Mark Millar has certainly ended up being potentially the right guy in the right place when it comes to Hollywood. While nobody talks up his work like he does, he’s got an interesting track record to work with and his new position as the shepherd for the Marvel Comics properties at Fox certainly has a lot of potential. With his good working relationship with Fox itself and his years spent working with Marvel on the comics side, he should be able to facilitate things well while also having an understanding that most Fox Marvel films have fallen on – really understanding the characters and how they should translate to the big screen. With his work on the Ultimates being the template for what Marvel Studios has done, Fox made what looks to be a smart move in bringing him in to be a Kevin Feige-like person. The Empire Podcast spent some time with him recently and had some interesting reveals.
“It came about for a couple of reasons. One of my friends Joe Carnahan was saying to them (FOX) Mark was involved with Marvel for years and a lot of the stuff that was used in The Avengers movie, the source material was a book I’d done called The Ultimates. He said, look Mark could be a really good resource for you and the guys at Fox had read The Ultimates and they said if he can bring that same sort of thing to the Fox lane of Marvel characters that could be really beneficial.
“So 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.’ 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.
“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.
“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.”
Millar also spoke recently to Comic Book Resources and had some interesting things to say on where they want to go with things and why fans should be glad that Disney doesn’t have all of the properties under one roof:
“I felt like ‘Iron Man’ was really the beginning of something for the Marvel Studios movies,” he said, “and ‘The Wolverine’ will be a similar starting point to build a lot off of for the Fox movies.”
According to Millar, there are at least ten Marvel movies that Fox is considering at the moment — an impressive number, considering the studio only owns characters rooted in the “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four” universes. But Millar sees endless potential in the stories and characters they can tell on the silver screen.
“X-Force or Cable or Deadpool — all these amazing characters are things we haven’t really gotten to yet,” he explained. “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.”
Ask most Marvel fans and they’ll tell you that they would prefer to have every single character at the House of Ideas under one roof, but Millar said that there’s a downside to Disney having all of the toys.
“People keep saying that they want to see all of the Marvel Universe in one place, but what I try to explain to them is that if Marvel Studios had the rights to all the stuff set up at other studios, they wouldn’t have the money to make all the other movies they’re making,” he said. “You wouldn’t be getting ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ or ‘Ant-Man’ because those slots would be filled up with a Wolverine movie or a Fantastic Four movie. There’s only a finite amount of movies they can make.”
