M. Night Shyamalan has revealed that he turned down both Marvel and DC when they asked him to direct superhero movies for their respective franchises, as he feared they’d compromise his unique style.
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Speaking to Yahoo! to promote his own superhero movie ‘Glass’, Shyamalan said “I want to make sure it’s right for everybody. I have a strong [filmmaking] accent. It’s very particular, and the best version of it is, to keep the accent. Are [Marvel and DC] movies a place for that? Or is it appropriate for that?”
Shyamalan cited ‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Hot Fuzz’ and ‘Baby Driver‘ director Edgar Wright as a filmmaker who was unable to impose his own style when working for Marvel.
Wright left Marvel’s ‘Ant Man’ during its production, and later told Variety: “I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie.”
“It’s not fair to [studios], because they want to make films in a certain language,” Shyamalan continued. “And what if I said ‘Hey, I’m going to do this 3-minute shot on the back of his head, and I also want to make them very dark, and I want his motivation to be really ambiguous, and I want to challenge the audience to make them super-uncomfortable’. I want [the studio] to be OK with those things.”
Shyamalan is responsible for acclaimed movies like ‘The Sixth Sense’, as well as some derided ones, such as the notoriously badly received ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender.’
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His new movie, ‘Glass’, features unused footage from its 2000 predecessor ‘Unbreakable’, and is the third in a trilogy that also includes 2016’s ‘Split’. Critics have been less than kind to the final entry in the series.