DC Films Update

Warner Bros. recently revealed that they secretly hired Geoff Johns, Marv Wolfman, and Grant Morrison (all three of which are prolific comic writers) last fall and have been using the three gurus (guri?) as their own personal team to pitch and develop new ideas for DC comics-based movies.

Badass. This sounds like the first step towards making some real progress against Marvel, and I'm glad that Warner Bros. hired these guys so long ago (even if they haven't told us until now). So which projects are they working on? Johns has a new treatment for a Flash movie (which he would produce and Dan Mazeau would write), but we don't know specifically what Wolfman and Morrison have been working on. I'm still hoping for Ryan Reynolds as The Flash (Wally West only), by the way.

DC has also thrown down the gauntlet and has issued an open call for treatments of an Adam Strange movie and an Aquaman feature. Leo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions is apparently attached to make the Aquaman flick, but that means that particular project is just one of approximately thirty the company has in development. Aquaman was featured heavily in an early season of HBO's "Entourage," where the fictional film broke the box office record for most money in a day. [Some news stations reported this as fact. Jackasses.]

Less famously, a television pilot for the CW was created under the working title of "Mercy Reef," featuring Justin Hartley as Aquaman with a "Smallville"-esque vibe. Coincidentally, Hartley went on to play the Green Arrow in "Smallville" and has been one of the high points of the show over the past few years. The pilot of the show was released on iTunes and actually became the number one most downloaded show at the time, but it wasn't picked up because the UPN and WB were in the process of forming The CW at the time and didn't want to take a chance on it with the fledgling network. I've embedded the trailer below (thanks to Slashfilm for the reminder).