Interview: DC Comics VP Gregory Noveck
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Fanboy website voicesfromkrypton.com (just kidding guys) scored an interview with a VP at DC Comics which is actually a pretty good read if you're interested in how they see things from the comic-side of film adaptation. I skimmed through it and I'm left with the impression that Noveck doesn't really understand the film business, and what he does know and understand comes mostly from common misconceptions concerning industry culture.
The man may really know the comic business, but he misses the mark otherwise. The interviewer who apparently preferred to go by an alias rather than his real name asks what Noveck thinks about casting rumors for the upcoming Justice League of America, which is essentially just a fanboy's wet dream where every major hero from the DC Comics' universe is thrown together in a single issue to fight evil as an army of some sort.
Neither Christian Bale nor Brandon Routh will be in Justice League to play their respective characters, which has irked some and confused others. While I thought that Noveck might perhaps have some unique insight into why this path was taken, his only apparently opinion is that it'd be "rude" and "confusing" ask a director to accommodate a character from another directors film, to have to deal with that characters style that originated under somebody else.
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I read that. The idea that a character is shaped by a director rather than, say, the script perhaps, nearly sent me right through the floor. Perhaps even more ludicrous is the thought that one director cares about what some other director did in some other film they had nothing to do with, and would feel compelled to respect any stylistic differences from another film in their own.
I sincerely hope these comic guys keep their nose out of film development. I know at least one of them who isn't even with the comic company anymore has wormed his way as a producer into practically every adaptation from a given comic company over the past few years and is actually pushing for creative changes in this films as if he were somehow qualified to do that.
The many reasons why this is a bad idea are well beyond the scope of this post, but it can be fairly well summed up as: the comic medium is not the film medium, and: comic fans are not movie fans.
Link: Voices from Krypton
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