Directing duties on this summer’s DC release The Flash passed through a few hands before landing in the lap of IT’s Andy Muschietti. One duo tapped was the writer-director pairing of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley who are well-known for Spider-Man: Homecoming and the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Why it didn’t take them long to leave the DCEU is becoming clearer.

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Speaking with Variety at the SXSW Film Festival, the D&D directors explained it boiled down to creative differences with the studio, Warner Bros., and the star Ezra Miller. While the duo envisioned something smaller in scale and street level, the actor and the Hollywood conglomerate felt differently – possibly wanting a film more akin to the stakes and scale we are receiving in June.

“It was a number of creative differences that caused us at a certain point to decide that it was time to go,” Daley began. His partner Goldstein would add, “If we feel like the powers-that-be aren’t excited about making the same movie as we are, we’re not going to win that battle…so it’s better to cut your losses and get out of there.”

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Daley, describing their pitch, went on to say the idea was “of a ground-level superhero where it isn’t entirely end-of-the-world stakes…He’s just learning his powers and is also somewhat dysfunctional with his life. The more imperfect we can make a superhero, the better, because that’s the inherent challenge: How do you give imperfection to someone that is, you know, physically perfect?”

Using Miller’s preferred pronouns, Goldstein talked about a meeting he and Daley had with the actor. “They were intense and very bright. Later, it became clear that they didn’t want to quite do the same thing as we did,” he said. Ultimately, “they” – Miller and WB – didn’t opt for what Goldstein and Daley discussed and went bigger.

Miller would team up with Grant Morrison for another crack at drafting the script. That too went nowhere. Christina Hodson was soon hired to write the movie as it is now, going for a Flashpoint narrative that Muschietti called a “beautiful, human story.” 

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