Doug Liman has an itch to scratch, and it’s making a comic book movie, but he doesn’t just want to sign up for any ol’ Marvel or DC property. The genre-shifting director had long been attached to helm the spinoff “Gambit” for 20th Century Fox with Channing Tatum set to star (who presumably still is) but almost as soon as Liman was announced the project started to go cold. Production start dates got pushed back and nothing really coalesced, and while you might blame the studio for putting the cart before the horse, some of it seems to come down to the director himself who admits that, in the end, he wasn’t particularly drawn to the property.
“I look for a personal connection to the movies I make and it may not be immediately obvious. You know, like what’s my connection to Jason Bourne? I have a deeply personal connection to that movie because it’s all about Iran-Contra and my father ran the investigations into Iran-Contra,” he told We Got This Covered. “In every story I have a personal connection. ‘The Wall,’ you’d be like what could this filmmaker from New York possibly have in common with these two soldiers pinned down in Iraq? But ‘The Wall’ is really about perseverance. It’s about picking yourself up and you just keep going and that’s something I have firsthand experience with. Not in war but in other aspects of life. With ‘Gambit,’ I just never found that personal way in. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Fair enough, and if Liman isn’t excited, it’s probably for the best that he moved on. What will become of “Gambit” remains to be seen, but the filmmaker has found much more spark at Warner Bros. and DC with “Justice League Dark,” which is giving him that connection he’s looking for.
“I think people will be surprised how character driven and how intimate ‘Justice League Dark’ is — in kind of a field of bloated comic book movies. We’ve found a way to do something that’s actually really personal and small, and that’s my goal… I love putting people in crazy situations. For John Constantine, we have an amazing set-up for him for ‘Justice League Dark’ that’s really human,” he told Cinemablend.
Promising stuff, but at the moment, it’s not clear where in WB’s ever changing DC schedule this film will fit, so we’ll have to see if “Justice League Dark” actually happens or is pushed back and shuffled around. But if it does go forward, Liman is ready and waiting. The director’s new film, “The Wall,” opens on Friday.
