Speaking with
SciFi Now, Mark Millar, 20th Century Fox's creative consultant for the studio's upcoming Marvel adaptations, talks more about director Bryan Singer's highly anticipated return to the
X-Men universe,
Days Of Future Past. Millar praises Singer's prior work on the series with 2000's
X-Men and 2003's
X2: X-Men United, and says that the
First Class sequel is "ambitious", which shouldn't be surprising considering the source matterial.
"It’s incredibly exciting. Even just as a fan. The first X-Men really launched the wave of superhero movies we’ve been loving for the past decade after some horrific stuff in the Nineties so having him back in the world he started just feels right. X2, I think, is one of the greatest superhero movies ever made. The idea of this guy [Singer] being back in the fold and planning something as ambitious as this picture can only be good news."
Millar then expresses no worries in how the film is being handled, despite the heavy mythology.
"I think as long as it’s done right. 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. It’s hard for me to say without actually spoiling the movie, but [producer Matthew] Vaughn – the guy who made the $28 million Kick-Ass look like a $78 million movie, you know? – I completely trust him when it comes to stuff like that – he knows exactly what he’s doing, and Simon Kinberg [X-Men: The Last Stand, Sherlock Holmes writer] has actually done a phenomenal job on the screenplay with him so it’s worked out really well."
One of the most common complaints concerning some of the
X-Men films - specifically 2006's
X-Men: The Last Stand and 2009's
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - was their including far too many characters to properly tell the story. Millar agrees that that was the biggest problem with those two
X-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."
X-Men: Days Of Future Past stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman and Nicholas Hoult. The film is set to hit theaters July 18th, 2014. Additionally,
The Wolverine is scheduled for a July 26th release, while
Fantastic Four will arrive March 5th, 2015.
About The Author:
Christian, former CBM editor, movie watcher, music listener, comic nerd.
Follow on Twitter at @PaulRom95 for my current shenanigans.
Follow PaulRom on:
