The Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny director James Mangold has been chatting about his planned DC Universe project.
James Mangold has seemingly entered the blockbuster phase of his career and call us curious, but we’re intrigued to see where this will all lead. Of course, Mangold is no stranger to the odd blockbuster, he directed 2013’s The Wolverine and 2017’s Logan, but with Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny about to be released (our review is here), a DC comics adaptation and a Star Wars movie all planned to follow, it seems like this will be the most commercial period of Mangold’s work to date.
Whilst Mangold has two Wolverine movies to his name, he wasn’t working in quite the same interconnected universe as say, a Marvel Cinematic Universe or perhaps, an interconnected DC Universe. How much say the filmmaker will get regarding how ‘standalone’ his film will be will be interesting to see over the coming months (and years). We’re sure you all recall Edgar Wright’s struggles to make a standalone Ant-Man film in the nascent days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
That project never came to fruition and we’re curious to see how James Gunn and James Mangold reach an accord over Swamp Thing, especially when Mangold is already publicly stating that he isn’t seeing the project as a franchise.
“While I’m sure DC views Swamp Thing as a franchise, I would be viewing it as a very simple, clean, Gothic horror movie about this man/monster,” Mangold told Variety.
That’s all well and good (and should make for a better film), but of course Swamp Thing will be part of an ongoing franchise with all of the bells and whistles that entails and we’re intrigued to see how much freedom Mangold is given to pursue that line of creative expression.
As much as anything else, it will be a test of DCU’s creative head James Gunn and whether he can translate his undoubted filmmaking instincts into a production capacity when there are so many other requirements to service, alongside good old-fashioned storytelling.
As far as storytelling goes, Mangold adds he’d been “toying for years with the idea of making a kind of Frankenstein movie”.
As to whether his film remains standalone, we will see but we sincerely hope he gets to make it his way. We’re sure conversations are currently cropping up in lots of places about the creative process of Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny given that film’s critical reception. We’ll bring you more on Swamp Thing as we hear it.
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
