James Gunn Reveals Why He Greenlit Mike Flanagan's CLAYFACE Movie
We’ve known for years that Mike Flanagan has been wanting to make a Clayface movie for DC Studios and several months after he said he pitched his idea to James Gunn and Peter Safran, the movie got the official greelight!
It was a pleasant surprise for a lot of DC fans because Clayface is such a cool and interesting character, and he will be making his debut in Creature Commandos.
During a recent DC press event Gunn was asked about greenlighting Flanagan’s Clayface movie and he responded saying:
“As I say all the time, everything here is about, ‘I want to make sure we have the screenplay that works perfectly.’ That goes above and beyond anything else.
“So when Mike Flanagan comes in and he is like, ‘I got this idea for Clayface…’ I didn't think about, ‘We're going to do something with Clayface.’ But then he told me this idea he had, and the idea was so amazing.
“And I'm like, ‘Well, let's take a shot. Let's go write it!’ So he writes it, and he comes in with this amazing script. He was so passionate about it that I'm like, ‘That definitely could fit in.’
“It's just quality above everything. Then we have to figure out, ‘How does that fit in with everything else?’”
Flanagan only wrote the script for the film, and unfortunately, he won’t be directing the film because he will be working on his Exorcist movie. So, DC Studios is now on the hunt for a director.
Flanagan previously shared that he would be “really keen to do a standalone Clayface movie as a horror/thriller/tragedy.”
In another interview Flanagan talked about his initial pitch meeting with the studio about Clayface being a horror movie, and that wasn’t the only DC movie that they talked about. He said:
“I went into Warner Bros. to have the meeting about DC. It was a general meeting with [producer] Jon Berg talking about whether there was anything in the DC Universe that I could be a fit for… I really want[ed] to do Clayface.
“I went in and said, ‘You know, if you want to do some horror-leaning DC stuff, boy do I have a great take on Clayface. I’d love to do that movie.'”
“And then if not, I wanted to talk about Scarecrow and Justice League Dark and Constantine. And I kind of threw everything up there and then said, ‘As a child, I used to dress up as Superman, because that was my hero — Christopher Reeve’s Superman was my hero.’ And the meeting kind of went nowhere. [Berg] didn’t really grab onto any of that stuff.”
I love how Gunn is handling all of these DC projects and not greenlighting them until the script is in perfect shooting condition. It’s an encouraging way to develop films, and I hope that it works out for them and that DC Studios will be pumping out one great film after another.