One of the best things about Mark Millar being name Chief Creative Consultant role for all of Fox’s Marvel properties is that he loves to talk. And when he talks, he is usually giving juicy tidbits of information as a means of promoting himself and the things he does.
Case in point: his recent interview for the podcast of the British film magazine, Empire (which the folks at SuperheroHype were nice enough to partially transcribe). In it, he describes what his job duties entail and what he expects to see from the Fox’s Marvel properties.
One of Millar’s primary duties will be to expand the line:
So they brought me in to oversee that really. To work with the writers and directors to suggest new ways we could take this stuff and new properties that could spin out of it because the X-Men alone feels like a universe of itself. There’s so many characters in there and so many great potential spin-off characters.
Fox has been doing fairly well with spinning off films from its X-Men film franchise already, with the Wolverine films and X-Men: First Class tying into that mythology. Millar’s job will then probably be getting dormant or slow-moving mutant projects such as Deadpool, Gambit and New Mutants up and running. In addition, he will probably be looking for new films from other characters from the movies. Let’s hope that he shows more restraint than the comic arm of Marvel did, as anyone who has ever been an X-Man has had one or more series to their own (And that is only a slight exaggeration).
One presumes Millar will also be trying to wring as many spin-off possibilities out of the Fantastic Four franchise, but that might be a bit harder because most of the properties that spun out of the comic book (Black Panther, Inhumans) are owned by Marvel Studios.
Millar also is tasked with having both of Fox’s Marvel licenses play well together:
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 and Josh Trank, who’s the new director on Fantastic Four, and just figuring out how everything can work together and not contradict each other. But I also don’t want to make it too much of a mess either, with everyone showing up in everyone else’s films.
While this does not mean that Wolverine will be taking a swipe at Ben Grimm’s face, it appears nothing in either franchise will go against the other. It seems to me that if they can find a way for the properties to intermingle in a non-awkward way (like say Reed and Sue Richards son being born a mutant), they’ll pursue it. But at the very least, it will be clear that the X-Men and the Fantastic Four live in the same world on the same planet.
But what about a sense of continuity with the Marvel Studios’ films?:
What my dream is, as a fan, is that when you go and see any Marvel movie that it feels as if they’re all taking place in the one universe like when you pick up a Marvel comic. You should feel as if they’re all taking place in one big kind of cohesive place.
This could be just a continuing of the above thought, but it could also be Millar stating that the Fox Marvel films will have the same “non-contradiction” viewpoint towards the Marvel Studios films. Again, we probably won’t be seeing Wolverine join the Avengers, or Tony Stark and Bruce Banner help Reed Richards with a particularly prickly scientific problem, the Fox films will be more similar in tone to the Marvel Studio films, and fans will have nothing to lead them to believe they don not all reside in the same version of New York City.
