Matthew Vaughn’s new film Kick-Ass (of which Empire has seen quite a bit; and it more than lives up to the title, by the way) may not be out for a while, but clearly he enjoyed the experience of working with Mark Millar, on whose comic the film is based - because he’s about to do it again.
Vaughn and his Marv Films partner, Krys Thykier, have just picked up the rights to Millar’s multi-part series, American Jesus, which tells the story of the return of Jesus Christ (in teenaged form as an all-American boy), and his subsequent battle with the Anti Christ - but with Millar’s usual adult, abrasive yet wonderfully pulpy touch applied.
As with Kick-Ass, the movie will be financed independently, which will allow Vaughn to stick to his guns in adapting this difficult and sure-to-be-controversial material. We can hear the Daily Mail’s minions getting ready with the ‘Careful Now’ and ‘Down with this sort of thing’ placards even now.
Millar’s been talking about making this movie with Vaughn for the last few months, but he claimed that the duo were holding off until he had finished work on the second part of the **American Jesus **trilogy. The first part, Chosen, was published in 2004, and it’s taken Millar, a busy man at the best of times, almost five years to get round to finishing the next three-issue instalment, entitled The Resurrection.
That will be published in the autumn. In the meantime, very little is known about Vaughn’s plans for American Jesus. We’d expect his writing partner, Jane Goldman, to come on board and, given how quickly **Kick-Ass **came together, it could even go before the cameras later this year.