Source: Entertainment Weekly

James Gunn and Zack Snyder are going head to head over Superman — though maybe not in the way fans expected.

Days before Gunn’s Superman movie flies into theaters, the filmmaker and DC Studios co-chief joined forces with Snyder for a cameo on the latest episode of Rick and Morty. Voicing themselves in a shared scene, the dueling Superman directors cross paths in the Warner Bros. cafeteria, where things quickly go from friendly to snarky.

“Just saw your new cut of Superman,” a beefy Snyder says, approaching Gunn. “Word of advice: He’s the Man of Steel, not the Man of Conversation.”

“Okay…?” Gunn responds skeptically.

Snyder continues, “Do more shots of him punching! And here’s a secret move: Start the punch at regular speed and then you’re gonna ramp it down…”

Gunn snaps back, “It’s not a f‑‑‑ing secret.”

But that’s where the sniping ends, as Gunn regretfully sits back and immediately apologizes: “I’m sorry, Zack Snyder, I shouldn’t be lashing out at you — your biceps are the size of my head.”

“Yes, but so is my heart,” Snyder replies, before asking what has Gunn so wound up.

When the Guardians of the Galaxy director reveals that he has an issue with Rick and Morty protagonist Rick Sanchez, Snyder brushes it off. “That’s the guy who sealed Christopher Nolan in the giant bookcase to punish him for Interstellar,” he says. “He doesn’t represent real fans. He’s just the smartest man in the universe. Don’t sweat it. He can’t do what we do. Probably.”

Gunn spends the rest of the episode as an antagonist to the titular characters. The conflict kicks off when Rick and Morty decide they’re unhappy with the direction that their favorite movie franchise, Maximum Velocitree, has taken. After confronting its director, Gunn, they opt to fix the film themselves with Rick’s latest invention, the Movie-lizer.

They do ultimately come up with a better ending, which has Gunn tearfully proclaim, “They did it! What an ending! They outdone the Gunn!”

Rick & Morty executive producer Scott Marder told Variety that both Snyder and Gunn were game to poke fun at themselves with the cameo.

“They were good sports,” he said. “Both of those guys sort of implied that this is the show they watch when they have downtime. So they were thrilled to get to be a part of the world, and there was no pushback or bristling. If anything, they laughed at anything we threw at them. There were probably, frankly, even more digs and more silly things we could have used. All they did was laugh it off.”

He also said Gunn took time to record his dialogue while in the middle of production on Superman.

“We were all pretty sure that whenever [writer Rob] Schrab reached out to Gunn he would be a million percent in the middle of doing Superman,” Marder said. “But not only did he respond instantly with a yes, but I think he ran it up the chain at Warner Bros. that same day. We had people on our production side who were like, ‘How is it that James Gunn and [David] Zaslav and all these people already know about this episode?’ We didn’t think it would actually move this quickly.”

Snyder was previously one of the chief creative forces behind DC’s superhero movies, directing Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League. In a corporate overhaul in 2022, Gunn and Peter Safran were named co-chairmen and CEOs of DC Studios.

Gunn opted to kick off the franchise reboot by writing and directing Superman, which stars David Corenswet as the Man of Steel, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. The film hits theaters Friday.

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