Category: Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I grew up online at probably too young of an age trying to find people to talk about the things that I liked,” reflects Amy Roberts, the manager of business development at Theorist Media and creative director and host of its fashion-forward brand Style Theory. “Being able to do that for a living is a […]

The post How Theorist Media Built a Media Empire for the Earnest 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.

Fifty years ago, Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network was startling for how prescient it appeared. In the era of Woodward and Bernstein, and Walter Cronkite, here was a film about a blossoming rot undergirding American news media, and a capitalistic profit-motive that threatened to write doom across the future of serious journalism and the […]

The post Primetime Review: You Can’t Look Away from Robert Pattinson’s Weirdest Antihero 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.

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 […]

The post Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked 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.

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO₂ produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

1. Data transfer 
2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Web performance is often more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the true efficiency of the underlying system, whereas page weight and transfer size are more objective measures and more reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design. 

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO₂ produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO₂/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO₂/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO₂/kWh. 

Most electricity comes from national or state grids, where energy from a variety of different sources is mixed together with varying levels of carbon intensity. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously; a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

That said, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the further the data travels, the more energy is consumed. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles”—and we want it to be as small as possible.

Using the distance itself as a benchmark, we can use website analytics to identify the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea. 

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO₂ (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Data transfer might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users’ devices. One tool we do currently have is the Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser (Fig 2.5).

You know when you load a website and your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically you think it might actually take off? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring. 

It shows us the percentage of CPU used and the duration of CPU usage when loading the web page, and uses these figures to generate an energy impact rating. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.