With Warner Bros. formally announcing plans for “Justice League” last night, the name of the game around Hollywood is to make your comic property even bigger and better than whatever Marvel is doing. Or at least try to. And Fox is pushing forward hard with their mutant universe that will continue to expand with “X-Men: Days Of Future Past.” And, just like Marvel, a small screen future could be in the playbook.
Chatting with Collider, writer Simon Kinberg revealed that there is some kind of chatter about the TV potential of the franchise. “We’re still in this place of figuring out what the future of the franchise will be, but when you look at ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.‘ to some extent and what Marvel is doing now with ‘Daredevil‘ and other shows on Netflix, it makes sense to tell some of these stories in TV partly because there’s just not enough screens to do all these characters, and also because the serialized format of comic books is better suited for TV,” he said. “Because that’s it, every week you come back to the same characters different story, and in comic books every week it’s the same characters, different story.”
“I think what [Fox is] seeing now is with the proliferation of new kinds of visual and special effects, there’s a way to make these stories that doesn’t cost $300 million every time you have to make a huge movie,” he continued.
It’s a wise assessment of how the industry is working these days and yet, filmmakers can’t help but trying to stuff as much as they can into each movie. Bryan Singer is certainly bringing a mutant-packed “X-Men: Days Of Future Past,” so much so that he’s had to prune back some characters, with Storm and Rogue already said to be appearing as nothing more than cameos. And Scarlet Witch (which both Fox and Marvel have the rights too, with various rules that are too boring to go into here) has also hit the chopping block.
“Is that the Scarlet Witch? No, that’s his little sister,” Singer told Empire (via Comic Book Movie) about what fans thought they saw in a recent TV spot. “I even had a line which I cut, where Quicksilver’s mother says to the little girl, ‘Go up and bug your sister,’ and the little girl says, ‘She bugs me!’ You never see the older sister, but it was to imply that there is an older sister for comic book fans. I ended up cutting it.”
But there will be lots more take in when ‘DOFP’ arrives on May 23rd. Until then, here’s a new promo thingy, centered around Wolverine (via ComingSoon).
