Director Doug Liman Explains Why He Dropped Out of DC's JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK and Fox's GAMBIT

After Edge of Tomorrow ended up being a big hit, lots of studios wanted to be in business with director Doug Liman. He was attached to a couple of big comic book movies at certain points in his career. One was for DC’s Justice League Dark and the other was for Fox/Marvel’s Gambit.

The filmmaker ended up dropping out of both of these projects and there’s a reason for that and that reason seems to be a lack of strong original scripts. He explains that he doesn’t want to do what everyone else is doing, he wants to do something unique, fresh, and new. These projects just didn’t offer him that.

While talking to CBM the director opened up about what led him to walk away from these projects:

“It's always about the script. Getting a great script is so hard, especially for an action script because - and especially for the movies I want to make - I want to be completely original and yet still be commercially satisfying and usually the commercially satisfying ideas are things that people have seen before, like if someone already discovered that and that's why it shows up in movie after movie.

“So, if you’re trying to be like, ‘Okay, I'm going to do a superhero thing,’ and there's been umpteen movies and TV shows about superpowers and I want to do something that's totally unique with Impulse, you know, a lot of the good ideas are already done and you've got to find your own lane. You don't have to, but for me, that's so important. I'm not interested in doing something that's derivative of someone else's work and so, it makes it particularly hard to develop material that can accomplish that. There's a lot of times you end up with a script that is really original, but it's not all that satisfying or you have something that’s pretty satisfying, but it doesn’t feel original.”

I don’t blame him for walking away from these film projects. It makes sense that he wouldn’t want to make the kind of films that just follow the same formula that everyone else is using, I can see how there’s no satisfaction in that.

I know the studios want to use the filmmaking formula that is working for everyone else, but sometimes thinking outside the box and doing something different and unique could yield great and exciting results! The success of films like Logan and Deadpool proved that.