It’s been nearly 10 years since Tim Miller stood on the stage at San Diego Comic-Con and revealed the first trailer for Deadpool, which had fans begging the filmmakers to play it a second time and kicked off a hugely successful franchise.
Now the director — who has kept busy making two acclaimed adult animated series, Netflix’s Love Death + Robots and Prime Video’s Secret Level — is ready to return to the superhero arena.
While discussing the new season of his Netflix series, The Hollywood Reporter asked Miller about what he would do to help revive the superhero game on this anniversary of Deadpool shaking up the genre.
“I think that the Marvel has this secret weapon they haven’t been able to unveil yet, which is the whole X-Men universe — which is what got me into comics,” Miller said. “The X-Men are my favorite characters. I wrote [Marvel boss] Kevin Feige, and I’m like, ‘If there was ever anything that you would let me do in the Marvel Universe, please, the X-Men would be it.’ I had an X-Men movie in development at Fox when the merger happened, which would have been awesome. [It was based on] X-Men 143, which was Home Alone meets Alien.”
Covering his bases a bit, Miller adds, “But if DC ever gets around to doing The Authority, that’s my favorite comic ever — it’s the Justice League if they killed people. I think there’s a lot of room left [in the genre], a lot of different stories to tell.”
Miller notes that he was a big fan of the recently released Marvel effort Thunderbolts*, which received strong reviews though struggled a bit at the box office. “I thought Thunderbolts* was an excellent film,” he says. “Florence Pugh was amazing. All the other actors did an amazing job and the action was good and grounded. Overall, the movie was thematically consistent. You kind of forget how much that matters — when everything ties together in a way that feels super satisfying.” (The film’s director, Jake Schreier, is in talks to direct Marvel’s first — though surely not only — X-Men effort.)
Asked if he feels he gets enough credit nowadays for launching Deadpool, a franchise which last year had the blockbuster third entry, Deadpool & Wolverine, Miller says he does.
“I am keenly aware that I’ve gotten more than my fair share of credit for everything,” Miller says. “I got to be the luckiest nerd in the planet. I have nothing to complain about, and Ryan Reynolds fucking crushed it. I didn’t expect to have my own studio. I didn’t expect to do a feature, much less one that would be successful as Deadpool, or [make Terminator: Dark Fate]. Even though [Dark Fate] wasn’t as financially successful at the time, it’s in the black now. And then to be able to do Love Death + Robots, which is probably my achievement I’m most of. Also, I’m old — but I’m not done yet.”
