Since the bombshell announcement that Netflix had acquired Millarworld, aka movie idea factory Mark Millar, the Scotsman has kept a very low profile despite many media requests. However he finally broke his silence, at Comicbook.com of all places. In an extensive interview, the always enthusiastic Millar goes full tilt fervent on how great this deal is:
A big movie studio makes around 30 or 40 hours of original material every year. Netflix has over 1,000 hours of original content this year alone and growing.Had we sold Millarworld to a typical studio we’d have seen some of these franchises trickle out over the course of the next decade. When I walked into my first Netflix meeting the guys were buzzing about the first four or five they want to get moving on as soon as possible. There’s just a completely different way of doing business here and it’s tremendously exciting. I compare it to how Hollywood must have felt in the 1920s. It’s fearless and they’re just charging ahead, which as a creator has the kind of energy I love.
Millar reveals that he is now an employee of Netflix and sits around thinking up great ideas all day. His wife, Lucy, who was always involved in Millarworld, has been made CEO and the duo fly out to LA for meetings once in a while. Other than that it’s blue sky.
In the interview, Millar teases the announcement of a new title over the weekend, which, I’m pretty sure didn’t happen yet.
Well, this first book we’re launching is coming in Spring and you’ll hear about that at the weekend. This comes out of a brand new project I’ve created in-house and I’ve asked pretty much the best artist in the industry right now if he’d like to draw the comic-book.
Who might that be? Chris Ware?
He also alleges his output will be the same – 20 monthly comics – but doesn’t really nail down the publishing details:
Now that Millarworld is owned by Netflix the possibilities are off the scale. In publishing terms, we’re being smart and staying at my exact current output, which is around 20 monthly comics a year or four graphic novel collections. This means we can really focus on promoting each book and use Netflix’s massive international machine. Their presence is just ridiculous. We’re announcing a new book this weekend and it almost feels like we’re announcing a movie. The amount of thought and the number of people behind this is unlike anything I’ve experienced in over 20 years as a comic-book creator. Again, this is next-level stuff and our plan is to have a range of books backed up by this incredible PR machine backed up by this amazing resource, which is the highest quality movies and TV shows we can do. But publishing is just a part of what Millarworld is doing at Netflix, the idea being that I’m just constantly creating new stories and these are being exploited in lots of different mediums, as we’ll explain over the coming months.
We’ve speculated for a while over who would publish both existing – Huck, Nemesis, Jupiter’s Legacy, Starlight etc etc etc – and upcoming Millarworld titles. The world on the street is that the line will be consolidated at Image, rather than Netflix starting its own business, but I guess we won’t really know until that first new title gets announced. It would make a lot more sense, however.
Chris Ware or Jeff Smith drawing a Millar comic would be kind of awesome in a very ironic way.
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