Midnight Special filmmaker Jeff Nichols has been talking about why he turned down the forthcoming DC superhero movie Aquaman. Nichols, who made the superb Midnight Special with Warner Bros, who also put together the DC movies, explained to Screen Crush on his decision to stay away from the huge movie starring Jason Momoa, which is set for release in 2018.
“The trick with Midnight Special is even though it was made at the studio, [Warner Bros] gave me a lot of control over the process”, he said. “And I don’t just mean control over final cut, but it felt like we were making one of my movies. I had my team. I had my family there. My crew. We made the movie we all wanted to make. With the DC universe, so many parts of it had been activated and so many decisions had already been made that it felt more and more – and Warner Bros. agreed – that it was me trying to jump on a moving train”.
Jeff Nichols, centre at the ‘Midnight Special’ press conference in Berlin,
Nichols continued to say that “the decisions that Zack [Snyder] is going to make in Batman V Superman, those all connect to things that are going to happen in Justice League and all that. And I was a huge comic book nerd, so I know all these characters and they all need to be beautifully webbed together. I was just far enough on the outside that I could develop things in a vacuum all day long but it wasn’t going to line up with everything they had planned”.
I can’t help but wonder just how good a Jeff Nichols directed Aquaman movie would have been though. It would have been quite something. The next Nichols movie will be called Loving, which is now in-production for a 2017 release. Read more about that over here.
Midnight Special is released in April (read our review here) while Aquaman is slated for a July, 2018 release. James Wan will tackle the stand-alone movie as soon as he wraps up work on The Conjuring 2.
More news as we get it.
