Warner Bros. must know something we don’t, because they just picked a very strange director for their upcoming feature film version of The Flash. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the superhero movie, due in theaters in 2018, will be both written and directed by Seth Grahame-Smith, who has never directed a film before, and whose screenplays have never been turned into a hit, either critically or financially.
But the man who helped bring you Dark Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (movies which, in all honesty, we actually kinda liked) has an “in” at Warner Bros: he’s writing their upcoming LEGO Batman movie, which spins off of the hit LEGO Movie directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Those two filmmakers had previously been attached to The Flash but have since departed to focus on the upcoming Star Wars Anthology film about the adventures of young Han Solo.
Seth Grahame-Smith, who is also writing the upcoming Beetlejuice sequel, seems to share Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s eccentric sense of humor, and dedication to treating outlandish concepts so seriously that become even more outlandish. Which raises the question, of course, of just how much of a comedy Warner Bros. thinks The Flash should be.
We don’t mean to be rude to Seth Grahame-Smith. We were serious when we said that Warner Bros. probably knows something that the rest of us don’t. On paper this seems like a strange decision, but so did giving Iron Man to Jon Favreau, and so did letting Tim Burton direct Batman. And those films turned out pretty darned great in the end, because those filmmakers weren’t selected “just because.” They had a distinct vision of how their movies should be filmed and the studios supported that vision.
So perhaps Seth Grahame-Smith had one hell of a pitch for The Flash, and if that’s the case, we may be in for one hell of a movie. Then again, it might also suck, if only because a lot of movies suck and there’s nothing on Seth Grahame-Smith’s resumé to indicate that he knows exactly what makes a film successfully, financially or otherwise.
Yet.
The new feature film version of The Flash is set to star Ezra Miller (We Need to Talk About Kevin), and will have nothing to do with the hit CW television series of the same name, which is also about the same character.
Image via DC Comics
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
