X-Men: Days of Future Past Producer Millar: “It’s Incredibly Exciting”

September 6, 2017, 10:39pm

Fans have been waiting for years to see a film adaptation of the dystopian X-epic Days of Future Past.Based on the massively popular comic book series by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the story takes the reader to a world where mutants aren’t just hated and feared–but hunted and killed by the government. Along with The Dark Phoenix Saga and God Loves, Man Kills, it’s one of the holiest of X-Men texts among the hardcore fans, and the excitement was palpable when rumors started to circulate that it could be the basis for the upcoming sequel to X-Men: First Class.Then there was a second wave of euphoria among many when it was announced that Bryan Singer, director of X-Men and X2: X-Men United, would return to the franchise to helm the film, along with a number of the cast from his original films playing their “future” selves.Mark Millar, who handles the X-Men films and other Marvel properties for 20th Century Fox, feels the same way about the film, and told SciFi Now as much.”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 isn’t fooling himself; he knows that the mythology of the film can be cumbersome, and that in order to do the comic properly (as opposed to the mess that was made of The Dark Phoenix Saga in X-Men: The Last Stand), there are elements of it that need to be addressed and can’t be ignored to make for a simpler movie. He doesn’t think it’s a concern, though, as long as the film is approached with those concerns in mind. Does that make it harder to market? After all, comics–and especially X-Men comics–have long been criticized as difficult to jump right into.