“I find it dull”: why David Fincher will never make a superhero movie
There are many high-profile auteurs who would never even consider the idea of making a studio-backed blockbuster. However, history has shown that David Fincher definitely isn’t one of them, even if he hasn’t actually gotten around to directing one of them yet.
Of course, he made his feature-length debut on a big-budget sequel rooted in a recognisable franchise. Still, seeing as he’s spent the last 30 years distancing himself as far away from the turgid Alien 3 as possible, it wouldn’t be fair to include the sci-fi flick as having checked the filmmaker’s box for working in that particular sandbox.
He’s come mighty close on a number of occasions, though, but as of yet, he’s never taken that plunge. It may not happen for a long time, if at all, either, considering his exclusive development deal with Netflix and the streaming service’s dearth of world-renowned, easily marketable, and established properties.
Fincher was handpicked by Tom Cruise to helm Mission: Impossible III and spent over a year developing the espionage epic, but he vacated on account of creative disagreements with the studio. Cruise cited how “the people who are financing them are experts on how they should be made and what they should be” as one of the major reasons behind his departure. He wanted a Fincher-directed sequel, whereas it sounds as if Paramount wanted a straightforward sequel that just so happened to have a top-tier filmmaker.
The exact same thing happened on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with Fincher outlining an enticing vision for the fantastical remake that would have been his version of The Empire Strikes Back in an ideal world. Eventually, the terms and conditions outlined by Disney instigated his exit from another massive-scale movie.
He was briefly attached to tackle a remake of Cleopatra with Angelina Jolie in the lead role, met with Kathleen Kennedy about potentially taking the reins on one of the Star Wars sequels, and signed on for regular collaborator Brad Pitt’s World War Z sequel, but none of the three happened. At this rate, it feels like Fincher is never going to scratch an itch he’s clearly held for the longest time, but if he does, don’t expect it to happen in a superhero movie.
In the late 1990s, Fincher was working alongside David S. Goyer on the screenplay for Blade with the intention of directing the Wesley Snipes vehicle, but that fell apart. That tends to be the case whenever the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker finds himself within close proximity to an IP with the potential to make serious bank at the box office.
He was additionally one of the many names to flirt with Spider-Man during the decades the friendly neighbourhood web-slinger spent trying to escape development hell. Still, despite pitching Sony with his ideas for how to approach the story, his disinterest in telling Peter Parker’s origin story proved a bridge too far.
“They weren’t fucking interested,” he said of his take that didn’t feature the high school student being bitten by a radioactive spider. “And I get it. They were like, ‘Why would you want to eviscerate the origin story?’ I was like, ‘Because it’s dumb?'” Just like that, he was out of the picture, but not without conceding how “there’s a lot of things I can do in my life, and that’s just not one of them” in regards to the genre.
Fincher is apathetic to the medium at large, outlining to Playboy why he’s never going to be convinced that anchoring a superhero story from behind the camera is worth the time and effort. “I find it dull,” he explained of the fairly predictable path the majority of those projects tend to follow. “I like to anticipate the energy of a movie audience that’s waiting for the curtain to come up and thinking, ‘Well, one thing we don’t know about this guy is that we don’t know how bad it can get.'”
Graphic novels are an entirely different matter, however, seeing as The Killer was based on writer Alexis Nolent and illustrator Luc Jacamon’s series of the same name. It still didn’t prevent Fincher from picking up and then dropping an adaptation of Frank Miller’s Hard Boiled, Brian Michael Bendis’ Torso, and Charles Burns’ Black Hole at various points.
