Former Flash Movie Directors Reveal Why They Exited the DC Project

The journey to the big screen has been a long and exhausting one for The Flash. The DC tentpole is hitting theaters this summer, but it spent years in various stages of production, with a number of popular directors joining the project, only to leave before seeing it through. Filmmakers like Rick Famuyiwa, Seth Grahame-Smith, and the duo of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley were all attached at one point or another. DC and Warner Bros. ultimately landed on IT director Andy Muschietti, and his version of the film is the one speeding into theaters this summer.

Ahead of the premiere of their new film, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Goldstein and Daley are opening up about why they decided to walk away from The Flash. While speaking to Variety at SXSW, the duo revealed that their departure simply came down to creative differences. They had a much smaller film in mind, while the studio and star Ezra Miller envisioned something significantly different.

"It was a number of creative differences that caused us at a certain point to decide that it was time to go," Daley explained.

"If we feel like the powers-that-be aren't excited about making the same movie as we are, we're not going to win that battle," Goldstein added. "And so it's better to cut your losses and get out of there."

"We pitched this idea of a ground-level superhero where it isn't entirely end-of-the-world stakes," Daley said of their version of The Flash. "He's just learning his powers and is also somewhat dysfunctional with his life. The more imperfect we can make a superhero, the better, because that's the inherent challenge: How do you give imperfection to someone that is, you know, physically perfect?"

Goldstein went on to say that the directors met with Miller about the movie and that they were "very bright," but eventually "it became clear that they didn't want to quite do the same thing as we did."

Muschietti's version of The Flash may be much bigger in scale than the previous iteration, but he and writer Christina Hodson kept a lot of the DNA from Goldstein and Daley's take.

"They took what we started and really ran with it and made it a very fun and emotional movie," Goldstein said. "We're really happy with how it all turned out."

The Flash is set to hit theaters on June 16th.