Anytime we preface a story with “it’s a slow news day,” buyer beware. So yeah, it’s a slow news day and perennial fabulist Mark Millar — the comic book creator behind “Kick Ass” — says Tony Scott, attached to direct his adaptation of the comic book, “Nemesis,” wants Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt for the leads. Oh yeah, that’s totally going to happen! Marlon Brando is going to come back from the dead and c0-star as well.
Millar told this tall tale to Empire earlier this month and we laughed and tried our best to ignore him. “You’ve got Holmes versus Moriarty here or Batman versus The Joker,” he said, typically inflating the worth of his own comic. “So each one has got to be a $20 million actor, really. I think you could go for the A+ list and get Johnny Depp as Nemesis and Brad Pitt as Blake Morrow.”
$40 million dollars just for the actors in this climate? Ok, Peter Pan. Some people keep beating the drum for this story like Bleeding Cool, who unfortunately don’t take the time to give their readers a trace of skepticism in their report even though Millar is a notorious liar exaggerator in the geek community (his most recent aspersion was claiming he would write the next “X-Men” film, which Fox denied and yes, it turned out to be false). So yeah, Millar was on the BBC today peddling the same ol’ story.
Tony Scott, brother of Ridley Scott… I just got a call from him, literally about a month ago… it was one of those very surreal things. This is a $150 million budget… he said “Who do you fancy for it?”… I said “I dunno, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp” so he said “That’s good, we’ll give them a call.”
Does Millar ever wonder if people are just patronizing him? So while Nemesis is known in comic-book circles, it’s pretty much completely unknown outside of them. Our UK writer gave some good context last time saying the comic “starts from the conceit, ‘What if Batman was the Joker?,’ and follows the titular supervillain, a genius billionaire who, bent on avenging the deaths of his parents, travels the world picking cops to torment, and finally returns to Washington D.C. to confront the cop who caused his family’s deaths. The source material is typical Millar, who never met a subtle undertone he couldn’t skullfuck while jumping from an exploding airship; it begins with a Japanese cop being run over by a bullet train, and also features Nemesis hijacking Air Force One and crashing it into Washington D.C.”
Sounds wonderfully retarded and very much up Tony Scott’s cinematically dyslexic alley. Also sounds amazingly expensive. Oh yeah, and Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt are going to star in it. Sure they are. Oh yeah, Millar once again says “Kick Ass 2” is green lit. Yeah, he said that before and the film’s own actors shut him down (a nerdlinger child at that). Must. resist. urge. to. reprint. bullshit, *cough.*