Yesterday, speculation began around the web that ‘Kick-Ass’ and ‘X-Men: First Class’ director Matthew Vaughn could be helming the first movie of the new ‘Star Wars’ trilogy after he had opted not to direct ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’. Now, Mark Millar, a frequent collaborator of Vaughn’s, has weighed in with exactly why the director handed the reins of the sequel to his successful X-Men movie over to Bryan Singer, and it doesn’t actually have anything to do with Episode VII in a galaxy far, far away.
In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Millar shared that Vaughn dropped out of the Fox franchise because the two of them needed to get moving on their adaptation of ‘The Secret Service’, a comic written by Millar and illustrated by ‘Watchmen’ artist Dave Gibbons. Here’s what the writer had to say in the interview:
“What we’re doing is that ‘Kick-Ass 2′ is filming now, and next year we’ll start production on ‘Secret Service’, which I did with Dave Gibbons, and Matthew and I have been talking about that for years. We thought Matthew was going to do X-Men first, but we found out there were actually a few imitators of ‘Secret Service’ in the works… [P]eople are always trying to rip you off. Somebody will start to work on a spec screenplay about your idea. There are three other projects I know of now about a James Bond kind of guy taking a street kid and turning him into a spy. Three screenplays were already going through Hollywood about this! So Matthew and I said, ‘F*ck this. We’re not letting anyone steal our ideas.’”
Vaughn and Millar have been working on this film for quite some time now, so it’s understandable that they’d want to jump on it before any other movies like it are released. Unfortunately, this pretty much rules out Vaughn’s involvement in a new ‘Star Wars’ movie. While it’s not unheard of for directors to take on multiple projects at once, Episode VII is a large-scale production that needs quite a bit of time and energy to plan it out perfectly and Vaughn won’t have either if he’s working on this film with Millar. It appears that the closest Vaughn will get to directing ‘Star Wars’ now is when he directs Mark Hamill in ‘The Secret Service’.
