John Oliver used a Last Week Tonight segment about the Trump Justice Department’s courtroom losing streak to take a direct shot at his own corporate parent’s superhero slate. The exchange with the DOJ’s record led into DC’s box office history as the punchline:
“OK, first: No one’s accusing you of ‘running away’; they’re accusing you of losing. Rest assured, everyone believes you ran cock-first as hard as you could straight into a brick wall. And second, I didn’t realize the existence of repeated unsuccessful attempts was actually good news — that’s huge for DC movies, if true.”
He then rolled a poster collage of six DC films onto the screen: Black Adam, The Flash, Birds of Prey, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Supergirl.
The segment’s actual target was designate Attorney General Todd Blanche, responding to NBC’s Laura Jarrett listing off a string of DOJ setbacks: dismissed indictments against James Comey and Letitia James, an Adam Schiff case that never got off the ground, a grand jury declining to indict six Democratic lawmakers, and a judge tossing a subpoena for Fed Chair Jerome Powell. When Blanche insisted the department wasn’t running from hard cases, Oliver pivoted the joke straight into DC’s box office record, an unmistakable target given the segment aired on HBO, a Warner Bros. Discovery property that shares a corporate parent with DC Studios itself. Variety reported Oliver appeared to catch himself mid-bit, laughing once the irony landed that he was mocking his own employer’s output on his own employer’s network.
Cosmic Book News’s follow-up reporting adds a layer the segment’s graphic conveniently left out: four of the six films shown, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Supergirl, carry producer credits for current DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran, while the remaining two bear Gunn’s creative fingerprints regardless of who’s credited. The joke wasn’t really about DC’s old, pre-Gunn era at all. It landed squarely on the regime currently running the studio, the same one that’s spent three years promising a coherent turnaround.
The numbers back up the punchline. Supergirl closed its run at roughly $125.8 million worldwide against a reported $170 million budget, a projected loss north of $100 million for the studio airing the joke about it. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’s $440 million looked especially rough next to the first film’s $1.15 billion. The Flash pulled in about $271 million despite a marketing push built around multiple Batman variants, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods managed only $134 million.
This lands in the same stretch where Spider-Man: Brand New Day just crossed $700 million domestic for Marvel, and where a California antitrust trial over the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger sits scheduled for March 2027, leaving DC’s entire corporate future genuinely undecided. A comedy writer on the DC/Warner payroll openly mocking his own studio’s track record isn’t spin, it’s the most honest assessment of the DCU’s box office reality anyone at the company has offered all year.
Does it say more about DC’s struggles that a rival studio is dunking on them, or that the harshest joke about DC’s failures this month came from inside Warner Bros. Discovery’s own building?
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