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News on ‘The Flash’ and ‘Green Arrow’ movies

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David S. Goyer is headed to International Comic-Con in two weeks to promote “The Unborn,” the horror film due in 2009 that finds the “Batman Begins” screenwriter back in the director’s chair and working with Meagan Good, Carla Gugino, Jane Alexander and Gary Oldman. Goyer is a familiar name to comics and genre film fans, of course, and he hopes to solidify that stature in the next few years with two more heroic projects: “The Flash” and “Green Arrow.”

Here’s Goyer’s approach on each:

“The Flash”: “To me, Wally West as the Flash has always been the most-Marvel of all the major DC characters. He’s like Peter Parker. He’s screwed up a lot, he’s overwhelmed. He wasn’t born as the last son of Krypton or some Amazonian princess, he’s a person who just ends up with these powers. He’s not even the first Flash, he’s sort of had this costume passed on to him by Barry Allen, he’s had to live up to this other guy who everybody admired. I like all of that. I don’t think we’ve seen a movie like that, where someone is trying to live up to the legacy of someone who came before him.”

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“Green Arrow”: “We’re not even going to tell an origin story. The movie starts with Green Arrow framed for a crime and sent to a prison for meta-humans. He has to survive in this special, high-security prison with a lot of people that he put in there. And of course, he has no super powers and he’s always been such a black-and-white, moralist kind of guy, and he has to make certain relationships inside that cause him to reexamine some of his beliefs and assumptions.”

When would these movie be made? “Green Arrow” is still in the very earliest stages and while “The Flash” has an IMDb target date of 2010, that’s not going to happen — not with Goyer’s schedule (which includes a Magneto movie) and the fact that Warner Bros. is mulling over the proper approach to ‘cape’ movies.

“ ‘The Flash’ right now is on the back burner. The word I hear is that Warner is taking a step back so they can reexamine, from soup to nuts, their approach to the DC characters and universe. The ‘Justice League’ movie was put on hold by [the writers] strike and after watching ‘Iron Man’ and the business it did, I think they want to see what they can get from Marvel and its more directed approach.”

Goyer said that he believes some decision-makers at Warner Bros. were surprised while watching the success of “Iron Man” since the armored avenger is, essentially, a second-tier comics character, but was brought to the screen with substantial commercial vigor. The Warner focus for decades has been bringing Superman and Batman to the screen again and again and now the Marvel model has some executives looking at the deep roster of characters still waiting for their first bite at the cinematic apple.

-- Geoff Boucher

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