James Gunn and Peter Safran, the bosses of Warner Bros-owned label DC Studios, will continue to lead the film, TV and comic book production hub and do what they do best after Paramount closes its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery.

Once upon a time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in Paramount’s hands, having a distribution deal with the comic-book label and launching the megaverse with Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Iron Man 2. Then Marvel took a hike to Disney, which scooped them up for $4 billion in 2009. With DC, Paramount no doubt gains a massive franchise one-up in its library that already includes Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Mission: Impossible.

We hear the duo had a recent meeting with new Skydance co-CEO David Ellison about their future and it went well. Per this morning’s news, all film units, Paramount and Warner Bros, are to report into Paramount Pictures co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. The future of Warner Bros motion picture chairs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy remains up in the air at the newly relabeled Skydance entertainment conglomerate; that duo is still in need of a chat with Ellison.

Gunn has been shooting the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, set for release on July 9, 2027. The label’s Clayface, about the Batman antagonist, is their first lower-budget genre movie, opens October 23. Warner Bros’ second highest-grossing movie last year was Gunn’s Superman with more than $618 million at the global box office. Also in production at DC is Matt Reeves’ sequel The Batman Part II set for February 18, 2028. This past summer’s Supergirl didn’t go so well, with a global gross of $126.4M.

Meanwhile, the DC-HBO Max series Lanterns has been a ratings success. Co-created by Tom King, Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy, it saw its third episode score a massive 10M global viewers in its first three days — 7M from the U.S. Since Lanterns premiered August 16, the pilot has been seen by more than 20 million viewers worldwide and continues to grow, the company said. The series launched as one of HBO Max’s top titles.

Safran and Gunn were appointed to lead DC Studios in October 2022 in a new label strategy orchestrated by WBD CEO David Zaslav to mimic Disney’s production label hub structure of Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar, etc., with myriad production heads. It was arguably the first time (unless we count Charlie Chaplin) that a filmmaker, Gunn, did double duty as a studio executive.

Safran already had a hot streak at Warners/New Line with the multibillion-dollar The Conjuring franchise and also producing DC franchise titles like Shazam and Aquaman. Safran had produced on Gunn’s 2021 The Suicide Squad movie and its HBO Max spinoff series Peacemaker starring John Cena, which has clocked two seasons.

This is all according to sources Friday morning. Paramount and DC couldn’t be reached for comment.