Director Ridley Scott has been hard at work making his Alien prequels Prometheus and the upcoming Alien: Covenant for the last few years, even as the era of superhero movie universes has sprung up around him.
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Scott recently turned heads when he commented that he has little interest in directing a superhero movie, citing a lack of strong, compelling stories and themes as the reason he can’t get behind a superhero project. As many fans have echoed, that seems a bit unfair: the superhero genre is proving able to be as varied as cinema itself, and there are some good superhero movie projects that seem perfect for Sir Ridley Scott.
Here are 5 Superhero Movies Ridley Scott Should Direct.
DC’s New Gods
DC Comics’ New Gods have an extensive ‘sci-fi meets Shakespeare; history that is perfect for a director like Ridley Scott.
Detailing the split between Highfather and Darkseid and the coming of age of the sons they traded as a peace treaty (Orion and Miracle Man), the movie’s world-building of New Genesis and its dark reflection Apokolips is something Scott would likely find fascinating.
It’s also a standalone DC cosmic property that wouldn’t need to be bogged down by a lot of superhero tropes.
X-Force
A hard-R movie based on the X-Force vol. 3 series of the 2000s (or a mixture of all the books), the film would follow an X-Men team that uses lethal covert means of eliminating threats and securing mutantkind’s survival.
The appeal for Ridley Scott would be a film that steps over the superhero “non-reality” to exam what beings with deadly power would do in a “kill or be killed” world climate. The obvious parallels to real world issues would surely give him something substantive to work with. And some kick-ass action sequences to share with viewers.
The Question
This is the offbeat movie that DC Comics fans have wanted to see made for sometime, and if Ridley Scott wanted a more low key superhero movie that allowed him to get more cerebral than explosive, this would be it.
The film would chronicle the crime fighting of Vic Sage, a hard-nosed investigative reporter who dons a blank-faced mask of fake skin and solves his investigations with sometimes-brutal vigilante tactics.
As later incarnations of the character also included Zen-like philosophical parables about life, society and people, this would be The Counsellor-style superhero movie for Ridley Scott to sink his teeth into.
Venom & Carnage
Do we really need to go into why the director of Alien would be great for a dark and fear-inducing look at when Spider-Man themed alien symbiotes take hold of (name your preferred venom) and a sadistic serial killer?
It’s basically a perfect storm of everything fans want in a Ridley Scott movie.
Astro City
Getting away from the DC/Marvel dichotomy, Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is a great superhero deconstruction, giving life in a world of real superheroes a much more multi-faceted and complex depiction. Instead of the idealistic golden perspective of heroes vs. villains, Astro City paints a more well-rounded picture, telling of the superhero experience from the perspectives of heroes, villains, bystanders, and everyone in between.
It would be a film unlike anything that Ridley Scott has made, but since he feels so passionately about how superhero mythology is being portrayed in cinema, maybe he’s the perfect director to handle it!
