/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.

• The Flash Movie at Ride the Lighting
• The Flash at IMDB