One week ago, Warner Bros. officially pumped the brakes on The Flash solo movie after we learned that Dope director Rick Famuyiwa had bowed out of the project citing creative differences.
He’s by no means the first filmmaker to do so, either; early on in development, Seth Grahame-Smith had been attached to shepherd the Scarlett Speedster onto the big screen, while Phil Lord and Chris Miller contributed a treatment of the script. It’s been a difficult start, then, and when quizzed about those production woes, The Flash himself Ezra Miller compared the setbacks to a kind of “tragic relay race.”
Chatting to Collider ahead of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, where he plays the mysterious Credence, Miller conceded that “these processes are complicated.”
“These processes are complicated, and I think it can—from afar—appear to be, as you say, something interpersonal or dramatic. That is rarely the case. These are groups of people taking the development of projects extremely seriously, and the teams are changing all the time. There’s often a lot of flux in who the team of the production of a film is before that production starts, and in this case, you hear about it, because it’s a critical figure—the directors that have been coming on and leaving. For me, it’s sort of a tragic relay race, and we’ve had a couple really incredible people carry this baton, and their marks are left on that baton, and the work that they’ve given to the project will certainly be represented in whatever the final product comes to be.”
Miller wasn’t the only one left disappointed after Rick Famuyiwa made for the exit door; Kiersey Clemons (Iris West), who was set to re-team with the Dope director, also reflected on the creative changeover during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Rick was one of the main reasons I wanted to do the movie. So him not being a part of it is obviously very upsetting to me. All I can do is give it up to the gods. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see who’s going to jump in. Ezra and I are going to do what we promised to do from the beginning. No matter who the director is, I am going to do what I think Iris should be.”
The Flash is tentatively slated for release on March 16, 2018, though we fully expect that due date to be pushed as the search for a new director intensifies.