Comic book writer Mark Millar has announced that he will be directing a superhero movie next March. Thing is, he isn’t saying what superhero it is.
Millar made the ambiguous statement this weekend on his website, stating-
Bet you didn’t see THAT coming, laddies and lassies!
But this is one of several big surprises planned for next year and you’ll hear a bit more about this in February when we start to release details. What is it? Who is it about? Well, that’s all a secret for now, but I learned a lot from Kick-Ass and love having the same creative freedom I have with comics when I work in cinema. I never want to be a studio bitch and go in there pitching for them to love me. The closest I came to this was a couple of calls regarding Superman, but pretty much none of my plans ever revealed as I didn’t like the idea of anyone nicking them.
Similarly, I don’t like the idea of asking for funding and justifying scenes with the money-men so I’m doing what Matthew Vaughn did with Kick-Ass and just making it outside the system with private investors. The financing is all secured and the movie stands or falls on how good I can make it, doing what Matthew did and just selling it once completed.
As you can imagine, I couldn’t be more excited. More as it happens, but this might just beat out War Heroes and American Jesus as my follow-ups to the Wanted and Kick-Ass movies. Have two other pictures about to go into development (and Wanted and Kick-Ass 2, of course), but I think you need to scare the Hell out of yourself every once in a while and something totally new like directing should do the trick.
The big question: Are you allowed to direct without wearing a baseball cap? Is it the modern version of the 70s BEARD?
So what does this mean? I think that we can assume that since he is doing this film independently that it is probably not a DC or Marvel Comics characters, as they are all pretty much tied up with their various corporate entanglements. However, there’s not much in his work outside of the “Big Two” that would fall under the superhero umbrella. Of the two, Wanted was turned into a film last year and an adaptation of Kick Ass directed by Matthew Vaughn is currently in post production.
That leaves us with two possibilities- 1)Millar will be tackling another creator’s character, which doesn’t strike me as likely, or; 2) this superhero character may be an original creation of Millar’s who hasn’t appeared in a comic yet. This is definitely a story we’ll be keeping an eye on.
Millar has been recently flirting with the edges of Hollywood. In the summer of 2008, he made some noise about a take on Superman he wanted to pitch to the execs at Warner Brothers. Before that, he was one of several Marvel Comics writers who met with Jon Favreau to consult on the first Iron Man script.
