The comic book writer who launched Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates (which influenced The Avengers movie) is now the Creative Consultant for the Marvel movie franchises controlled by Fox.
I wanted to share part of Mark Millar’s interview with SciFiNow about the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past. Bryan Singer returns to the X-Men franchise to direct the film based on the classic storyline set in the past and a dark future. Turning that beloved X-Men story into a film is ambitious.
“I know how it’s done, so I’m not worried. I’ve been in all these meetings and talked about it at length with everyone, and everything I hear sounds incredibly mainstream. It’s no more difficult than The Terminator, or whatever, there’s one element of time jump in it, but other than that it’s absolutely fine.”
One of the biggest challenges in turning comic book teams into big screen teams is screen time for fan favorite characters and deciding who to cut. Millar compared what he faced writing Ultimate X-Men with the development of the X-Men movies.
“I remember when I was writing Ultimate X-Men and people were saying ‘I want to see Gambit, I want to see Rogue, I want to see…’ Everybody has a list, and at first you think ‘I’m going to please everyone’ and then you realise you’re pleasing no-one by just throwing in ten second cameos, you know.
I think that was the major problem with that first Wolverine movie and X-Men 3. Bryan Singer did such an incredible job with that original movie – it’s quite like Star Wars in that there’s Episodes IV, V and VI, and we’ve got the Matthew Vaughn prequels, and I love that – I love the fact that it simplifies so well. X-Men in the Nineties was so convoluted in comic-book terms, and Bryan drove a knife through it and make it work and simplified the whole thing.
I’d like to have that same approach and if we are bringing in a character then it shouldn’t just be for a trailer or to get a picture up online, get people excited, it should actually have a point in the story.
The trick with that is to try and keep the cast relatively small so that you actually care about them.”
For the entire interview here’s the ScifFiNow link.
Bryan Singer has revealed Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman will reprise their roles. Kitty Pryde is critical to the original story but no word on it Kitty (played by Ellen Page in X3) will be in the film.
If you missed it – here’s my X-geek wish list for the next movie!
By Editor