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“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design Systems as Living Languages

Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn’t be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file “exception” requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system’s essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

When Perfect Consistency Fails

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb’s pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn’t ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris () was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an “Oh, Ship!” moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

The Birth of a Dialect

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris’s core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Constraint	Fluent Move	Rationale
Glare & low light	Dark surfaces + light text	Reduce glare on low-DPI screens
Gloves & haste	90px tap targets (~2cm)	Accommodate thick gloves
Multilingual	Single-task screens, plain language	Reduce cognitive load

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn’t customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris’s core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn’t failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

The Flexibility Framework

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

Tier	Action	Ownership
Consistent	Adopt unchanged	Platform locks design + code
Opinionated	Adapt within bounds	Platform provides smart defaults, products customize
Flexible	Extend freely	Platform defines behavior, products own presentation

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

The Decision Ladder

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: “Which option lets users succeed fastest?”

Rules are tools, not relics.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

Governance Without Gates

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation – e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns – when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context – retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Start Small: Your First Dialect

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don’t address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren’t “”breaking the system””—they’re serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re not managing design systems anymore—we’re cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn’t care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.  

These tensions are often at odds with a site’s goals. If we are providing support and advice to customers, we don’t want those customers to wrangle with each other. If we offer news about the latest research, we want readers to feel at ease; if we promote upcoming marches, we want our core supporters to feel comfortable and we want curious newcomers to feel welcome. 

In a study for a conference on the History of the Web, I looked to the origins of Computer Science in Vienna (1928-1934)  for a case study of the importance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous consequences of its loss. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult (and sometimes disagreeable) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna.  The people who worked out the theory had no interest in building machines; they wanted to puzzle out the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be sure that mathematics is consistent? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language? 

The core ideas were worked out in the weekly meetings (Thursdays at 6) of a group remembered as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. The intersection of physics and philosophy had long been a specialty of this Vienna department, and this work had placed them among the world leaders.  Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Other frequent participants included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, psychologist Karl Popper, economist Ludwig von Mises (brought by his brother Frederick, a physicist),  graphic designer Otto Neurath (inventor of infographics), and architect Josef Frank (brought by his physicist brother, Phillip).  Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

When Schlick’s office grew too dim, participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger circle of participants.  This convivial circle was far from unique.  An intersecting circle–Neurath, von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern–established the Austrian School of free-market economics. There were theatrical circles (Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt), and literary circles. The café was where things happened.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were often a challenge. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Architect Josef Frank depended on contracts for public housing, which Mises opposed as wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath was eager to detect muddled thinking and would interrupt a speaker with a shouted “Metaphysics!” The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. Perhaps they would order another coffee, or one of their friends might drop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. Coffee was invariably served with a glass of purified spring water, still a novelty in an era in which most water was still unsafe to drink. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely. 

In the basement of one café, the poet Jura Soyfer staged “The End Of The World,” a musical comedy in which Professor Peep has discovered a comet heading for earth.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler:  Destroying everybody is my business.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, established the café as a comfortable and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a coffee would be welcome. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters greeted regular customers with titles too, but were careful to address their patrons with titles a notch or two greater than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor.  This assurance mattered all the more because so many members of the Circle (and so many other Viennese) came from elsewhere: Carnap from Wuppertal, Gödel from Brno, von Neumann from Budapest. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. Your friends wouldn’t be bothered by the pram in the hall. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The amiability of the café circle was enhanced by its openness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops made a useful surface for pencil sketches, serving all as an improvised and accessible blackboard.

Comedies like “The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that, if one got carried away, a parody of one’s remarks might shortly appear in Neue Freie Presse surely helped Professor Schlick keep matters in hand.

The End Of Red Vienna

Though Austria’s government drifted to the right after the War, Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, dedicated to public housing based on user-centered design, and embracing  ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Most members of the Circle fled within months: von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, Carnap to Chicago. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews.  Jura Soyfer, who wrote “The End Of The World,” died in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay large fines to emigrate. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career; his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we design for amiability?  This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I believe we may identify eight distinct issues that exert design forces in usefully amiable directions.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with consequential problems, not merely scoring points for debating. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels—help promote amity.

Empiricism: The characteristic approach of the Vienna Circle demanded that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. If neither seemed ready to hand, the matter could not be settled. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: Disputes grow worse when losing the argument entails lost face or lost jobs. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Without seriousness, abstraction could have been merely academic, but the limits of reason and the consistency of mathematics were clearly serious.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This stands in contrast to the contemptuous sneer that now dominates social media.  

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. Still, this was Vienna, at the margins of Europe: old-fashioned, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. Most or all harbored the suspicion that they were really schleppers, and a tinge of the ridiculous helped to moderate tempers. The director of “The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: All sorts of people were involved in discussion, anyone might join in. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders reduce tension, and provide opportunities to broaden the range of discussion and the terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to defuse awkward moments, and Vienna’s cafés had no shortage of humorists. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The environs of the Circle—the university office and the café—were unmistakably public. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The prospect that one’s bad taste or bad behavior might be ridiculed in print kept discussion within bounds. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction; even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: The subject matter was important to the participants, but it was esoteric: it did not matter very much to their mothers or their siblings. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I believe it is notable that this environment was designed to promote amiability through several different voices.  The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schlick and other regulars kept discussion moving and on track. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous.  Crucially, each of these voices were human: you could reason with them. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. The café circles had no central authority or Moderator against whom everyone’s resentments might be focused. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are just my personal views, but they’re pretty good.

I want to start off with a couple of statements, and you will agree:

1. Designers are good people. I have never heard a designer say, “I don’t care if somebody can’t read this text”, “Not my fault if somebody can’t use this device”, or “Who cares if this is confusing?”
2. Some designs exclude people. You have seen people unable to read the text on a website or app that somebody designed. You’ve seen people unable to use a physical device that somebody has designed. You’ve seen people utterly bamboozled while trying to use a service that somebody designed.

So what?

The first question is, “Is this life-or-death stuff?” The answer is, “Yes.” In my favorite essay, This Is All There Is, Aral Balkan makes the point that pretty much everything that we design can affect life events and death events. Aral gives the example of how even a straightforward bus timetable app can affect life and death events, if we design it badly:

• somebody might miss a life event, such as their daughter’s fifth birthday party; or
• somebody might miss a death event, such as the chance to say goodbye to a dying grandmother.

The next—and frustrating—question is, “Why do some designs still exclude people?” After all, we know that:

• not everybody can see perfectly;
• not everybody can hear perfectly;
• not everybody thinks the same way; and
• not everybody moves the same way.

I think the answer is that there’s too much to recall. Consider, if you will, the wide variety of topics that A List Apart articles cover. Designers are expected to remember all of that guidance, plus all of the accessibility guidance, plus so much more. It is too much.

Recognizing accessibility issues while designing

I’d like to point toward one possible solution, starting from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. These are from the mid-1990s, and—although there’s a good chance that you, gentle reader, are a lot younger than that—please bear with me. 

Seeing as the problem is that there’s too much to recall, I want to look at heuristic № 6, “Recognition rather than Recall.” Jakob Nielsen said that for users, information required to use the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. I suggest we tweak that to make life easier for designers. Let’s say that the information required to produce the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. In other words, let’s make it easier to recognise accessibility issues while we’re designing.

How are we going to do that? I really like the book A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. I really like this book not only because it includes a quote from me—actually two quotes, but I don’t like to boast—but because it includes personas that are perfect for helping us to recognise accessibility issues. That’s the good news. The even better news is that these personas are available now for free on the companion website to the book What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, again by Sarah Horton, with David Sloan this time.

Meet your users

I’m going to introduce you to these personas now:

• Vishnu, an engineer and global citizen with low vision says, “I want to be on the same level as everyone else”, “If I can adjust my screen, I can read comfortably”, and, “Translating in my head is easier with simpler sentences.”
• Trevor, a high school student with autism, says, “I like consistent, familiar places on the web”, “When I can learn the pattern, I can find my way”, and, “Reading is hard for me”.
• Steven, a deaf graphic artist and American Sign Language speaker, says, “My only disability is that everyone doesn’t sign”, and, “Without captions, it’s meaningless to me”.
• Maria, a bilingual community health worker, says, “I love this. It’s all here … when I can find it”, “When a site is confusing, I just leave”—fair enough, Maria!—and, “When I hear and see it, health information makes more sense”.
• Lea, an editor living with fatigue and pain, says, “No one gets that this really is a disability”, “Don’t make me work so hard”—please do not bombard this lady with drop-down lists—and, “Links at the top of the page make navigation easier for me”.
• Jacob, a blind paralegal and a bit of a geek, says, “The right technology lets me do anything”, and “This makes it possible to do my job”.
• Emily, who has cerebral palsy and is living independently, says, “I want to do everything for myself”, “Simpler screens are easier screens”—hell yeah, Emily!—and, “Tell me what I need in advance”.
• Carol, a grandmother with macular degeneration which affects her sight, says, “My grandkids are dragging me into the world of technology”, “I don’t understand what the screen is saying”, and, “Why can’t the text be just a little bit larger?”

I want to throw one more persona at you now, because, well, A List Apart readers are overachievers. One of my favorite authors, Cennydd Bowles—who literally wrote the book on Future Ethics—says to create Personas Non Grata. In other words, every time we design something, we have to think about what a bad guy could do with that thing, and whom that might affect.

To actually use these personas while designing, I like what Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher in Design for Real Life call the Designated Dissenter: for each project that you work on, one of your teams should be responsible for asking, “Will this work for Vishnu?”, “How’s Trevor going to get on with this?”, and so on. 

Then, once you’ve used the personas to recognise the accessibility issues, you can look up the guidelines for whichever platforms you’re designing for: 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
• Accessibility designing — Material Design 3
• Accessibility — Windows apps
• Accessibility | Apple Developer Documentation
• Check your interface for accessibility (Ubuntu)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

I told you in the introduction of this article that I would give you homework. You thought I was joking. So, here’s your homework: I want you to grab the personas from the Know About Accessibility website, and use them throughout every design project to help you recognise accessibility issues while you work—and reclaim design for everyone.

NOTE: This article is based on “Recognise,” my five-minute presentation from Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Dublin’s Defuse (Design for Use) event in 2025.

Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves will teach you.

In 1788, Prussia introduced the Abitur, a standardized national examination required for entry into universities and the civil service. To pass it, students needed to demonstrate measurable, gradable knowledge. The system needed to teach language to large classrooms, produce consistent outcomes, and do it with one teacher and thirty students. The educators responsible for designing this system reached for the only teaching template they had, one that had been used in European schools for two centuries: the method developed to teach Latin.

Latin, by 1788, was a dead language. Nobody needed to speak it. The scholars who studied it were reading Cicero and Virgil, not conducting conversations. The method built around it, memorizing grammar rules, constructing translations, analyzing written texts, reflected that reality exactly. Oral skills were irrelevant. Comprehension of written form was everything. The method was not designed to produce speakers. It was designed to produce readers of texts in a language nobody spoke.

When Prussia applied this template to French and German, living languages spoken by living people, the premise did not change. Johann Valentin Meidinger’s textbook Praktische Französische Grammatik, published in 1804, ran to 37 editions across Europe by 1857. Karl Plotz formalized the approach into what became the dominant model for teaching modern languages across Europe and eventually the United States, where it became known simply as the Prussian Method [1]. Each institution that adopted it trained teachers in it, who trained students who became teachers. The constraint that created the method, how do you grade language at scale with limited resources, became invisible inside the method itself. What remained was the assumption: language is a body of rules to be learned consciously and measured. It was a design decision dressed up, over time, as a pedagogical truth.

The observation that should have ended it

There are people in the world who cannot read or write a language and speak it fluently. There are children who hold full conversations years before they can read a single word. There are immigrants who arrive in a country knowing nothing of its language and come out, years later, speaking it naturally, not because they studied it, but because they lived inside it. Literacy and fluency are separate things produced by entirely separate mechanisms. The Grammar-Translation method, as it became known, assumed they were the same thing. That assumption was inherited from a method designed for a language nobody needed to speak, and it was wrong the moment it was applied to a language people actually used.

The evidence against it accumulated slowly. In the mid to late nineteenth century, reformers including François Gouin in France and Maximilian Berlitz in the United States argued independently that language should be taught the way it is actually acquired, through immersive exposure to real communication in the target language, not through analysis of its rules. Berlitz built an entire school network around this principle. The reformers were correct. They were also largely ignored by mainstream education systems, because the Grammar-Translation method had one decisive advantage that direct immersion did not: it could be graded.

In 1982, the linguist Stephen Krashen gave the argument its most formal articulation in what he called the Monitor Model of second language acquisition. His distinction was precise: language acquisition, the unconscious process through which children absorb their native language and through which adults succeed in immersive environments, is categorically different from language learning, the conscious study of grammar rules and vocabulary that classrooms deliver [2]. Acquisition produces fluency. Learning, at best, produces the ability to pass a test. The evidence supporting this distinction, and the observation that immersive exposure to real native-speaker communication is the mechanism that produces genuine fluency, has only grown since.

I went to Brazil without a word of Portuguese and came out speaking it. I studied French in a classroom for years and cannot hold a conversation in French today. This is not an unusual experience. It is the expected outcome, and it has been the expected outcome for as long as we have had formal language education.

The same decision, made again in a different medium

Prussian educators faced the question: How do you deliver language learning at scale, measure progress, and retain users over time? The answer it arrived at was structurally identical to the one arrived at in 1788. Duolingo gamified the grammar drill into a streak. Anki formalized the translation exercise into a spaced-repetition flashcard. Babbel organized grammar lessons into structured modules. The interfaces were new. The underlying assumption, that language is a thing you study rather than an environment you inhabit, was not.

This was not a failure of design skill. The products that emerged from these decisions are, in many respects, genuinely well-crafted. Duolingo’s retention mechanics are sophisticated. Anki’s spaced repetition is grounded in real cognitive science. They are excellent at what they actually do. The problem is what they actually do: produce measurable engagement with a proxy for language rather than the conditions that produce language itself. A streak is measurable. A vocabulary score is measurable. The moment a user walks out of an app and holds a real conversation in another language, that happens in the world, outside the product, and cannot be instrumented.

When the outcome a user needs is difficult to measure directly, the design process tends to reach for something that can be measured. The proxy becomes the goal. The interface optimizes for it. The gap between what the product delivers and what the user actually needed grows. This is not a pattern unique to language learning. It is a pattern that repeats across product categories whenever a design constraint—the need to measure, the need to scale, the need to produce a grade—gets built into a system so deeply that it stops being visible as a constraint and starts being mistaken for a truth about the problem itself.

What happens when the constraint changes

The constraint that made the Grammar-Translation method necessary in 1788 was real and rational. One teacher. Thirty students. A standardized exam. You cannot grade a conversation at scale. You can grade a translation exercise. The method was not chosen because it produced fluency. It was chosen because it produced a score.

That constraint no longer exists in the same form. Technology has made it possible to deliver immersive, real-time conversation practice to anyone with a smartphone, at a cost that continues to fall. The design problem is no longer how to make language learning gradable at scale. It is how to make the conditions of genuine language acquisition accessible to people who cannot move to another country or afford a native-speaker tutor.

The products that are now closest to solving the actual problem are not the ones that invented a new pedagogy. They are the ones that removed the access barrier to an old one. Praktika builds AI conversation partners with distinct personalities, regional dialects, and cultural context, replicating the specificity of a real native speaker rather than a generic language-learning voice. Langua clones native speaker voices so that the interaction feels like a real conversation rather than a lesson. Rosetta Stone’s foundational methodology, image association in the target language with no translation, was built on the same insight Berlitz arrived at in the nineteenth century: language is acquired through immersive exposure, not through analysis of its rules [3]. A 2025 meta-analysis of 31 studies found that AI conversation tools produced a statistically significant improvement in language learning outcomes, a result that no amount of flashcard optimization has consistently matched [4].

None of these products invented a new theory of language acquisition. They translated an existing one into something more people could reach.

The design question this leaves

The Grammar-Translation method persisted not because educators were wrong about design, but because a design decision made under a specific constraint became, over two centuries, indistinguishable from the thing itself. The constraint, how do you grade language at scale, was forgotten. The method it produced was inherited as if it were a description of how language works, passed from Prussia to Europe to America to the App Store, from the grammar drill to the streak.

Every time a design team optimizes for a metric because the actual outcome is hard to measure, they are making a version of the same decision. It is often the right decision given real constraints. The question worth asking is whether the constraint that made it necessary still exists, or whether it has simply become invisible inside the system it originally produced.

Before reaching for what can be measured, it is worth asking what the user actually needs to do, and what stopped them from doing it before. Sometimes the answer is a new solution. More often it is an old one that was always out of reach.

Movies from the 1990s can feel surprisingly strange when you watch them today, not because the stories were necessarily unusual, but because everyday life looked different. Characters could disappear for hours without anyone worrying, casually use technology that has vanished, or move through public spaces with freedoms that now feel almost unfamiliar. Some details barely register until you realize how much the world has changed around them. These little habits, objects, and situations were once completely ordinary on screen because they reflected real life at the time. Looking back three decades later, they can feel like accidental time capsules, capturing a version of everyday life that has quietly disappeared.

The post 15 Things That Were Considered Normal in Movies 30 Years Ago appeared first on Den of Geek.

With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.

11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)

While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.

Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.

10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)

Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.

Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.

9. Super (2010)

Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.

As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.

And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.

7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.

Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.

Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.

5. Slither (2006)

Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.

Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.

4. The Suicide Squad (2021)

James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.

In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.

3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)

Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?

And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.

On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.

1. Superman (2025)

Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?

Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

What appears on screen can be completely convincing, even when the reality behind the camera looks almost ridiculous. A terrifying location might turn out to be a tiny set, a massive fantasy world can be built inside a studio, and actors who seem to be interacting with something extraordinary may actually be staring at a tennis ball or an empty piece of green screen. Movie magic works precisely because audiences are not supposed to see the machinery behind it. But once behind the scenes photos reveal what was actually happening, familiar scenes can become almost unrecognizable. These glimpses into production show just how much imagination, construction, choreography, and clever filmmaking goes into creating a few seconds of movie magic.

The post 13 Movie Scenes That Looked Completely Different Behind the Scenes appeared first on Den of Geek.

With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.

11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)

While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.

Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.

10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)

Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.

Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.

9. Super (2010)

Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.

As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.

And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.

7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.

Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.

Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.

5. Slither (2006)

Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.

Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.

4. The Suicide Squad (2021)

James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.

In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.

3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)

Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?

And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.

On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.

1. Superman (2025)

Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?

Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

There is always that one movie that makes people laugh harder than anything else. It might be a comedy everyone knows, an old favorite that somehow never gets boring, or a completely unexpected choice that someone remembers because they could barely breathe while watching it. Reddit recently asked people to name the funniest movie they had ever seen, and the answers quickly turned into a wonderfully chaotic collection of comedy favorites. Some picks are obvious classics, while others reveal very specific senses of humor. These are the movies people brought up when asked for the one film that made them laugh harder than any other, and the choices are seriously tempting

The post 14 People Share the Funniest Movie They’ve Ever Seen appeared first on Den of Geek.

With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.

11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)

While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.

Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.

10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)

Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.

Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.

9. Super (2010)

Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.

As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.

And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.

7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.

Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.

Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.

5. Slither (2006)

Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.

Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.

4. The Suicide Squad (2021)

James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.

In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.

3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)

Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?

And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.

On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.

1. Superman (2025)

Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?

Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

History can start to feel strangely polished when we only see the same famous photographs over and over again. Everyday life was considerably messier, funnier, and more inventive than a textbook can usually capture. People experimented with bizarre gadgets, found creative ways to do ordinary jobs, and posed for photographs that would not look entirely out of place on social media today. Other images reveal familiar landmarks and technologies at stages we rarely get to see. None of these moments necessarily changed the world, but that is exactly what makes them interesting. They fill in some of the wonderfully strange gaps between the events everyone already knows. Here are 15 photos giving us a new perspective on history.

The post 14 Photos Giving Us a New Perspective on History appeared first on Den of Geek.

With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.

11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)

While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.

Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.

10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)

Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.

Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.

9. Super (2010)

Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.

As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.

And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.

7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.

Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.

Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.

5. Slither (2006)

Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.

Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.

4. The Suicide Squad (2021)

James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.

In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.

3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)

Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?

And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.

On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.

1. Superman (2025)

Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?

Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Some TV episodes end with answers. Others end with viewers staring at the screen, wondering what just happened. A strange final scene, an unexplained twist, or a story that suddenly refuses to make sense can leave an audience debating the episode long after the credits roll. Television has produced plenty of moments that became famous precisely because nobody could agree on what they meant. Some were deliberately mysterious, while others simply took storytelling somewhere audiences were not prepared to follow. These 15 episodes left viewers with questions, theories, and plenty of reasons to hit replay, proving that sometimes the most memorable endings are the ones that refuse to explain themselves

The post TV Episodes That Left Viewers Completely Confused appeared first on Den of Geek.

With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.

11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)

While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.

Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.

10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)

Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.

Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.

9. Super (2010)

Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.

As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.

And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.

7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.

Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.

Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.

5. Slither (2006)

Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.

Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.

4. The Suicide Squad (2021)

James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.

In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.

3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)

Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?

And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.

On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.

1. Superman (2025)

Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?

Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Sitcoms are the comfort food of television, at least the healthy kind when compared to reality shows. You know the characters, understand the rhythm, and generally have a pretty good idea what kind of joke is coming next. That is, unless the show decides to throw that formula straight out the window.

Basically every sitcom has that one episode where we raise an eyebrow at least, yet there are some shows with moments so out there that it can’t help but to generate discussions online. From what we could find, these are the episodes that reminded viewers sitcoms can get much stranger than expected.

The post 15 of the Strangest Ever Sitcom Episodes appeared first on Den of Geek.

With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.

11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)

While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.

Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.

10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)

Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.

Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.

9. Super (2010)

Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.

As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.

And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.

7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.

Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.

Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.

5. Slither (2006)

Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.

Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.

4. The Suicide Squad (2021)

James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.

In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.

3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)

Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?

And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.

On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.

1. Superman (2025)

Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?

Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.