Finn Brooks: Hey — how are you, are you okay, because you texted me like six times before we started recording.
Hope Sterling: I am not okay! I'm — no, I'm fine, I'm great actually, but James Gunn and Peter Safran just confirmed a faux-docuseries about Jimmy Olsen as an investigative journalist. Paired with Gorilla Grodd. On HBO Max. That's the show.
Finn Brooks: The Jimmy Olsen and Grodd Show. I've seen the name, I just — every time I read it I think I'm misreading it.
Hope Sterling: Skyler Gisondo is reprising the role from Superman 2025, Jimmy Tatro is literally playing Gorilla Grodd, and Safran said shooting starts this year. Like it's locked. It's happening.
Finn Brooks: Okay that is — wait, Jimmy Tatro as a gorilla is genuinely a choice. That's a choice someone made.
Hope Sterling: And MEANWHILE — this is the part — @artofcatwoman posts on August 12th, just 'so we could actually have got that,' and the @DiscussingFilm thread spelling out that Catwoman and Poison Ivy pitches got rejected hits 40k plus likes. Forty thousand likes on a thread that is basically just a receipt.
Finn Brooks: 40k on a thread saying 'this instead of that.' That's not just online noise — that's a lot of people going 'wait, same.'
Hope Sterling: Right? And like — I want to be fair, the Catwoman and Poison Ivy rejections are coming from @DiscussingFilm, not from DC directly, so there's a little bit of 'we're trusting this source' happening. But the contrast lands either way because the Jimmy Olsen show is fully confirmed.
Finn Brooks: Okay but what does that 'could have got that' framing actually mean though — like is it that those specific pitches were far along, or just that the slot could have gone differently?
Hope Sterling: Okay but that's the thing — like, we don't actually know if those were formal pitches that got taken into a room and killed, or if it's more like... fans wanted them, someone floated the idea somewhere, and @DiscussingFilm connected dots. Those are really different situations.
Finn Brooks: That's exactly where I want to pump the brakes. Because the core claim — Catwoman and Poison Ivy rejected — traces back to that @DiscussingFilm thread and fan posts. Not a DC press release, not Gunn or Safran saying 'we passed on this.' So the 'rejection' might be real or it might be fans reading the silence and filling it in.
Hope Sterling: It's like when a restaurant announces a weird new menu item and you go — wait, I asked for that other thing three times. Except we don't fully know if you actually asked, or if the chef just never heard you.
Finn Brooks: That's — yeah, that's exactly it. The discourse is real. 40k likes on that thread is a real number. But the underlying sourcing is messier than the outrage suggests, and those are two separate facts.
Hope Sterling: But the vibe of it feels true though? Like — female-led projects with actual IP recognition, characters people genuinely love, and what got greenlit is a faux-doc where Jimmy Olsen plays an investigative journalist covering DC villains. That's the show.
Finn Brooks: No I hear you, and the format is genuinely novel — mockumentary, investigative journalist framing, that is structurally weird for superhero TV in a way I actually find interesting. But 'interesting' and 'the right call over Catwoman' are not the same sentence, and we can't say DC formally rejected those pitches without a source that isn't Twitter.
Hope Sterling: Wait so is the discourse itself the story then? Like — no verified defenders showed up in any of this. It was just frustration, wall to wall.
Finn Brooks: That's — yeah, that's actually signal. Even if the sourcing on the rejections is thin, a fan Twitter that is entirely frustration with zero pushback? That's its own data point. The 'could have got that' framing landed because Catwoman and Poison Ivy have real IP recognition and the contrast with a talking gorilla mockumentary wrote itself.
Hope Sterling: But okay, that's actually what I want to push on — because there's a take going around that I think is just wrong, and it's the 'trust Gunn, he backs weird swings' thing. Like, I hear it constantly. And I cannot, because — Booster Gold.
Finn Brooks: Oh, Booster Gold just ends the argument.
Hope Sterling: David Jenkins — the Our Flag Means Death guy — developed a whole comedic DC series where the whole premise was, like, imposter syndrome as a superhero. Gunn himself described it that way. And Gunn was literally calling it still in development in April 2026. April. And by July it's just... dead.
Finn Brooks: Three months. April to July, gone. And this isn't some vague rumor — Gunn said it was alive and then it wasn't. That's not a pivot, that's a — I mean, what even happened in those three months?
Hope Sterling: Nobody's saying! That's the detail that's driving me insane. But here's the part that makes the 'weird swings' defense collapse — the Jimmy Olsen mockumentary got greenlit. The faux-doc with a talking gorilla survived. The comedic unconventional project with actual creative pedigree behind it? Gone.
Finn Brooks: And it's not just Booster Gold. The original ten-project slate from January 2023 — Paradise Lost, no longer in active development as of August 12th, Gizmodo confirmed it. Waller, the Viola Davis spinoff — also dead. That's like, four projects cancelled or shelved and only about four even completed. That's not a rough patch, that's — wait, actually no, that's half the strategy gone.
Hope Sterling: Okay but devil's advocate — is this just... business? Like is there a spreadsheet somewhere that makes sense and we're just not seeing it?
Finn Brooks: Maybe, but even if there is — and there probably is — the Booster Gold call specifically is indefensible as a 'we back weird stuff' story. Powerless got cancelled too, by the way. That NBC show set in the DC universe, ordinary employees at Wayne Security? Superhero sitcom, cancelled. Batman '66 is genuinely the only time a comedic DC TV project actually worked, and that was sixty years ago.
Hope Sterling: And honestly? The part that comes later is going to make this even harder to defend — because once you see the pattern of what keeps getting greenlit versus what keeps dying, the 'coherent creative philosophy' argument gets really uncomfortable really fast.
Finn Brooks: And that pattern is actually — wait, that's the thing that changes going forward, right? Because every single greenlight DC announces now gets read through all of that accumulated wreckage. Like, someone who loved Viola Davis in Suicide Squad, who watched Waller quietly die, who then sees Jimmy Tatro announced as a talking gorilla — that person is not trusting the next announcement. Whatever it is.
Hope Sterling: And DC hasn't explained any of it publicly. Zero.
Finn Brooks: Which is — okay, I want to be fair here, there's probably internal data. Streaming numbers, international performance metrics, stuff we genuinely cannot see from outside. And maybe on that spreadsheet, Jimmy Olsen and Grodd makes complete sense. Maybe Booster Gold tested terribly somewhere.
Hope Sterling: Sure. Maybe. But if you can't explain the call, you own the backlash. That's just — you own it.
Finn Brooks: No, a hundred percent. The odd-couple secondary character pairing isn't one weird bet. Jimmy Olsen plus Grodd is actually a recurring pitch template. Supporting characters, lower stakes, comedic tone. That's not Gunn going rogue, that might be a structural preference baked into however they're thinking about the TV slate.
Hope Sterling: Which makes Catwoman and Poison Ivy feel even weirder to pass on, because those aren't secondary characters. Those have actual IP recognition. Like, people know those names.
Finn Brooks: Right — and Gunn and Safran's whole stated thing is they only greenlight projects with a strong distinctive vision. That's the quality-gating argument. But... David Jenkins developed Booster Gold. Our Flag Means Death guy. That IS a strong distinctive vision. So the quality-gating logic doesn't actually survive contact with that specific cancellation.
Hope Sterling: Did you find a single person defending the show? Like, one?
Finn Brooks: I did not. And that's — I mean, that's its own data point. Not the discourse being wrong, just... if the only verified signal is frustration with zero visible pushback, DC has a communication problem on top of the greenlight problem. Those are two separate fires.
Hope Sterling: And like — I genuinely don't know if Jimmy Olsen and Grodd being actually good fixes any of that. If Gunn and Safran are working from data we can't see, fine, but they haven't said anything. So every greenlight is just a Rorschach test for however much trust you have left. And right now people have none.
Finn Brooks: No but wait — what if it's genuinely great though? Does that change anything for the 'could have got that' people? I actually don't think it does. The Booster Gold thing already happened.
Hope Sterling: Genuinely don't know. That's the honest answer.
Finn Brooks: My detail I can't shake — Peter Safran said shooting starts this year. This year! Jimmy Tatro is a gorilla before Catwoman gets a pitch meeting. That's the sentence.
Hope Sterling: @artofcatwoman said 'so we could actually have got that' and then logged off. That's it, that's my detail, I'm done. To the chaos.
