Today’s no-news story is so short that the trail of links will be longer. On Saturday, ShockTillYouDrop reported that WB producer Charles Roven “told us that there is “no momentum” on the comic book adaptation The Flash at Warner Bros. Pictures.”
Not a big surprise, frankly, given the last few bits of non-news about the film. (via SuperHeroHype, in turn via The Beat)
ABC has bought the TV rights to Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, Flashforward, based on a script by David S. Goyer (Batman Begins and the Flash movie that never happened) and Brannon Braga (Star Trek, 24). The network wants to turn it into a series, and thinks it could become a companion piece to Lost.
As described by Pop Critics (where I learned about the deal):
During [a scientific] experiment, as the button is pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a few moments while everyone’s consciousness is catapulted more than twenty years into the future. At the end of those moments, when the world reawakens, all human life is transformed by foreknowledge.
Why am I mentioning it here? Because I really like Robert J. Sawyer’s novels, and the word Flash is in the title. I discovered him through his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, and since then I’ve read Calculating God, Mindscan, and Rollback. I haven’t gotten to Flashforward yet, but it’s on my to-read list.
Sawyer tends to write social science-fiction: if X technological advance occurs, or Y scientific principle is discovered, what impact will that have on society? How would we react to discovering an alternate reality in which Neanderthals developed civilization instead of us? Or if aliens landed and claimed they had scientific proof that God exists and created the universe 14 billion years ago? What are the legal implications of being able to copy your personality into a virtually immortal, lifelike robot?
Regarding the title: In Sawyer’s blog, he mentions that the actual title is Flashforward, but because it was split into two words on the cover, it tends to get referred to as “Flash Forward.”
Classic Flash writer Mark Waid, in between his duties as Editor-in-Chief of BOOM! Studios, still manages to find time to write comics. His latest project: Spider-Man, detailed in an interview with Newsarama.
Newsarama tries to make sense out of Warner Bros. DC Movie plans, and concludes that The Flash is unlikely to reach the big screen anytime in the next three years. Meanwhile, The Geek Files reports that Ryan Reynolds is still interested in the role.
Comics Should Be Good has been running Underappreciated Artist Spotlights, including features on Ross Andru and Mort Meskin. Ross Andru and Mike Esposito took over from Carmine Infantino as artists on The Flash in 1967. Mort Meskin was the regular artist on fellow speedster Johnny Quick‘s stories in More Fun Comics and Adventure Comics throughout most of the 1940s.
Inspired by the wild success of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. is going to be trimming its low-end movie production and focusing on the big tentpole films, the Wall Street Journal reports. So where to DC’s super-heroes stand?
With “Batman vs. Superman” and “Justice League” stalled, Warner Bros. has quietly adopted Marvel’s model of releasing a single film for each character, and then using those movies and their sequels to build up to a multicharacter film. “Along those lines, we have been developing every DC character that we own,” [Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff] Robinov says.
Like the recent Batman sequel — which has become the highest-grossing film of the year thus far — Mr. Robinov wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone as “The Dark Knight.” Creatively, he sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.’ DC properties. “We’re going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it,” he says. That goes for the company’s Superman franchise as well.
The studio is set to announce its plans for future DC movies in the next month. For now, though, it is focused on releasing four comic-book films in the next three years, including a third Batman film, a new film reintroducing Superman, and two movies focusing on other DC Comics characters. Movies featuring Green Lantern, Flash, Green Arrow, and Wonder Woman are all in active development.
While I hope they don’t go too dark with The Flash, I’m glad to hear that they’re pulling away from the light near-comedy suggested by the choices of Shawn Levy and later David Dobkin as director.
/Film got a little more info out of The Dark Knight producer Charles Rovan:
“We had hoped to be able to get a new draft going before the writers’ strike and we weren’t able to,” Rovan admitted. “And since the writers’ strike, we just haven’t been able to find the right creative compatibility between what we’re looking for and a writer and you know, we’re a little bit dragging our feet, we’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen with this actor’s strike, you know.”
(via FusedFilm)
On the plus side, there’s that Warner Bros/DC film summit that’s been making the rounds of comics blogs lately. Perhaps once the labor issues are resolved, we’ll see some more movement?
And yes, “looking at how best to exploit the DC Comics characters and properties” is an appropriate description, if a bit blunt. Warner Bros. is a movie studio. Neil Gaiman sums up the typical Hollywood take on source material in his short story, “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” (in Smoke and Mirrors):
She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.
At a July 1 press conference for The Dark Knight, producer Charles Roven discussed the long-delayed film adaptation of The Flash with iF Magazine. David Dobkin (The Wedding Crashers) is still director, but there isn’t much more to say, since they’re “not even writing it yet.”
Back in December 2004, the project was first announced with Batman Begins’ David Goyer as writer/director. His version would have “showcase[d] the legacy aspect of the hero” and played up the sci-fi elements, “playing with relativity, Doppler effects and all kinds of things like that.” Goyer actually wrote and finished a script.
By February 2007, DC had decided to abandon Goyer’s draft, hired Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum), and re-positioned it to be a spin-off of the planned Justice League movie. Just 8 months later, they’d handed the film to Dobkin.
Last Year’s Writers Guild of America strike put both films on hold. And with continuing delays on Justice League: Mortal (currently scheduled for 2011), it’s unclear whether The Flash will still have to wait its turn, or if it’ll run out of the gate first.