Former SWAMP THING Showrunner Addresses James Mangold's DCU Movie
Back in 2019, there was a short-lived Swamp Thing series that DC Entertainment developed with James Wan. The series only ran for one season, and it was actually really good! But, it was ultimately canceled. I remember that the project went through some major production issues.
Swamp Thing is about to go through another reboot thanks to producer James Gunn and director James Mangold. A lot of fans are excited about this project, include the showrunner of the canceled series, Mark Verheiden.
During a recent interview with Multiverse of Color’s The Showrunner Whisperer podcast, Verheiden was asked about the Swamp Thing movie, and said: “James Mangold, who’s a great guy, is apparently working on a Swamp Thing movie, which is great.”
He went on to add: “He’ll give a great take on it. So, hopefully, that maybe kicks off a little more of the darker characters [getting their own projects].”
The former Swamp Thing showrunner continued, “I’m really hopeful for what James Gunn brings to the world. It feels like the old, sort of the last regime’s DC movies maybe aren’t doing quite as well as they had hoped, so maybe this new take will… They’re talking about encompassing darker characters [in the DCU], so that’d be great.”
When previously talking about the movie, the filmmaker teased his vision for it, saying that it will be a standalone film that he describes as a “very simple, clean, Gothic horror movie.”
He explained: "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... Just doing my own thing with this, just a standalone."
Mangold added that he's been "toying for years with the idea of making a kind of Frankenstein movie," for years before teaming up with James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC Studios, and this Swamp Thing movie is going to be that.
The filmmaker went on to expand on that and say he has no agenda of building a cinematic universe for Swamp Thing, he just has a story that he wants to tell. He also compares it to RoboCop: “It’s no different speech than anyone else gets with me; I don’t have any agenda for a universe, I’m not building towards someone joining in some future.”
He continued: “Have at it, but I’d just be interested in telling, I’ve always been interested in doing a version of Frankenstein, basically, and, yet, I feel, ‘It’s alive!’ has been done enough, but Swamp Thing always occurred to me as this wonderful version of a Frankenstein story, much in the way one of my favorite pop films of growing up, RoboCop, the original one. This guy who just wakes up and he’s been turned into, he finds he’s become this machine, was also something I was fascinated with with Logan, obviously.”
Mangold went on to say that he likes the idea of making Swamp Thing a “noir, mystery, horror film about a guy who wakes up and he’s this thing.” He added: “There’s an amnesiac quality of, ‘How did I get here and who did this to me?’”
He added: “So I’m envisioning a horror-noir film following a creature that can’t be seen, trying to piece together from fragments of memories, what happened and who did it. And none of this runs counter to the Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson and all the great work that went on...I’m just framing it up in a new movie context, but that’s all they were exploring in these comics and so beautifully.”
You can check out the full conversation between Verheiden and The Showrunner Whisperer below: