Long before the Fox buy-out by Disney, Doug Liman was attached to direct ‘Gambit‘ for the studio. On top of that, the director was also attached to helm ‘Justice League Dark‘ before Warner Bros. ended up scrapping the project. So you have to wonder why this visionary director ended up leaving these films.
It would have been an easy payday for the director after his success with ‘Edge of Tomorrow,’ but he had a specific reason for walking away.
According to Liman:
“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.”
So it seems the problem both of these potential films suffered from was a lack of originality that motivated Liman to get behind the camera. If that is truly the case, I think we can agree that Liman dodged a bullet.
Do you wish Doug Liman had directed either ‘Gambit’ or a ‘Justice League Dark’ movie? Would you like to see the director handle any major superhero franchise? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Source: Comic Book Movie
