20th Century Fox has brought on comics writer Mark Millar as a creative consultant to its Marvel properties.
Perhaps seeing the success that Marvel Studios (a child studio of Disney) has had in consolidating its properties into a single, shared ‘film universe’, Fox has decided that all future films based on their Marvel franchises should have a consistent vision. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the characters will all start working together, like the Marvel Studios Avengers films, but they will be at least in the same universe, which is a step up from their current complete disconnect.
To that end they’ve hired Mark Millar. Millar has been writing comics for years, and has worked on Marvel properties like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and X-Men, as well as having penned the best-selling Civil War series.
Lately, he’s been helping develop various comics into films, including Wanted and Kick-Ass – both of which turned out pretty well, if not very close to the source material.
Millar will serve as creative consultant on all future and current Marvel-based films at any of 20th Century Fox’s studios. Their Marvel film properties consist only of Fantastic Four and X-men. X-Men has two fully-realized franchises with films in production, and Fantastic Four is being rebooted with a new film which is currently in development with Josh Trank (Chronicle) at the helm.
“As someone who has spent his entire life obsessed with both comic-books and movies, this is essentially my dream gig as it’s a unique combination of both,” Millar explained.
“I spent ten years working at Marvel and am really happy with the work I did on the comic side of things so the idea of working with these characters now in a brand new medium is enormously exciting for me. I really like the Fox team, love this bold new direction they have for their franchises and am proud to be working alongside some of modern cinema’s biggest talents. James Mangold is incredible, Matthew Vaughn’s one of my closest pals and Josh Trank gave us, in my opinion, one of the greatest superhero movies of the last decade with Chronicle. The invitation to join this crew was maybe the coolest phone-call I’ve ever had.”
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely this will translate into 20th Century Fox actually working with Marvel Studios or Sony Pictures, who collectively own the remainder of Marvel’s film franchises. However, it will certainly be interesting to see if Warner Bros., who owns the majority of DC Comics’ film rights, ultimately makes a similar move.
