Mark Millar is certainly a busy man at the moment, with several Millarworld properties in various stages of development – including the currently-in-production Kick-Ass 2 and the forthcoming adaptation of The Secret Service from director Matthew Vaughn – while he’s also getting to grips with his new role as creative consultant on 20th Century Fox’s various Marvel properties. Still, he’s managed to find time to take part in a couple of recent interviews to discuss his plans for Fox’s upcoming superhero slate, which currently extends to the X-Men sequels The Wolverine and X-Men: Days of Future Past, along with the proposed Fantastic Four reboot from Chronicle director Josh Trank.
“Fox are thinking, ‘We’re sitting on some really awesome things here. There is another side of the Marvel Universe. Let’s try and get some cohesiveness going,‘” said Millar during the latest edition of The Empire Podcast (via ComicBookMovie). “So they brought me in to oversee that really. To meet with the writers and directors to suggest new ways we could take this stuff and new properties that could spin out of it… X-Men feels like a universe by itself; there’s so many characters and so many great potential spin-off characters. They asked me to come in and work out a plan, so unfortunately at this point I can’t get too specific. I DO have a three to four year plan of where things could go, but you know, I’ll be working with guys like Matthew Vaughn [who has since passed on directing duties on X-Men: Days of Future Past, with Bryan Singer his replacement] and Josh Trank and just figuring out how everything can work together and not contradict each other.”
Meanwhile, Millar also elaborated on the studio’s strategy to emulate Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe during a chat with ComicBookResources, explaining that he sees The Wolverine as the ‘starting point’ for Fox’s shared Marvel Universe, as well as touching upon potential future offerings: “You have to remember that Fox grabbed the X-Men back in the ’90s because it was the biggest franchise in the world. So X-Force or Cable or Deadpool – all these amazing characters are things we haven’t really gotten to yet. X-Force #1 was the second biggest book of all time behind Jim Lee’s X-Men #1, so there’s an immediate brand recognition to that stuff and a built in fanbase. You go to any convention in the world, and you’ll see 20 people dressed as Deadpool. In a lot of ways, these are Marvel’s coolest characters, so I want to remind people of that and build on what we already have. I think there’s a great foundation, and just from basic conversations, we’ve come up with ten movies we could do. These things cost $150 million each to make, so we have to pick and choose what we want to do.”
Originally published November 9, 2012. Updated November 6, 2019.
