The Flash,' The Most Challenging DC Film, Gets First-Time Director With History Of Writing Flops

It is not Seth Grahame-Smith’s fault that he has been hired by Warner Bros. /Time Warner TWX -1.43% to write and direct The Flash even though he has zero theatrical directorial experience. We all know how this song goes, with a relatively inexperienced white male filmmaker being handed a major franchise while female filmmakers and minority filmmakers with quantifiable resumes sit on the sidelines and wait for their bite at the apple. Yet if there is blame, it belongs to those who made the hire not the person who accepted the job. And with the season premiere of The Flash again about to show the world that DC Comics already has a practically perfect live-action incarnation of The Flash, it is ever more interesting that Warner Bros. has entrusted their trickiest property (because there is already a terrific version in existence that supplies everything you’d want in a Flash adaptation) to yet another mostly unproven, white male filmmaker with almost no quantifiable credits to his name. I hope he pulls it off.
What’s odd this time that the writer/director of The Flash has barely directed anything and has written two major features that were rejected by audiences. In this case, his experience argues against him getting a job writing and directing a big-budget film version of The Flash. It is of course our hope as fans of DC Comics and The Flash that he will do a decent job and produce a solid film alongside whatever David Ayers, James Wan, and Patty Jenkins have up their sleeves. But what stands out about this pick, especially right after Walt Disney DIS +0.00%/Marvel picked Taiki Waititi to helm Thor:  Ragnarok, is that Mr. Grahame-Smith hasn’t even been terribly successful at the things he is known for in the industry.
Seth Grahame-Smith has never directed anything beyond a few episodes of The Hard Times of RJ Berger in 2011 (he also wrote twenty episodes of said vulgar MTV show that he helped create along with David Katzenberg). I watched those two episodes yesterday. While they are “fine” for what they are, they are frankly less visually dynamic than any given episode of almost any Disney Channel sitcom (like Dog With A Blog, which also stars Beth Littleford as the matriarch). That’s not an insult, as the show is clearly following a specific low budget, dialogue-centric template, but it’s also not anything that shows off any kind of directorial verve.  I can only hope that the show’s bawdy adolescent male conquest fantasy mentality isn’t itself something we’ll see in The Flash.
In terms of his theatrical screenwriting, he adapted his own novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter into a 2012 feature film that received poor reviews and made just $116m worldwide on a $69m budget for 20th Century Fox . He also (along with John August) wrote the screenplay to Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, which received poor reviews and made $245m worldwide on a $150m budget. He did a rewrite on Fantastic Four, which isn’t going to help anyone feel better about this. He has also written a screenplay to a theoretical Beetlejuice 2 and is penning the upcoming LEGO Batman Movie. Beyond that, he was a cinematographer on a few minor things in the late 1990′s and most of his would-be producing credits are on theoretical films (Beetlejuice 2,  Ninjago, the Gremlins and It remakes) that might not actually get made.