Mark Millar has said that a sequel to Kick-Ass will definitely happen. Speaking to SciFiNow, the comic book writer, who is launching the sequel to his popular comic strip in the first issue of CLiNT magazine, said that the only problems were scheduling ones when we asked him about the possibility of a second film.
“That’s happening anyway, even based on the theatrical performance [of the first film],” said Millar. “The theatrical revenue put us in profit – it made money, it made good money, so combine that with the DVD money and everything and it’s an absolute shoo-in.
“Matthew [Vaughn, director]’s only dilemma is, he and I have two projects we’re readying after X-Men – we’ll have a script ready for both early next year, so we want to be shooting one of these two projects next summer. Vaughn will direct one and produce the other – I don’t know what that’ll be yet, whether it’ll be Kick-Ass 2 or this other thing.”
As for the first film, Millar admitted that he felt mixed about its performance at first, until Vaughn put the numbers in perspective for him. “It’s weird, because Matthew kept saying to me, ‘Calm down.’ I was like, it’s going to do $500 million and Matthew’s like, it cost $28 million! To put it in context, Iron Man cost $200 million, and Matthew said if we’re in profit, we’re happy. Even then in the back of my mind, $100 million and in profit wasn’t good enough – I wanted it to do bigger.”
Despite being slightly disappointed by the theatrical take, however, Millar was overwhelmed by the sales in other areas.
“What we realised is it’s gone nuts on DVD – it’s made $38 million in its first week on DVD, which is almost its entire domestic gross, and 42 per cent of that is Blu-ray. We’re probably going to make $150 million on DVD over the next 15 weeks. I don’t know the formula they use, but you can usually work it out to about a quid – they multiply something; take something away using that first week’s sales and pre-orders.
“We’re looking at $100 million theatrically then $100-150 million on DVD, then there’s TV rights on top of it. Matthew was phoning me last week – that’s a quarter of a billion dollars from a $28 million investment! He’s been very sensible about this from the start, while I was going, ‘it’s going to be bigger than Avatar’.”
In terms of comics, Millar is most famous for his work on The Authority and, of course, his rebooted Avengers in the form of the Ultimates. When asked, however, he was nonchalant about whether his take on the characters, such as Captain America, would make it into the film.
“I’m honestly not bothered. If it’s a great movie, then great. I just see myself as somebody who’s borrowed those characters and got to play with them for a while. I don’t see any kind of ownership. I’m just going into these movies as a fan. They’ve invited me to the Captain America set, which is exciting, but generally speaking, I feel like I’m doing my own job with the Millarworld stuff.”
