Nearly four years on since comic book behemoth Mark Millar first announced a partnership with Netflix to bring his page creations to the big screen, the streaming service is readying its first Millarworld offering: Jupiter’s Legacy, a sprawling superhero epic with an almost limitless ambition. Like Watchmen, it spans multiple generations of crime-fighters – though here, actual superpowers abound, as a younger crew of heroes attempt to live up to the precedent set by their super-parents. And, as you’d expect from Millar, it’s ultra-violent, packed with twists, and from someone who knows traditional superhero mythology inside-out. As the creator himself describes it to Empire in the new issue, it’s “part-2001, part-Avengers, part-Godfather II”.
Here's an exclusive look at Josh Duhamel’s Sheldon Sampson, aka The Utopian, taking on Tyler Mane’s villainous Blackstar.
While there have been huge superhero stories on screen, from the epic double-bill of Infinity War and Endgame, to this week’s mammoth four-hour Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Millar promises a tale with a near-mind-boggling scope and scale. “It’s a 50-year story self-contained inside one franchise,” he tells Empire. “It’s got a cast of 50 or 60 super-characters. The story starts in 1929 and runs until the end of time. It runs through all time and space and explains the mystery of human existence, all tied into a superhero story.”
As huge as it all sounds, Millar says Netflix never raised any concerns about needing to scale back. “There hasn’t been one conversation where someone said, ‘Can we make that explosion slightly smaller?’,” he says. “Ambitious ideas are being rewarded.”
Read Empire’s full Jupiter’s Legacy story in the upcoming The Falcon And The Winter Soldier issue, on sale Thursday 18 March and available to pre-order online here. The first series of Jupiter’s Legacy is due to arrive in full on Netflix on 7 May.