John Oliver went after DC movies on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight — on HBO, no less, part of the same Warner Bros. Discovery family — using the studio’s box office record as the punchline of a segment about the Trump DOJ’s losing streak in court.
Here’s what the graphic didn’t tell you: four of the six flops flashed on screen were produced by DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran, and the other two have James Gunn’s fingerprints on them.
“That’s huge for DC movies, if true”
The segment tackled the DOJ’s record under designate attorney general Todd Blanche, with Oliver rolling a clip of NBC News’ Laura Jarrett running down the losses to Blanche’s face: dismissed indictments against James Comey and Letitia James, an Adam Schiff indictment that never materialized, a grand jury declining to indict six Democratic lawmakers, and a judge tossing the subpoena for Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Blanche’s answer: “It means that we’re working hard.”
Oliver fired back that nobody was accusing the DOJ of running away from hard cases — they were accusing it of losing them — before landing the kicker: “And second, I didn’t realize the existence of repeated unsuccessful attempts was actually good news. That’s huge for DC movies, if true.”
Cue a collage of DC posters: Birds of Prey, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Black Adam, The Flash, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Supergirl. The bit hits around the 12-minute mark below.
Four of the six are connect to James Gunn and Peter Safran
Here’s the part Last Week Tonight conveniently skipped: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Supergirl all carry producer credits for Peter Safran, the same Peter Safran who has been running DC Studios alongside James Gunn since November 2022.
The receipts: The Lost Kingdom sank to $440 million after Jason Momoa’s first Aquaman swam past $1.14 billion, Fury of the Gods managed $134 million, and Supergirl limped to $126 million.
The Flash isn’t regime-free, either. Gunn changed the movie’s ending and hyped it as one of the greatest superhero movies ever made before it face-planted with $271 million worldwide. The VFX artists also weren’t allowed to finish their work.
And Supergirl — the only poster on that board greenlit and released entirely on Gunn and Safran’s watch — used the Gunn Cut on its way to becoming the lowest-grossing DC movie ever, with that $126 million coming against a $170 million-plus budget and a reported $120 million in marketing, standing to lose the studio up to at least $100 million.
The wipeout was big enough to crater the studio division in WBD’s Q2 earnings.
That leaves Birds of Prey as the lone pre-Safran entry on the board, and even that one out-grossed Supergirl, pulling in $205 million back in 2020.
In defense of Black Adam
Worth noting: Dwayne Johnson has said the claims that Black Adam lost money are flat-out false, with a producer confirming the film turned a profit.
Its $393 million haul is more than triple what Gunn and Safran’s Supergirl pulled in.
So while Oliver aimed the joke at “DC movies” as a whole, the scoreboard he threw on screen is mostly a Gunn-Safran highlight reel, mocked on HBO, a corporate sibling, just as the Paramount Skydance takeover hangs over the whole company with the merger trial set for March 2027.
