Millar talks Supes...again

You can read Mark Millar's interview at Den of Geek. Here's an excerpt though:

I genuinely had waited since 1987, Superman 4; buying magazines, checking it out online when the internet came along, just praying for a Superman movie. And managing to snare a draft of the Tim Burton scripts, and probably versions people haven’t even bothered looking at. I’ve probably read them all. So I was really anticipating this Superman movie. In the end it just sort of came out and didn’t do all that well, and it sort of deflated me on Superman; it took me a couple of years to get back into it again. Obviously Superman has a huge place in my heart.

The ‘director’ phoned me about a month ago, and said ‘Look, I’ve got absolutely no authorisation from Warner Brothers, because Warners aren’t looking in particular, but I want to have all my soldiers lined up, just in case.” He said “I want to do a complete reboot of the Superman franchise”. He said “I know you’ve got a huge passion for it and the buzz on Wanted is great”. I think it was the week before Wanted opened. He said “I’d just like you to be a part of it. I think there’d be a really good fan reaction, because people have said they’d like to see what you’d do with it. And I’d just like you to be part of the team. Are you interested?"

Millar also predicts a bust in 2014.

How much longer do you think this incredible surge of popularity for superhero movies can continue?

I think probably six years. I think I said to you that I’m very interested in patterns, and a few years back I worked it out on a sine-graph. It was back in the mid-nineties, when everyone was losing their jobs – remember than in 1993-94 the industry halved it’s size, and then halved it’s size again the following year. Everybody was going ‘Oh my God, it’s the end of comics!’. But I just remembered the interview I’d read with Denny O’Neill the year before, and Denny O’Neill was saying in the 1980s that we could never have anticipated the graphic novel boom, because back in the seventies we were all losing our jobs. That got me really interested so what I did was to look at sales figures going across about six decades, and saw that patterns, which describes a peak in the forties, a trough in the fifties, a peak in the sixties...

It’s like any other economic cycle; there’s booms and there’s busts. And I remember just comforting myself in the nineties by thinking ‘You know what? We’re all skint right now, nobody can get any work, but in ten years’ time it’s going to be great!’. And I remember saying this to my friends. I hadn’t really had my break yet, so they must have thought I was a lunatic. I was saying I thought it was going to be really brilliant.

But I couldn’t really have anticipated guys like myself or Frank Miller holding onto the copyrights on things and getting lots of money from the movies and that kind of thing, but I just knew something great was going to happen. And this is it. But I think the next bust will probably happen around 2014, just as it happened in 1994. And that kind of ties in with the slate of movies that are coming up. I think we’re nowhere near the doom yet, I think it’s still building.

But you’ve got to think that by 2011 the Avengers movie will be out, and that’s going to be huge. And then 2013 I think is going to be the absolute apex of it. There’s going to be the Justice League movie, you’ll have Avengers 2, a new Superman franchise up and running...saturation! You’re going to be on Spiderman 5...and then I think it will all crash after that.