In an interview with Newsarama about his current Marvel series, The Ultimate Avengers, the comic book writer was asked about how he feels seeing the current and upcoming Marvel Studios movies being heavily influenced by his and Bryan Hitch's series. Below are some of the main excerpts from the interview but to read the whole thing, follow the link at the bottom of the article!
"Bill Jemas phoned me after he saw the first Iron Man film and said, "they've just done Ultimate Iron Man." And I said, "what do you mean?" And he said, "Oh Tony Stark was never really like that before. He was a kind of suave, alcoholic billionaire. But that kind of craziness was really Ultimate Iron Man that they captured. And Jon Favreau said they were going for that kind of thing. And I just see it as very flattering. Obviously, we don't get any money for it or anything; it's just our take on a character. But to me, that's just fun."
"I loved doing the comic. So if they want to do any of that stuff as a movie, like Sam Jackson as Nick Fury like Bryan and I did in The Ultimates, then brilliant! I love it. Like, when we were doing The Ultimates, I said, "let's make Nick Fury a cool black guy." And Bryan said, "There's no cooler black guy in the world than Sam Jackson." And he was totally right. So that's what we did. We didn't think, "Oh, this will precipitate an Avengers movie." No, we just thought he was a cool black guy that we love."
"To be honest, I'm more interested in my own films really. I see the Iron Man films as a nice little nod. And the fan in me loves the fact they're making the movies and that something I did can contribute."
In Part Two of the interview, Millar also commented on his creator owned work recieving rapid movie adaptations and mentioned that he's planning a return to the Marvel Universe proper in the near future, "I'm definitely planning to do more company-owned stuff. I mean, I love doing all the movies, and we're setting up two new creator-owned things. I'm almost embarrassed when I'm talking about this, how quickly these things get made into films. I never actually planned them that way. I just like writing my comics."
"Once Ultimate Avengers is done, which won't be too long now, I'm going to get into the Marvel U proper again. I'm going to go meet the Marvel guys in a couple of months and talk to them about it. I have a big, big plan."
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