‘Captain Marvel’ Finds Its Directors

‘Mississippi Grind’ filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck will helm the MCU stand-alone.

Mississippi Grind directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck will direct Brie Larson in Captain Marvel, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Nicole Perlman and Inside Out‘s Meg LeFauve wrote the script for the Marvel Studios film, which will be produced by Kevin Feige.

Boden and Fleck landed the job after an extensive search. Last summer, Marvel had whittled down its list of contenders to Niki Caro, Lesli Linka Glatter and Lorene Scafaria for the highly coveted helming gig, which will mark Marvel’s first female-centric tentpole. The studio was making the hiring of a woman a priority for the project.

But Marvel was very deliberate in its decision-making, conducting several rounds of additional searches. The studio met with Lucia Aniello, who directed the upcoming female-centric raunchy comedy Rough Night, earlier this year even as it continued sharpening the script. Fifty Shades of Grey‘s Sam Taylor-Johnson, who helmed the highest-grossing movie of all time for a female director, also is said to have been approached. Earlier in the process, Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Jennifer Yuh (Kung Fu Panda 2) had been in the mix.

Along with Mississippi Grind, Boden and Fleck’s other feature credits include the the 2006 Ryan Gosling starrer Half Nelson, which earned the actor his first Oscar nomination, though the bulk of the duo’s work has been done in TV, including episodes of The Affair and Billions.

The pair is not the first that Marvel has pulled from television. The Russo brothers, who directed the last two acclaimed Captain America films and will helm the next Avengers installment, Infinity War, were also filmmakers that did a bulk of their work on the small screen.

Captain Marvel has a release date of March 8, 2019, which will come nearly two years after DC releases its own female superhero movie, Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins (Warner Bros. opens the Gal Gadot starrer on June 2).

Boden and Fleck are repped by WME and Management 360.

Source: hollywoodreporter.com