I, Tonya‘s Craig Gillespie to direct the new Supergirl movie, which is pretty wild

In the now more-than-a-year since James Gunn and Peter Safran took over Warner Bros.’ DC Studios, it’s been kind of hard to get a read on which directions they’d be taking the battered and embattled superhero brand. After all, most of the attention on the duo’s post-DCEU output has been on Gunn’s own Superman (formerly Superman Legacy), which is a) more than a year out from release and b) probably going to come in for at least a bit of special treatment, since it’s being directed by one of the studio’s bosses. What’s not as clear is how the rest of the studio’s future output will be treated, and whether Gunn specifically—who went from cult movie favorite to internationally known name on the basis of making Marvel superhero movies that broke the Marvel superhero mold—would be cultivating unexpected talents, or charting a safer course.

Into that uncertainty comes the news that Craig Gillespie—whose unorthodox film career has charted a course between the Disney version of punk rock and a movie where Ryan Gosling falls in love with a sex doll—has been tapped to direct Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow. Gillespie, who’s probably still best known for his skewed biopic I, Tonya, joins a project that already features a script from writer Ana Nogueira, who’d previously been tapped to write a Supergirl movie based on the version of the character played by Sash Calle in The Flash—before everybody at DC Films appeared to collectively decide that they weren’t in the “acting like The Flash happened anymore” business. Still, Gunn and Safran liked Nogueira’s work on that first draft, and so tapped her to write the new version, now starring House Of The Dragon’s Milly Alcock.

The upshot of all this is that Gillespie, a director who can both color inside the lines (Cruella, his rather good Fright Night remake) and go wildly off-script in pursuit of his more lurid instincts (I, Tonya, his work on Hulu’s Pam & Tommy), is going to be an early test case for what Gunn and Safran will look like as producers and execs, rather than directors and writers, with their DC movie content. He’s certainly not the safe choice, suggesting a taste for weirdness in the pair’s picks that speaks to their own long and weird trips to the top of the studio heap.

[via THR]