James Gunn’s DCU looks like it will doing things its own way, reviving the comic book universe and attempting to make it the success that its previous iteration failed to become. According to director James Mangold, who will be helming the new Swamp Thing movie, that looks to include some potential changes to the origins of some characters.
Swamp Thing has been adapted previously as both movies and TV shows, and the origin of the plant-based character have always been roughly the same. That origin would be of a scientist who is caught in a laboratory explosion engineered by the character that usually becomes the villain of the story, and subsequently finds himself turning into the big green creature. However, it looks like Mangold is planning on making a little change to this when his version of Swamp Thing arrives. He told the Happy Sad Confused podcast:
“But to me, the idea of making kind of almost a kind of noir mystery horror film about a guy who wakes up and he’s this thing, and he’s… there’s this amnesiac quality of like “how did I get here and who did this to me.” So I’m envisioning a kind of horror noir film following a creature that can’t be seen trying to piece together from fragments of memory what happened and who did it.”
Changing Swamp Thing’s Origin Can Benefit the DCU.
Even though James Gunn and Peter Safran will be kicking off their run in charge of the DCU with the iconic Superman, Gunn does favor the more obscure characters that have a lot of room to play around with. Messing with the likes of Batman or Superman is going to end up alienating a lot of people, where are characters such as Swamp Thing have a dedicated but relatively small following and that means origin changes are not such a big deal.
Over the last decade, Marvel Studios have done this with many characters and storylines from their comic books in order to make things fit together in a way that works for the MCU storylines. If anyone is going to make those kind of decisions for DC, the James Gunn is probably the right person to do it. How successful it will be is something that will not be known for a few years yet, but it certainly cannot be less successful than the recent run of old DCEU movies.
The Flash is the latest DC movie to hit cinemas, and although early reviews called it one of the greatest superhero movies of all time, subsequent opinions have been more mixed, and its box office has been another smudge at the tail end of the DCEU. Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are still to be released this year, but currently the expectations on both of these have taken a bit of a hit following lukewarm response to the once-certain success of The Flash.
