Why DC may be the place for Reeves

MICHAEL CAVNA

IT’S why we can expect Matt Reeves to say no – yet precisely why I hope he’ll say yes. “I’m always looking for a reason to say no when I’m approached about a big studio tent-pole,” Reeves told IndieWire in 2014, on the occasion of his successful big studio tent-pole Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Reeves is in early talks to direct the first solo Batman film of DC Comics’ Extended Universe (DCEU) era, after star Ben Affleck recently announced that he was ceding the director’s chair.

And it doesn’t get much more “tent- pole” than a massively budgeted piece of an extended universe that grosses billions worldwide.

But Reeves’s quote to IndieWire then continues: “Because your fear is, will you be consumed into the anonymous machine and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express.”

And that is why DC may be just the place for Reeves, who co-created TV’s Felicity with childhood friend JJ Abrams before continuing to grow as the deft director of Cloverfield, Let Me In and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Over at Marvel, Joss Whedon – director of the two Avengers films – has spoken of the creative constraints within the cinematic House of Ideas under Kevin Feige. Everything seems to be building to something.

At Disney, this build-out is occurring not just with Marvel, but also with Star Wars, as relaunched by Reeves’s childhood chum.

Yet the DCEU has an opening for creativity precisely because none of its films has achieved what The Force Awakens or The Avengers did. We will soon get Wonder Woman, and then Justice League, and things could begin to creatively calcify if both those films become defining works.

But at this moment, under such DCEU leaders as Geoff Johns, a Batman solo movie needs a specific and inspired point of view. WB/ DC should crave the sort of genre ingenuity that Reeves has so far shown he possesses in spades.

And as Reeves said in 2014, about his first Apes film: “They were looking for a point of view, and I was very lucky that they embraced mine.” – The Washington Post

Director Matt Reeves