Ava DuVernay to Direct DC’s ‘The New Gods’

Ava DuVernay has lined up her directorial follow-up to Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time.

The filmmaker will take on Warner Bros. and DC’s The New Gods, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The property is a creation of the late and legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, X-Men and other iconic heroes. 

The news comes a week after DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time earned $33 million at the box office in its opening weekend. With the movie, she became the first African-American woman to direct a film with a budget of more than $100 million. Prior to Wrinkle in Time, DuVernay first broke out as the helmer of the 2014 Martin Luther King Jr. feature Selma. She followed that up with the 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary 13th.

With The New Gods, DuVernay will be stepping into a rich world, just as she did with Wrinkle in Time. In the comics, The New Gods is part of the so-called “Fourth World Saga,” a series of four interconnected comic book series written and drawn by Kirby when he arrived at DC from rival Marvel in the early 1970s. Mixing social commentary, mythology and science fiction, it sees a war between two alien planets — New Genesis and Apokolips — arrive on Earth when the ruler of the dystopian Apokolips, Darkseid, discovers that humanity holds the key to the Anti-Life Equation, which allows its user to control all living beings in existence.

In addition to Kirby’s original titles, the Fourth World Saga has continued through a number of DC comic book series over the past four decades, as well as forming the basis for storylines in animated series and DC’s recent live-action movies; the villain Steppenwolf and the Mother Box from last year’s Justice League are both Kirby creations from the Fourth World Saga.

After the news of the movie broke, DuVernay paid tribute to Kirby, who died in 1994.

“Our dreams make us large.”

Thank you, #JackKirby. pic.twitter.com/gv3SiccV6a

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) March 15, 2018

DuVernay has considered jumping into the world of comic books before, having passed on directing Marvel’s Black Panther, based on the character Kirby created with Stan Lee in 1966. 

DuVernay is repped by CAA and Del Shaw.

March 15, 9:56 p.m. Updated with DuVernay’s tweet.