James Mangold is making Swamp Thing for Warner Bros and DC – but he’s insistent that the film will be standing alone.
While he might have a highly-touted Bob Dylan biopic releasing this week, director James Mangold has otherwise been engaged in a frenzy of franchise filmmaking of late. There was last year’s Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny and next up, he’ll be turning his attention to a Star Wars prequel film which is said to chart the formation of the Jedi Order.
After that, the filmmaker will be turning his attention to a Swamp Thing movie for Warner Bros that will add to the growing number of entries in the new DC Universe.
Mangold has been talking just a little about that Swamp Thing project which presumably is some years away from production, given that any given Star Wars film doesn’t exactly whizz through the Lucasfilm system these days. In music to our ears (swamp blues?), Mangold has reiterated to Movieweb that as far as he’s concerned, his Swamp Thing tale won’t tie in with James Gunn’s wider DC Univere in any tangible way.
“While I’m sure DC views Swamp Thing as a franchise,” he told the outlet, “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.”
Given that Mangold has been attached to a Swamp Thing story for a while, we imagine that comment won’t come as surprise to DC Universe creative boss James Gunn, who is hopefully supportive of that choice. While a Swamp Thing crossover with other DC characters absolutely could work at some point (the character has had some gnarly encounters with Batman over the years), Mangold is surely right in wanting to ringfence the film so he can maintain the sanctity of its tone and story.
“I’m not that interested in being handcuffed by so much lore at this point that it’s almost immovable and you can’t please anybody,” he adds. Could that be an oblique reference to the wave of negativity aimed at Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny's release, which saw Mangold trying to tell the final act of a hero that has endured through four films and countless other adventures in other media?
The filmmaker has admitted that he was ‘hurt’ by the response to the film and it’s fair to say that he was tasked with carrying a fair amount of baggage into that project, not least the very negative backlash to Dial Of Destiny's predecessor, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.
With Swamp Thing, Mangold clearly wants space to tell the story as he sees it with no wider considerations. Let’s hope that’s how it turns out that way, although it will likely be some time before we find out.
