Matthew Vaughn’s Original Superman Pitch Described As A “Big, Fun Epic”

It’s going on 10 years since Mark Miller and director Matthew Vaughn (Kingsman) collaborated on Kick-Ass, the subversive, hyper-violent comic book movie designed to flip the bird at the entire genre.

But in between orchestrating scenes of Red Mist and Hit-Girl shooting the shit, Vaughn confided his original Superman pitch to Mark Millar circa 2008, one which has now been described as an “epic” and “fun” take on the Man of Steel.

Word comes by way of Mario-Francisco Robles (via JoBlo), who interviewed Millar on the latest episode of the El Fanboy Podcast. At the outset, the decorated scribe addressed the latest developments between Warner Bros. and Matthew Vaughn, who would rather pump fresh blood into the fledgling DC Extended Universe than collaborate with Marvel, whose MCU continues to go from strength to strength.

He and I are massive Superman fans. I mean, we worship Richard Donner. We love the Christopher Reeve movies. He actually phoned me up a few months ago, and he said, ‘Hey, listen, DC, they’re very interested in me doing Man of Steel 2. Do you want to come in and do this?’ And I was like, ‘I’m exclusive to Netflix for years. We can’t even have that conversation.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, man. What’re the chances of this?’ And then he kind of drifted away. And he’s attached himself to a couple of things and all that. Y’know so, it’s one of those things that might, I mean- if somebody phones Matthew up and offers him enough money it could all change tomorrow.

Mark Millar then proceeded to shed light on Vaughn’s original take, which would have been decidedly different from Man of Steel.

It was actually a massive, uplifting, hopeful thing. There’s no point doing Superman unless you feel good. You should walk out of ‘Superman’ just feeling like a million dollars. You should feel great after a Superman film. The movie itself was going to be a big, vast fun epic. But ‘Superman’s got to be a laugh, as well.

Had the DCEU kicked off with a “massive, uplifting” Superman movie, Warner’s superhero franchise would have turned out to be vastly different to the one that continues to underperform with each passing instalment – barring Wonder Woman, of course. So it’s a little disheartening to hear that Matthew Vaughn, who won over comic book fans with his work on X-Men: First Class, was originally plotting something completely different to Zack Snyder.

But what say you? You can post your own reactions to Millar’s revelation via the usual place.