Ah – so much for Kick-Ass’ DVD needing my help to get a sequel!
Mark Millar (note: a compulsive bullshitter, but whatever) has told Richard Bacon on Radio 5 Live that enough U.S. Blu-ray/DVD’s of Kick-Ass have been sold to greenlight a sequel! The news comes a week before they street in the U.K.
Millar said;
The estimate is [Kick-Ass] will do 100 to 150 million on DVD based on the American sales, you know, so it’ll end up making a quarter of a billion on a 28 million investment. So It should be okay. So the sequel’s greenlit, we can go ahead and do the follow up now, you know. The first made so much compared to what it cost it would be crazy not to.
Though we should always remain skeptical when Millar announces something (as he seems to be the least informed source on his own projects!!) and it’s worth reminding ourselves that his Kick-Ass sequel in comic book form – Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall – is gearing up for a press campaign towards a first issue September release – and the promise of it being turned into a movie will consciously give it an extra curiosity factor.
Oh, and whilst we are here, Millar spoke of Nemesis, his latest comic book series that was picked up by Fox last month;
Tony Scott, brother of Ridley Scott… I just got a call from him, literally about a month ago… it was one of those very surreal things. This is a $150 million budget… he said “Who do you fancy for it?”… I said “I dunno, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp” so he said “That’s good, we’ll give them a call”.
… and a phone call is as far as he’ll get. Well maybe… Pitt was close to playing Big Daddy in Kick-Ass before scheduling on a Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds made that impossible, so I guess he’s not out of the question – and well if anyone can pull off the casting of Johnny Depp for a crazy action movie – Tony Scott is the man! But surely Denzel Washington is going to get one of the parts, and Nicolas Cage would make a great Gordon-esque cop Blake Morrow, right?
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7 Comments
Kick Ass sucked. Vaughn seems like such a dick.
However, I love the new option to reveal an article instead of clicking it. Smart stuff
Thanks Rashad…. we are slowly making the site a little less painful for everyone. Slowly, anyway!
Gee, this sounds like Millar’s previous boasts about Wanted getting a sequel –still waiting!– and few of his other projects being greenlit. The guy’s gone from merely creating perverse fantasy worlds to living in one!
Short rant then I’m through jumping whenever Millar’s name is mentioned…maybe.
Millar’s work is a crappy –and hopelessly perverse– parody of comic books and so is the man himself.
His absolute obsession with sex and children and violence is disturbing as hell. It’s only a matter of time before he turns up on TV charged with some sort of puke-worthy crime, like that pervert who made the Tomb Raider video game.
Matt, I don’t so much resent that you may like stuff like Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim (and I’m still not convinced this chronic infatuation is totally genuine) but rather that THIS prurient crap is what you get hyper-enthused over. You pushed Scott Pilgrim like you had money riding on it.
As for Millar. He’s everything that’s wrong with pop culture. He caters to the most venal tastes in everything he does. You can’t ascribe quality to what his work. Yeah, you can hide behind the talking point, “Wanted/Kick-Ass/Pedophile-Blood-And-Guts etc is “original, different,fresh take on,” etc, but they aren’t any of those things. And one other thing his works aren’t is GOOD!
Millar’s the comic-book equivalent of a shock-jock, doing any obscene thing he can to get attention. Nobody picks up his stuff because they think it’s any good. They do so so they can say, “I didn’t know you can show THAT in a comic book!”
BTW, you notice I’ve never mentioned the racist way he portrays non-white characters, something you’ve never seemed to notice, or the way rape is as common as waving hello in his stuff?
His crap may sell, but neither his comics nor the movies they spawn are blockbusters, because Millar isn’t original or talented.
Millar represents a non-stop race to the bottom in an industry that needs no help getting there. The only reason anyone even knows who he is in comics is because nobody else but him is willing to dive into the toilet Millar wallows in. Its’ easy to be the #1 shock-meister in a business where nobody else wants that feces-laden crown.
Is this what we want to see get money and adulation? To hell with that!
Yeah – Angelina Jolie kinda embarrassed him when she announced she wouldn’t be back for a sequel (which felt kinda obvious to anyone who saw the original… but yeah) and then Universal got cagey over the franchise potential without her. To Millar’s credit – they got very close on a sequel until Jolie made the decision. She definitely left him with egg on his face.
Oh the Pilgrim backing was completely genuine. You will always find me supporting innovative and original material. There’s a movie by the name of Resident Evil 4 out next week, and even more Saw movies in October and really – who needs it? If we can replace these dead-horse franchises with brand new material, then that’s my goal. That’s the money I have riding on it – Hollywood’s money that I wanna see used on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series or Jonathan Nolan’s superb sci-fi script Interstellar. I want to see films like this make the big screen for example, and the more genre-bending projects that make money – the more likely we will actually see it happen.
At the end of the day, I saw Scott Pilgrim on Monday night and I didn’t enjoy it. I was bored out of my mind after the first fight sequence and I think Edgar Wright overplayed his excessive imagination, something that often plagued his Spaced t.v. show. But there you go, who knew? I was wrong, you guys were right.
I enjoyed Millar’s writing on Kick-Ass – I think he tapped into something with his take on Spider-Man in the 21st century — but his comic series Nemesis I can’t get into. HOWEVER… as soon as someone said crazy Tony Scott vehicle with A-listers and I got it. Seriously… this will be the Face/Off of this decade if Scott casts right.
Personally, I liked Pilgrim. I don’t really understand the argument that imagination got in the way of substance- I think what Wright achieved is making a comic book film that is actually close to the original medium instead of simply using the material as a reference point, he has used the medium as well.
He made a video game film. More fun to play, than to watch. You know… you wouldn’t sit for two hours watching your mate play Sonic.
Absolutely he made a video game film- partly why I loved it I think also. The demo for the game of the film is now available to download and it is incredibly good (amazingly considering the usually appalling track record of film tie-in releases). Maybe my enjoyment was heightened by the excitement for the game?
Also, sadly, I would watch a mate play Sonic for two hours. I actually have before.