Geoff Johns opened up about his eight years as a DC executive inside Warner Bros., and how everything he learned there is now paying off with Ghost Machine and the Redcoat movie.
Speaking on Robservations with Rob Liefeld, posted Monday, Johns walked through the whole run, from Richard Donner’s office to the executive suite.
“Every department was separate”
“I was there from 2010 to 2018, but I was still writing the whole time,” Johns said, revealing he was originally brought in as something closer to a consultant because of how fractured the studio was.
“When I first joined the company, it was more like, they basically said, ‘You wanna be a creative consultant?'” Johns said. “‘Cause the way that Warner Brothers was structured was the TV department was separate from the video game department, was separate from the animation department, was separate from the film department. Separate from the consumer products department — every department was separate, and so they wanted me to come in, kind of consult on things. That was what it started as, and it changed.”
“I was always adamant that I’m a writer first,” he added. “I’ve had kind of two jobs. I was assistant to Dick Donner for four years, and then I was at Warner Brothers at DC. Those are my two jobs. Otherwise, I’ve been writing or producing.”
Johns said the value of the studio years was seeing the machine from the inside: “You got access to budgets and every kind of decision made along the way, both good and bad — you saw it happen and you saw how it played out.”
Stargirl was the start
He recalled watching an early director’s cut of a TV episode and thinking, “Oh my gosh, it’s a disaster,” only to watch it come together in the edit.
It all peaked with Stargirl — “the first comic I ever wrote for DC, based on my sister who died in a plane crash a few years prior to me writing the book” — which Johns refused to hand off, showrunning it himself and managing a 250-person crew.
“Everything was to prep me for Ghost Machine”
“I look at everything in my career — from being an assistant to a director to writing comics, writing TV, writing movies, being part of a studio, producing, showrunning — everything was to prep me for Ghost Machine,” Johns said. “Everything.”
Now that experience is driving the Redcoat movie, set up at Charles Roven’s Atlas Entertainment, with Johns nodding to the producer’s Oppenheimer, Wonder Woman, and Dark Knight résumé.
And Ghost Machine is running its Hollywood dealings the way an ex-studio officer would: “We’re very careful about adaptation, and we don’t option things — we partner up with people,” Johns said, confirming Redcoat is moving and teasing, “We have other stuff going on, but I can’t talk about it right now.”
Johns and Liefeld also talked about Lanterns, and announced they are teaming on a new Chapel comic book.
