The actor who played the central character in Warner Bros. Pictures' massive, eight-movie adaptation of J.K. Rowling's best-selling Harry Potter book series, Daniel Radcliffe has helped the studio rake in nearly $8 billion in ticket sales and another $7 billion in home video sales and related merchandise.
Surely that amount of money has earned Radcliffe no small amount of goodwill with Warners, but has it earned him enough for the studio to let him take a stab at one of their coveted superhero roles? In a recent interview, the former "boy wizard" revealed that he wants to star in a superhero movie and that one of the characters he feels "really passionate about" is part of the pantheon of DC Comics characters owned by Warner Bros.
There’s not many superheroes left who haven’t been done but I don’t think anyone’s done The Flash yet.
That’s one I’d probably have a go at but I don’t have any immediate plans. There are lots of offers around, but I want to do something that I’m really passionate about.
Radcliffe's correct in assuming that no one has "done" the Flash yet, at least not as a major motion picture — CBS aired 22 episodes of The Flash TV series in the early '90s, which starred John Wesley Shipp as forensic scientist-turned-scarlett speedster Barry Allen — but Warner Bros. has been developing a live-action adaptation of the character since at least 2008. In fact, Warners president Jeff Robinov revealed last August that a "solid script" for The Flash movie written by Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim is already in the can, but the studio is taking it slow in the wake of Green Lantern's failure to impress at the box office.
With Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy wrapping up with the release of The Dark Knight Rises this summer, and the future of the Superman franchise in doubt beyond The Man of Steel because of copyright disputes, what Warners needs right now is a new superhero tentpole franchise. But, whether Radcliffe has the "magic" to support a franchise not based on the Harry Potter books remains to be seen.
