Mark Millar’s Wanted is getting the big screen treatment this weekend… sort of. The movie hitting theaters June 27th only has a passing resemblance to the comic book of the same title. But one assumes that the same won’t be said of the movie version of Kick-Ass, which Millar has told Comic Book Resources will be shooting on location in New York City in August. The existence of the movie shouldn’t be a total shock to you; Aint It Cool reported on Matthew Vaughn stepping into the director’s chair for this one back in March.
Kick-Ass is a comic about a kid who puts on a superhero outfit and decides to fight crime in New York City; at the end of the first issue he’s hospitalized and near death, as the idea is supposed to be that this is what superheroes in the real world would be like. But by the second issue Millar’s introduced a gang of street toughs right out of a 1980s issue of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, and it turns out one near-death experience is all it takes to get our hero into fighting shape. The concept does more for me than the actual book, and the concept feels like a gimmick from a decade ago.
But the book, like everything Millar does, is popular. He’s producing the movie version, and he says a script is already done, as is some casting. “The casting’s all been done, and everything’s all
in line now with that. There’s two big names attached, which I can’t
mention so we can get on the cover of ‘Variety.'” If anyone out there has one of those names, send it to me or to any of the other independent movie sites. Let’s scoop Variety for a good time.