‘The Flash’ Movie Will Be Inspired By ‘Back to the Future,’ Plus Todd Phillips’ Joker Movie Updates
Things aren’t exactly calm and uneventful over at the Warner Bros. offices this week. The DCEU is in the midst of a massive retooling, with former chief creative officer Geoff Johns stepping down from his longtime role on Monday and news that Matt Reeves’s Batman movie will be a reboot sans Ben Affleck. Now new details about the future of the DCEU have surfaced, revealing a change of tone for The Flash movie and how that Joaquin Phoenix Joker film will be different from the Jared Leto one.
A new lengthy report from The Hollywood Reporter dives into the big mess DC execs are trying to sort through to reset the cinematic universe. Walter Hamada, who was hired as DC Films president back in January and has since taken charge following Johns’ exist, has apparently spent the past several months sorting through DCEU projects to decide what to change and what to focus on. “He walked into a s—show, and he’s trying to clean it up,” one source told THR of Hamada. So what does that clean-up look like? First off, it’s wiping away all the murky doom and gloom Zack Snyder cast on the DCEU and replacing it with something lighter and fun, namely for The Flash movie.
The trade reports that Ezra Miller‘s Barry Allen solo film will ditch the somber themes originally planned for the movie (thank God). Instead, The Flash movie will be more inspired by Back to the Future, with THR noting the Robert Zemeckis classic will serve as a “touchstone” for the film. While the project has had an endlessly a bumpy road with one director exit after another, production will finally kick off this fall with Game Night directors and Spider-Man: Homecoming screenwriters John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.
The tidbit of interesting information in the report concerns Todd Phillips’ Joker movie, set to star Joaquin Phoenix as the Batman villain even though Joaquin Phoenix likes to pretend he has no idea what that is in the press. With Jared Leto returning for a standalone Joker outing, we’ve known that Phillips’ movie will exist outside of the main DCEU and under a new banner. According to THR, that banner might be called DC Dark or DC Black. (OK fine but lets hope they don’t take those words literally when it comes to the actual look of the films.) Phoenix’s Joker project will also differ from the main DCEU slate in a major way: it will have a fraction of those films’ budgets. The report notes Phillips’ film will have a $55 million budget. For comparison, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Wonder Woman had a budgets of $250 million and $149 million, respectively. So expect something much different.
Next up in the DCEU is James Wan’s Aquaman on December 21, Shazam on April 5, 2019, and Wonder Woman 2 (now officially titled Wonder Woman 1984) next November, followed by Cathy Yan’s Harley Quinn Birds of Prey movie and Christina Hodson working on the Batgirl movie.
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