When Bryan Singer stands out of the director’s chair and opts to produce instead, who you gonna call? Mark Millar -- or so it would seem. By way of Bleeding Cool, here’s a post he made on the Millarworld messageboard asserting that Fox approached him for an X-MEN 4 dance and he gave them the cold shoulder. I’ll have to agree with Rich Johnston and call baloney here, given Millar's history of using hoaxes to create buzz for his own work. Just last week, h e posted a doctored photo of a non-existent NEMESIS billboard and claimed it was real. It was so effective, some posters still believed it was real even after we said it was a hoax.
As much buzz as there is behind KICK-ASS and Millar’s properties, in general, I really doubt Fox would offer a $200 million project to a first time director, no matter how good his literary credentials are. Sure, Frank Miller got to direct THE SPIRIT, which had a big chunk of change behind it, but that was only after SIN CITY the movie was such a runaway smash. Warner Bros. even had the Wachowski Brothers (former comics writers, themselves) direct the low-budget thriller BOUND basically as a test to see if they could handle directing a movie before they let them make THE MATRIX. Fox might go to Millar after his S cottish superhero movie comes out, but I doubt they would before. I’d really expect them to go Matthew Vaughn, actually, seeing as how they already had him involved in making X3 at one point.
So why put this out there? I think Millar’s wants to draw some attention to the broader scheme of his Millarworld creator-owned comics - - that is, that he’s creating the next generation of superheroes. Readers who pick up NEMESIS or this unnamed superhero book with Leinil Francis Yu are going to get an unpredictable story that’s exactly how Millar wants it to be. He wanted to do it so bad, he even turned down a chance to direct a huge franchise movie. You see what I’m saying?
Anyway, the full post is below. Dissect it through your own lens. I suppose it’d be a good discussion to speculate on what a Millar-directed X-MEN movie would look like. Do you suppose it’d resemble his outrageous ULTIMATE X-MEN run?
Fox just offered me X-Men 4… but I turned it down.
Why? I love the X-Men movies. The exec at Fox also seemed like a really smart guy who knows exactly what worked and didn’t work about the earlier trilogy. He has an abiding love for the comics and knew my work better than I did. I have no doubt he’s going to put together an amazing movie here because the people he’s talking about behind the camera are all friends and heroes of mine. He also offered me massive scope with the story and I have an idea I really like, something that takes the franchise in a really fresh direction.
But you know what?
I’m having so much fun creating my own characters and enjoying the control this gives you over the comic-books and the movies that handling an established franchise eems odd to me now. It’s tempting, SO tempting for a guy who’s been a fanboy as long as he can remember, but I need to stick to my guns. I want to create the NEXT generation of superheroes over the next few years and going back would, I think, be a mistake.
Vaughn is being offered everything you can imagine too in the wake of Kick-Ass, but we both agreed that keeping complete control is what made Kick-Ass such an amazing experience for both of us. Six big producers have now come forward for Nemesis (I’ve always said I’m holding off until April 17th before I let CAA take this out) and Vaughn and I already have our next movie planned out, based on a book I’m doing with Leinil Francis Yu in September.
But it’s still the friggin’ X-Men, guys. Have I gone mad? Was it nuts to turn this down?
-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Comics and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia. Watch out for the HYBRID BASTARDS! hardcover collection this March - - available for pre-order now on Amazon.com.
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