The Tomorrow War Director Chris McKay Wants to Make a Marvel Movie

Chris McKay, director of The Tomorrow War and reportedly the man most likely to bring DC’s Nightwing film to life, wants to do a Marvel movie. Granted, just about everybody wants to do a Marvel movie at this point, but in the case of McKay, a hot name in the industry whose latest film stars Guardians of the Galaxy frontman Chris Pratt, you have a guy who seems like a pretty obvious candidate. McKay, who has Lego Batman 2 coming next year and both Nightwing and Johnny Quest on his upcoming slate, is obviously a filmmaker who has that geek sensibility running through his veins right now.

Speaking with YouTube’s popular Eman’s Movie Reviews channel, McKay was quizzed on his MCU ambitions. That’s where he said he’s eager to do a superhero movie — although it still seems like the brass ring for him would be getting his Nightwing project off the ground.

“I guess we’re running out of Marvel characters, right?” McKay joked when asked whether he would want to do a superher movie, then added, “I really hope so. I’ve got a Captain America tattoo on one side, and I’ve got a Catwoman and a Superman tattoo over here, so my love for all things comic book…I’m like you, where I grew up with Batman, I grew up with Spider-Man, I grew up with Captain America. I love Catwoman, I love Superman. I hope to someday be able to make a movie in those worlds. I really wanted to do Nightwing, and Nightwing was a character who was really important to me. When I was a Batman fan, I was a Robin fan, as a kid. Robin was the window; you were sort of looking at Batman through Robin’s eyes, right? As I grew up reading comic books and watching movies and things like that, Robin grew up. Robin became Nightwing, so to kind of go through that transition as a reader, where he was a little kid, and as I’m getting older, he’s getting older, and now he’s becoming his own thing…that was my childhood experience. That was kind of a profound thing for me, and so I always sort of take that away. Batman and Robin, Batman and Nightwing have a father-son relationship, and that’s something that to me is a really important aspect of that story that I hope to someday get on film as well as to just tell a straight up Nightwing story.”

In The Tomorrow War, the world is stunned when a group of time travelers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: Thirty years in the future mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species. The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher and family man Dan Forester. Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist and his estranged father in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.