Ava DuVernay To Helm Superhero Movie Based On Comic By Jewish ‘Captain America’ Creator
I don’t know much about superhero movies, but I do know that if the brilliant director Ava DuVernay is going to direct a DC movie based on comics by Jack Kirby, the Jewish artist who created Captain America, that means we’re all going to see a superhero movie.
Fresh off directing the major undertaking “A Wrinkle In Time,” starring little-known actresses like Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, DuVernay has signed with Warner Bros. and DC Comics to direct an adaptation of “The New Gods,” a comic book by Jack Kirby. Kirby, of course, was the Jewish comic book creator, born Jacob Kurtzberg, who gave the world such characters as Captain America (in collaboration with Joe Simon) and with Stan Lee (another Jew!) the world of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and the X-Men. For DuVernay, this will be a second movie with a budget topping $100 million, following “A Wrinkle In Time.” It also makes DuVernay only the second woman after Patti Jenkins of “Wonder Woman” to direct a DC movie, which is funny because by my conservative estimate DC has made 70,000 movies.
Ava DuVernay and Patti Jenkins. New gods, indeed.
Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO