Superhero team The Authority will play a major part in the DCU, with James Gunn promising a “very different kind of superhero story.” Revealed alongside the rest of Chapter 1 of Gunn and producer Peter Safran’s plans for the franchise, The Authority will follow the release of the Superman reboot, Superman: Legacy, and introduce audiences to this somewhat obscure set of supers.
As well as being a passion project for Gunn, The Authority will be much more complex than just good guys versus bad guys, with the filmmaker and now co-CEO of DC Studios explaining via social media how The Authority will lean much further into the gray areas that come with being a superhero.
“So this is one of my real passion projects. I’ve been working really hard on it with the writers, we’re starting to put together the entire story. […] This is a big movie. […] I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the authority WildStorm characters. WildStorm was a comics imprint that was bought by DC that I really love, we’re moving a lot of these WildStorm characters into the DCU.”
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Safran adds, “They’re kind of like Jack Nicholson in ‘A Few Good Men.’ They know that you want them on the wall, or at least they believe that,” with Gunn revealing that The Authority “is being written now.” Though we’re not sure by whom…
“Yeah, this is a big movie and I don’t know how many of you know are familiar with The Authority… The Authority is a very different kind of superhero story. They are basically good intention, but they think that the world is completely broken and the only way to fix it is to take things into their own hands, whether that means killing people, destroying heads of state, changing governments, whatever they want to do to make the world better. And we’ll see how that journey goes for them. But as I said earlier, there’s morally gray characters of which these are.”
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Who Are The Authority, and How Will They Factor into the DCU?
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Created in 1999 by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, The Authority was originally a project playing out under the Wildstorm banner. Following the adventures of superhero team, some of the members of which were carried over from Ellis’ Stormwatch, The Authority eventually became a part of the DC universe following The New 52 multiverse merger, with the group acting as a highly secretive team tasked with tackling dangerous missions while remaining unknown to the larger superhero community.
Notable members of The Authority include Jenny Sparks, “The Spirit of the Twentieth Century” who is tied with the general feelings surrounding the status of the world and is the group’s founder and original leader; Apollo, who is something of a Superman archetype and can concentrate solar energy into blasts of laser; and Midnighter, who possesses superhuman strength, speed, reflexes and resilience thanks to some bioengineered enhancements. Apollo and Midnighter eventually marry, with the pair often thought of as a parallel to Batman and Superman.
The Authority should provide a very different, and likely much more violent, take to the DCU than we have seen so far, and will follow on from Superman: Legacy, which is due to be released on July 11, 2025.
