James Gunn Exits DC, and Grand Theft Auto Gets a Festival

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Coming up on Spotlight: James Gunn is out as the boss of DC, Grand Theft Auto Six gets its own music festival, and Paul McCartney is officially a billionaire.

The biggest shake-up in superhero movies in years happened on Monday. James Gunn and Peter Safran are leaving their jobs running DC Studios. Skydance, the company that now owns Warner Bros., is replacing them with Jeremy Latcham, a founding member of Marvel's original team, with credits on Iron Man, The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy.

There's a twist built into that last credit. The Hollywood Reporter says Latcham was one of the people who pushed Marvel to hire Gunn for Guardians in the first place, the movie that made him an A-list director. Now he's taking over Gunn's job.

The Reporter's sources say David Ellison and his co-CEO showed up at Gunn and Safran's offices on the Warner lot last Friday and told them they were out, despite earlier assurances. The sticking points were reportedly about who reports to whom, and about money. Gunn's Superman made six hundred eighteen million dollars worldwide and turned a profit, but the new owners reportedly expected more, and this summer's Supergirl struggled. Clayface, a lower-budget horror movie, has been a modest hit.

Gunn isn't leaving DC entirely. He's still finishing Man of Tomorrow, his Superman sequel, due in theaters next July ninth. And his goodbye post was unusually candid. He called the four years "trying, to say the least," said he disliked the "at-times corporate nature of the job," and apologized to his wife for the time it cost them. He says he's "incredibly relieved" to get back to pure filmmaking, and that he's already writing another DC project. Whether the universe he started survives a new boss is the open question for fans.

Nine days to go until Grand Theft Auto Six, and Rockstar is throwing a party. It's out November nineteenth on PlayStation 5 and Xbox, and two days later there's a one-day festival in Miami built around its music. Travis Scott, Cardi B, Metro Boomin and Rauw Alejandro top the bill, along with the French electronic duo Justice, who scored the game. Tickets go through a lottery on the app Dice, and it closes this afternoon. Take-Two's boss Strauss Zelnick told Variety that presales are running "far in excess" of expectations.

Johnny Depp's Scrooge movie, Ebenezer, had its London premiere in Leicester Square Monday night, and the first reactions are out. Ti West, who made the horror trilogy that started with X, directed it as a darker, black-comedy take on A Christmas Carol, with Ian McKellen as Marley and Tramell Tillman of Severance as the Ghost of Christmas Present. The reactions on social media are split. Some early viewers praised Depp and a surprisingly emotional ending. Others called it beside the point, or just Depp doing a quirky character again. Full reviews arrive Thursday, and the movie opens Friday.

On Broadway, Here There Are Blueberries opened Monday at the Barrymore Theatre. It's a documentary-style play from Moisés Kaufman, of The Laramie Project, about a real photo album sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. The snapshots showed Auschwitz officers and office workers relaxing at a retreat a few miles from the camp. One caption reads, here, there are blueberries. The play follows the archivists working out who took the pictures and how they survived. Deadline's Greg Evans thinks the writing sometimes lags behind the material, but calls the production "vital and more often than not riveting," and saves special praise for Brandon Flynn as the grandson of the camp's commandant. It runs through January tenth.

Paul McCartney is now a billionaire, according to Forbes, worth about one point four billion dollars. That puts him third among musicians, behind Taylor Swift and Jay-Z. Forbes says the bulk comes from MPL, the publishing company he started in 1969, which handles his own songs and has bought up plenty of other people's, including Buddy Holly's catalog, Broadway scores and Christmas standards. He's also playing a benefit for veterans on January twenty-seventh in Las Vegas, alongside Ringo Starr, the Killers and St. Vincent. Joe Walsh is the headliner, and he also happens to be Ringo's brother-in-law.

Oasis, meanwhile, are skipping their own big night. They're being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday in Los Angeles, and Rolling Stone says they won't be there. Noel Gallagher is playing a jazz festival in London that night instead. That's a letdown for Phil Collins, who's also being inducted and said he was looking forward to meeting them. Noel once called him the Antichrist.

And finally, the Frozen cast is back for a nature documentary. National Geographic and Disney Animation are making The Real Frozen, filmed across Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It follows real animals through brutal winters, narrated by Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel and Jonathan Groff as Anna, Elsa and Kristoff, with Josh Gad dropping in as Olaf. A reindeer named Sven was not available for comment.

That's Spotlight for Tuesday. Ebenezer opens Friday, Here There Are Blueberries is running in New York, and if you want a Grand Theft Auto concert, enter that lottery this afternoon. See you tomorrow.