James Mangold Shares He Plans To Incorporate ‘RoboCop’ And Frankenstein Themes Into His ‘Swamp Thing’ Movie

John F. Trent |

Jun 29, 2023

Director James Mangold provided some clues as to what moviegoers might expect for his upcoming Swamp Thing film hinting he will incorporate themes from RoboCop and Frankenstein.

The Swamp Thing film was announced as the last film on DC Studios CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran’s Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters slate.

In the initial announcement, Gunn described the film as a “very dark horror story and the origins of the monster who is Swamp Thing.”

He added, “And although it’s tonally outside the rest of the DCU, it will still feed into the rest of the stories.”

Mangold confirmed he was writing and directing the film while at Star Wars Celebration telling Collider, “The truth is, I’m writing both right now, and who knows what’s going to happen and what’s gonna blossom first or second? So there’s your thing, I’m doing Swamp Thing, there’s your scoop. It’s not a rumor, it’s happening. I put it online.”

Here’s @mang0ld revealing he’s writing both the #swampthing movie and his #StarWars movie during our red carpet interview at #StarWarsCelebration2023.

This is the first time he’s acknowledged he’s working on ‘Swamp Thing’ for #dc pic.twitter.com/HdTxdpZXJM

— Collider (@Collider) April 7, 2023

Now, in an interview with Josh Horowitz as part of his Happy Sad Confused show, Mangold shared more details about his vision for the film.

He said, “I’ve always been interested in doing a version of Frankenstein, basically, and yet, I feel like, ‘It’s Alive!’ has been done enough. But Swamp Thing always occurred to me as kind of this wonderful version of a kind of Frankenstein story, much in the way one of my favorite pop films of growing up, RoboCop, the original one was.

“This guy who just wakes up and he’s been turned into, he finds he’s become this kind of machine,” Mangold explained. “Also something that I was fascinated with with Logan, obviously, but to me the idea of making kind of almost a noir, mystery, horror film about a guy who wakes up and he’s this thing and there’s an amnesiac quality of like how did I get here and who did this to me.”

“So I’m envisioning a kind of horror, noir film following a creature that can’t be seen trying to piece together from fragments of memory what happened and who did it,” elaborated.

“And none of this runs counter to the Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson and all the great work that went on. I’m just framing it up in a new movie context, but that’s all they were exploring in these comics and so beautifully,” he noted.