Finn Brooks: Hey — quick question before we even start. If you had to pitch a DC show right now, like today, August 2026, what would you pitch?
Hope Sterling: Oh my gosh, hi — um — okay, Catwoman, obviously? Zoë Kravitz, done, take my money.
Finn Brooks: The Ankler, August 12th — DC and HBO rejected a Catwoman pitch. Also rejected a Poison Ivy pitch. Both dead. But the Jimmy Olsen and Gorilla Grodd mockumentary? Still casting — Mary Holland just joined as the female lead.
Hope Sterling: No way. No way, that is the actual situation we're in.
Finn Brooks: That is the actual situation. And @bldstarr got fourteen hundred likes posting about how beyond stupid this is, which — honestly, the internet is not wrong to be confused. James Gunn and Peter Safran are signing off on these decisions.
Hope Sterling: And Waller's dead too, right? Like this isn't just the two pitches — the whole slate is caving in.
Finn Brooks: Waller dead, Paradise Lost dead — that's two of the original five TV shows from the January 2023 announcement, gone. So the one surviving project that's actually moving is the one about a guy who works at a newspaper and a telepathic gorilla.
Hope Sterling: Okay but wait — 'surviving project' is doing a lot of work there, because Jimmy Olsen hasn't even gotten an official greenlight from HBO. Like, Mary Holland joined the cast and everyone's reporting it like it's a done deal, but as of August 12th it is just... casting. That's it.
Finn Brooks: Hold on — it's in active casting with no greenlight?
Hope Sterling: No greenlight! So the whole framing — 'they chose Jimmy Olsen over Catwoman' — like, did they? Or did they just not say no to Jimmy Olsen yet while they were saying no to everything else? Those are actually really different things and I feel like the outrage skipped over that completely.
Finn Brooks: Okay that is — wait, that reframes it a lot. Because if Jimmy Olsen doesn't have a greenlight, the contrast people are screaming about might not even exist as a real decision yet.
Hope Sterling: And then there's the Casey Bloys thing, which is the part that like — okay, I cannot stop thinking about this. He already said in November 2024 that there were no plans for a Selina Kyle series. He was prioritizing The Penguin spinoff. That's a year and a half before The Ankler's August 2026 report. So is the Catwoman pitch a fresh rejection or is it... the same no, just getting a second news cycle?
Finn Brooks: No, I don't buy that it's recycled — someone had to have pitched it after November 2024 for it to get rejected in 2026, right? But even then — we don't know who pitched it. No writer attached, no producer named, no premise made public. The Ankler report is paywalled, and everyone reacting is reading aggregators.
Hope Sterling: Which means nobody actually knows what was in the pitch.
Finn Brooks: Nobody knows! Like — was it a great pitch? Was it a terrible pitch? Was it even a full pitch or just a concept someone floated? Same with Poison Ivy — zero creative details public. We're all just assuming it was good because we love the character.
Hope Sterling: The actual new information here is like... smaller than the headline? Casey already said no Selina Kyle in 2024, Jimmy Olsen isn't even greenlit, and we have no idea what the pitches actually were. That's the receipts version of this story and it is significantly less dramatic than my timeline was this morning.
Finn Brooks: But wait — even the 'less dramatic' version has a problem nobody's naming, which is that we don't even know if these were the same universe. Like, the Catwoman pitch reportedly had Zoë Kravitz reprising her role. Her role. From The Batman 2022. Matt Reeves' film. Which is not the DCU.
Hope Sterling: Hold on — say that again?
Finn Brooks: If Zoë Kravitz is reprising Selina Kyle, that pitch is for the Reeves universe, not Gunn's DCU. Jimmy Olsen is a DCU project. They're not even — I mean, that's not apples to oranges, that's apples to a completely different grocery store.
Hope Sterling: Okay but does that actually let Gunn off the hook? Because like — two separate Batman universes running at the same time is its own problem, right? That chaos is still his and Peter Safran's architecture.
Finn Brooks: Oh, a hundred percent the two-universe thing is a mess — but that's a different charge than 'Gunn rejected Catwoman.' If Reeves said no, Gunn didn't reject anything. The whole 'beyond stupid' framing just... loses its premise. It's not confirmed either way, that's what's killing me — nobody has actually said which universe the pitch was even for.
Hope Sterling: So the entire discourse is built on an assumption nobody confirmed.
Finn Brooks: That's literally it. And — wait, same with Poison Ivy, right? Is that a Reeves pitch? DCU? We have no idea. If they were both Reeves universe pitches, Matt Reeves said no, not Gunn, and suddenly the comparison to Jimmy Olsen is just... wrong. Not unfair — structurally wrong.
Hope Sterling: Mmm — and honestly, the Supergirl box office thing is getting dragged into this too, and that's a whole other layer DC has never actually confirmed is connected to any of these calls. That part I feel like we need to get into because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting in this narrative.
Finn Brooks: Yeah, no — that's the thing that's been bugging me this whole time. Supergirl made like $126 million globally, which is catastrophic, and everyone's treating it as the explanation for every dead show. But DC hasn't said that. That's a fan inference, not a confirmed policy.
Hope Sterling: And that's the part that keeps getting me — like, the whole five-show slate from January 2023 is basically a crime scene at this point. Waller, dead. Paradise Lost, dead. Booster Gold — David Jenkins just posted on Threads that he's off it. Off it. Like, publicly, on Threads.
Finn Brooks: Wait, he announced it himself?
Hope Sterling: On Threads! And then The Ankler reported DC is out looking for a new writer, so it's not even like he quietly stepped away — it's just... public. That's three shows cratered and one that literally doesn't have a writer.
Finn Brooks: Okay and Viola Davis has literally already moved on — she signed with Paramount+ for something shooting in 2027. Through JuVee Productions. That's not 'Waller is on pause,' that's Viola Davis packing her desk.
Hope Sterling: Which — okay, that detail is actually the one that makes it feel real to me? Because an actor of her caliber does not sign a Paramount+ deal while she's still waiting on a greenlight. She is gone.
Finn Brooks: So out of five shows, Lanterns is the only one that — I mean, it's supposedly gearing up to premiere soon, right? That's the one survivor. And I keep trying to figure out if that's proof the slate is working or proof that everything else collapsed around it.
Hope Sterling: Mmm — and the gender optics thing, like, I hear it, four female-led projects in the ditch, the optics are genuinely bad. But DC has never said Supergirl's $126 million global — catastrophe, obviously — caused any of this. We're connecting dots they haven't connected.
Finn Brooks: No but the cumulative thing is real even without the gender read — it's just a studio that announced five shows and can execute maybe one. That's the actual story.
Hope Sterling: Right — and if you're a fan who's been waiting since January 2023, Lanterns better be incredible, because that's all that's left to show for it.
Finn Brooks: And the thing that I genuinely cannot get past — Gunn and Safran have made zero public statement. Nothing about why Poison Ivy got rejected, nothing about Catwoman, no confirmation about which universe any of it was even for. We're just... supposed to assume they have a plan.
Hope Sterling: That's the thing, right? We genuinely don't know. Like, whether it was budget, whether it was Supergirl's $126 million disaster, whether Matt Reeves said no first — none of it confirmed. Nothing.
Finn Brooks: My one detail I'm still not over — Viola Davis. Already at Paramount+. Already packing for 2027. That's the one that got me.
Hope Sterling: Mine's David Jenkins announcing he's off Booster Gold on Threads. On Threads! Okay, cheers to Lanterns, I guess — she better be incredible.
