With ‘Maze Runner’ director Wes Ball, the newbie boom continues

Untested directors have been the trend on big Hollywood movies for a while. They offer to producers and executives the appeal of “new blood” — and, not insignificantly, the lure of budget-friendliness and/or malleability. In an era when a movie’s brand is as important a selling point as any directorial flourish, who needs an expensive filmmaker with a greater propensity for pushback when a first-timer can get results?

And results are what they’ve gotten. Many of the neophytes’ movies have indeed turned into solid box-office performers. Over the weekend Wes Ball became the latest newbie to reach base. The first-time feature filmmaker guided the dystopian young-adult adventure “The Maze Runner” to the top of the box office, as the film took in an estimated $32.5 million.

This comes only a few years after Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez, known previously for just a (well-regarded) short, took the reins of the Sam Raimi-produced “Evil Dead” remake. Josh Trank made the jump from a short titled “Stabbing at Leia’s” to the found-footage superhero pic “Chronicle.” Both movies also topped the box office on their opening weekends.

The newbie boom is happening in certain genres, and in this era, for a reason. When effects drive the action, it’s most important for studios to know a director can handle those. Robert Stromberg was a visual-effects guru who had worked on a lot of big productions but never directed a movie when producer Joe Roth handed him the keys to “Maleficient.” That worked out pretty well.

And if directors can make effects look good with just a few dollars at their disposal, imagine, the thinking goes, what they can do with a briefcase full of money. Gareth Edwards showed his chops on the ultra-low-budget “Monsters,” and landed the job on Warner Bros.’ “Godzilla.”

Ball fits the category too. A Florida State film school alum with a professional background in graphics and visual effects, he was best known for the CG-animated short film “Ruin,” which has a similar post-apocalyptic vibe to “Maze Runner.” (Watch the short, which Fox also acquired, above right.)

Fox’s “Planet of the Apes” franchise has been especially adept at this — it’s taken directors of smaller movies such as Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves and allowed them to paint their sensibilities on a much bigger canvas.

Marvel has been practicing this for a while too. “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” helmers Anthony and Joe Russo were not first-time filmmakers when they took the chair for their latest projects, but they certainly were taking a big step up and over.

The Christopher Nolans and Bryan Singers of the world aren’t going away. And even sunny-eyed producers will acknowledge there’s a learning curve when a director goes from shooting a small movie on a tight schedule to working for studios on some of their biggest projects; there’s a reason that résumé and pecking order has existed in Hollywood as long as it has. Of course, pecking order doesn’t matter quite as much when the directorial style of a film isn’t the reason people are coming out to see it — e.g., Josh Boone, the relatively unknown director whose “The Fault in Our Stars” grossed over $300 million worldwide, in large part for the film’s name and stars.

Is all this a laudable sign of Hollywood’s willingness to bet on new talent or a sign that established auteurs matter less than ever? Maybe a little bit of both. It may not matter. Faced with cost-cutting pressures and an uncertain box office — and a generation of directors willing to do what it takes to get the job done — studios are picking up the Ball and running with it.

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