Ever since Dope director Rick Famuyiwa dropped out last year, Warner Bros. has been pretty cagey about who might end up directing Ezra Miller in its standalone Flash movie. Now, though, the studio has started floating some high-profile names to take over the film, with The Hollywood Reporter noting that Robert Zemeckis, Sam Raimi, and Matthew Vaughn have all taken meetings to potentially direct the speedster showcase.
Of the three, Vaughn seems like the easiest fit; he’s directed a number of superhero movies (Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class), and his Kingsman was a) a hit, and b) the sort of light action fare that might comfortably fit Barry Allen’s quick-moving antics. (Minus some of the head-popping gore, anyway.) Raimi’s a weirder choice; although his Spider-Man movies helped kick off the superhero movie boom, he hasn’t had a hit since 2004’s Spider-Man 2. (That being said, his signature first-person POV shots seem like a natural fit for zooming around Central City.)
According to THR, though, Zemeckis is the frontrunner; his love of big technical showpieces—Forrest Gump, The Polar Express, the plane crash sequence in Flight—making him a squint-and-it-makes-sense fit for a movie that will live or die by how it captures The Flash’s fast-forwarded action. That being said, it’s been a minute since Zemeckis successfully operated in big blockbuster territory, with recent films like Allied and The Walk making less-than-superheroic impacts.
Of course, it’s always possible that this is just a smokescreen, and that Warner Bros. just brought in a trio of recognizable directors to build up fresh buzz for a would-be tentpole that’s fallen to the wayside. We’ll know more if and when the studio actually names a director for The Flash, instead of just flirting with various famous candidates for the job.