X-Men: Days of Future Past Producer Millar: "It's Incredibly Exciting"

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.

"I think as long as it's done right. I know how it's done, so I'm not worried. I've been in all these meetings and talked about it at length with everyone, and everything I hear sounds incredibly mainstream. It's no more difficult than The Terminator, or whatever, there's one element of time jump in it, but other than that it's absolutely fine. It's hard for me to say without actually spoiling the movie, but [producer Matthew] Vaughn – the guy who made the $28 million Kick-Ass look like a $78 million movie, you know? – I completely trust him when it comes to stuff like that – he knows exactly what he's doing, and Simon Kinberg has actually done a phenomenal job on the screenplay with him so it's worked out really well." Of course, fans will note, Kinberg is also responsible for writing X-Men: The Last Stand--but by that same token, he penned the Sherlock Holmes adaptation for Warner Bros. He did note, though, that one of the challenges that face the X-Men comics--and the movies, especially in recent years--is that everyone wants to see their favorite character, but then nobody's happy if the character isn't given enough screen time or if the character seems poorly adapted. "I remember when I was writing Ultimate X-Men and people were saying 'I want to see Gambit, I want to see Rogue, I want to see…' Everybody has a list and at first you think 'I'm going to please everyone' and then you realize you're pleasing no-one by just throwing in ten second cameos, you know. I think that was the major problem with that first Wolverine movie and X-Men 3. Bryan Singer did such an incredible job with that original movie – it's quite like Star Wars in that there's Episodes IV, V and VI, and we've got the Matthew Vaughn prequels, and I love that – I love the fact that it simplifies so well. X-Men in the Nineties was so convoluted in comic-book terms, and Bryan drove a knife through it and make it work and simplified the whole thing. "I'd like to have that same approach and if we are bringing in a character then it shouldn't just be for a trailer or to get a picture up online, get people excited, it should actually have a point in the story. The trick with that is to try and keep the cast relatively small so that you actually care about them." That seems like a particularly sticky problem when you consider that the rumor is that a number of characters will be there as both their younger and older selves--but at least Millar and company are aware of the challenges.