Yeah, but it's Fox - what do you expect?
A director not signing on for a project is quite different from them dropping out or being kicked off it.
Warner bros announce superhero films through 2020
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Doesn't that make things even worse? To part ways with a director that has been working on a film for years? And was heavily invested with everything, script, casting, pre-production, etc?
Of course it happens with every major studio. WB did it with The Hobbit director Guillermo del Toro. Disney fired Star Wars director Josh Trank.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that movie studios seem to be moving more toward a TV-like showrunner/writers'-room model, mainly where the interconnected "cinematic universes" are concerned, but even with a single project in the case of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes 3. In television, shows are driven by writer-producers, and directors are more like contractors who come and go (although many shows these days have "producing directors" who have an ongoing executive role overseeing the directorial side, so TV is becoming more like movies in that sense).
I think we can come up with 100 examples of a change in director being a good thing, and 100 examples of it being a bad thing.
Those were a bit of a train wreck.
My guess, albeit totally unfounded, is that Famuyiwa might have wanted to inject at least a tad more social commentary than WB wants in the movie. We already have a Flash franchise in which the black characters could be played by white actors without changing a single word of dialogue. (Not that an ethnicity-blind fictional world is in any way a bad thing in of itself, but it's not exactly reflective of reality or hugely progressive, either.) Do we really need another Flash franchise that's all Speed Force nonsense this and Speedster blather that, but which has nothing to say about our actual times?
As well as keeping Barry's mom murdered by a time traveling psycho nonsense. Speed Force (and Negative Speed Force), Nora Allen's death giving Barry some tragedy (where before there was none) and such are all Johns' ideas and things he keeps apart of the Flash IP. When he wrote Wally, Bart, and Barry, what was different was how their powers worked and their cast of supporting characters. Under the mask though, they could all be interchangeable.
I really do think Famuyiwa leaving had to do with Johns' seeing more of his idea for the Flash movie should be like. Johns' has already retconned a lot of Flash IP to suit his needs in the past.
Many superhero films say little about our times, largely, because that's not their job. Its a choice. The Avengers was pure roller coaster fan service, and who knows what the Thor movies were trying to say. In the end, social commentary was not on the filmmakers' to-do list. Regarding the Flash, to the most important, true face of DC adaptations--the films--the Flash is unexplored territory. The DC TV series are not part of that conversation, or continuity for that matter, so again, the Flash can and should be explored on the grand landscape of the DC film universe.
True - and all the more reason why taking a risk and doing something different, at least a little bit and along the margins, might pay off. But then, this is the studio that decided that what a Suicide Squad movie really needed was yet another Giant Sky Beam.
Meh, Flash is a guy in a suit who runs really fast. That's a good fit for a modestly budgeted CW show with a posse of entertaining sidekicks, but not something that cries out to me as needing a huge IMAX canvas the way Spider-Man and his skyscraper swinging does.
Seriously? The action on the "modestly budgeted CW show" is huge by TV standards, highly cinematic. Just yesterday they had a kaiju rampaging through the city. A week before, they had the Flash somehow generate enogh wind to keep a levitated cargo ship from crushing a hospital. They've featured alternate worlds, dimensional rifts, tsunamis, nuclear explosions, time paradoxes, all sorts of wild and massive action. Give them a feature budget and they could easily fill that IMAX canvas.
And Batman just hits people in the face...
Oh wait, comic book heroes are more than just their powers/abilities.
The difference is Marvel did it to protect their formula, which is obviously successful, whereas WB's problems seem to derive from them undercutting their directors because they are nervous (stemming from the mixed reception to MoS) and feel they have to do something, not because they have an artistic vision or standard of quality in mind.
Never mind the stereotypes. The comics at their best often touch on social themes, because they add realism and resonance to the stories. The first X-Men movie undoubtedly benefited by its references to the holocaust (done very tastefully), in order to give its story gravitas. The 9/11 parallel in BvS was one of the more positively-received aspects of that film. I for one find this approach more effective than costumed weirdos fighting because of a generic CGI threat, or for soap opera reasons.
Well, six of the last eight Batman movies have been terrible, so...
And yet, you'll notice the solution is always "run so fast everything blurs, and that magically fixes everything." Multiple bombs in one city? Run at blur speed. Black hole? Run at blur speed. Cargo ship about to land on a hospital? Run at blur speed. Incoming tsunami? Run at... etc.
Seriously. Of course they could throw more stuff at the screen with more money. But if the solution always remains "run at blur speed", then I see no compelling reason why us fans of the show should shell out for a movie version of the more of the same, only somewhat bigger.
Clearly you haven't been paying attention, they solved that one with magnets
Also, all of those other examples you provided, running fast produced different effects.
So yeah, if you can't think of anything that the Flash could do impressively on the big screen, that's more due to your lack of imagination than his power set...
Aren't you forgetting that the Quicksilver sequences in the past two X-Men movies were the most visually impressive, creative, and critically acclaimed sequences in those movies? Heck, the Quicksilver sequence in Apocalypse was the only part most people seemed to like. There are all sorts of visually impressive and creative things you can do with the concept of superspeed or accelerated time perception.
Seriously. Of course they could throw more stuff at the screen with more money. But if the solution always remains "run at blur speed", then I see no compelling reason why us fans of the show should shell out for a movie version of the more of the same, only somewhat bigger.
Have you actually watched the show, or read any Flash comics? Writers and artists have been coming up with countless variations on the Flash's powers for the past 60 years -- 76 years if you count Jay Garrick. There's so much more to it than just running fast. As with Quicksilver, there's thinking really fast, being able to accelerate his perceptions or speed-learn or even resist mind control by outracing it with his thoughts. And there's his vast range of other physical abilities: running up vertical walls, creating air vortices, phasing through solid objects, becoming intangible, moving fast enough to appear to be in multiple places at once, harnessing and throwing his "speed lightning," magnetic manipulation of metal (as an extension of his "lightning" abilities), and of course the big ones, traveling between dimensions and traveling through time. I mean, come on, man, the Flash can time travel under his own power! That's become almost as central a part of the Flash narrative as the "run really fast" stuff. I'd be surprised if the Flash movie didn't make some use of time travel or parallel Earths.
One of the main criticisms of earlier screen portrayals of the Flash, in fact -- e.g. the 1990 series or the animated Justice League -- was that they tended to tone down his powers too much, downplaying how incredibly powerful someone with unlimited superspeed would actually be, and overlooking the other powers he's been given in the comics. There's very little that the Flash can't do.
No, nor am I forgetting that his screen time and powers were used sparingly, and that lots of people also claimed the Apocalypse sequence was just a rehash of the DoFP one.
Dude, aggro much? I already mentioned in this thread I watch the show.
Except, apparently, to learn to not be an idiot, because he's so fast the writers have to constantly make him screw things up in order to sustain and drive new stories.
Which has nothing to do with the question of whether the Flash's powers can lend themselves to visually impressive cinematic sequences.
You are correct--the sort of things seen on the very TV-anchored Flash series (or any of the Berlanti productions) would never work in the majestic, expansive movie world seen in MoS, BvS and (from what we can see in the trailer) WW. The movie Flash will be a different animal--created for that majestic world in story as well as visuals, but able to use the character as part of a larger world, where he has a purpose, other than being "the guy who runs fast."
