Mark Millar – the Scottish writer behind a succession of cracking comics like The Ultimates, Marvel’s Civil War crossover, and Wanted – has had a bit of a breakthrough this year when it comes to the movies.
The movie version of Wanted, of course, did gangbusting business at the box office this year. And Matthew Vaughn is about to direct a movie version of his most recent work, Kick-Ass, with Nicolas Cage signed on to star.
But Millar, who wasn’t involved with the screenplay for Wanted and won’t be writing Kick-Ass for Vaughn (Vaughn and Jane Goldman have collaborated on that), has bigger fish to fry. Superfish, in fact. Well, Superman.
A massive Superman fan, Millar not only owns Christopher Reeve’s cape but, rather disturbingly, the stuffed corpse of the white cat that Supes rescues from a tree in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman The Movie. Oh, and as a writer, Millar’s Red Son – in which he reimagines the Man of Steel as a Communist hero – is one of the finest Superman tales in many a year.
Millar announced a while ago that he had tentative plans for a new Superman movie, dependent on the status of Bryan Singer’s The Man Of Steel, and today he confirmed to US TV channel G4 that it might yet happen.
“A director approached me about three months ago now. I had sort of given up on it,” says Millar. “[But] Superman is a huge deal to me. My friend knows this. He’s a really big director. He says that, look, the Man of Steel looks like it might not be happening. If it doesn’t happen, it’s been spoken about the possibility of me coming in. Would you like to write it?”
Millar’s response? Well, duh!
“I’ve had this plan for ten years of a big three-picture Superman thing. Like a big Lord of the Rings epic, starting over from scratch again. A seven-hour Superman story, hopefully one year after the other. If it works out, we could start shooting next summer.”
Of course, we’d like to see Singer return to Superman as well, but we have to admit that we’re intrigued by this, and by the identity of Millar’s mysterious director friend. We’re racking our brains to think of a director who could rank as a big deal, and whose slate is sufficiently clear enough to make this a go project starting next year. Is it Michael Bay? Paul Greengrass? Zack Snyder? Someone else? That guy who directed that thing that time?
If you have any ideas who it might be, let us know below.
And to hear more from Millar on this, the status of Kick-Ass and his new comic book, War Heroes, click here.