Progress is Slow on Live-Action Flash Film

Screenwriter Marc Guggenheim discusses his involvement with the DC comic book adaptation, as well as his experience on the Green Lantern movie set and progress on the sequel.

During a recent interview with Newsarama, veteran scribe and comics author Marc Guggenheim shared a few details about the slow comics-to-film transition for The Flash; of which he and Greg Berlanti (who were both involved with Martin Campbell's Green Lantern have been hired to produce treatments for:

"We've turned in the treatment for Flash..I think it's very hard to talk about these characters in a closed-ended, sort of non-sequel way especially characters like The Flash and Green Lantern, which have such rich, long histories. You can't help but talk about the characters and go, 'Oh, I really want to do the movie where we get to this moment, or that moment.' So you're always talking in terms of sequels, but no, nothing's planned. We haven't even written the script yet for The Flash. It's very much one step at a time for The Flash."

Green Lantern is scheduled for theatrical release June 17th, 2010, and many DC Comics fans have wondered whether the Scarlet Speedster may make a cameo appearance in the film; or vise versa in The Flash.

"I actually can't confirm that. I wish I could. The truth is, those sort of decisions get made high above my pay grade. I have all sorts of my own ideas and things I would like to see or like to do. And I'm certainly a voice in favor of cameos and Easter eggs and trying to tie the movies together. But you really have to talk to DC about that."

Regarding his visit to the New Orleans set of Green Lantern, Guggenheim had nothing but praise for the production crew involved with bringing the ring-slinging cosmic hero to the silver screen:

"I went down to New Orleans two months ago to see some of the Green Lantern filming, and I got to see a whole bunch of things in connection with the movie. In all honesty, I was completely blown away. I don't think it dawned on me how huge this movie would be until I went down to New Orleans and really saw everything that I saw. It was incredibly eye-opening. I was really rendered speechless. There's just no way for me to put it to words, just how huge this movie is going to be."

Though the film is still in the early stages of post-production, rumors originating at LatinoReview.com pegged it's sequels already in the planning stages; with tentative, back-to-back filming beginning next Spring. Guggenheim reports that Green Lantern 2 is still in it's infancy, and work on the third film of the proposed trilogy is still a ways away:

"I think where that came out of was, when Greg Berlanti originally pitched the movie to Warner Bros., he pitched three movies. So there's always been, and he's said this publicly, that there's always been enough story for a trilogy. The scope of the character and the character's world requires that. But we're really just focusing on the treatment for Green Lantern 2.

"It would be a quality problem to have, to think about a third. But one step at a time..and I know that everyone involved in the production of the movie is just focusing on completing the first film."