Director Matthew Vaughn would love the chance to shake things up in two film franchises that fans hold sacred.
Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Vaughn said he and comic book writer Mark Millar had the big concept of “a three-picture trilogy” on Superman for Warner Bros.
“We pitched how to do a trilogy of Superman movies. Warners wasn’t interested. That’s as far as it went,” Vaughn said. It “never came back around” after that, he added.
The proposed trilogy would have borrowed from the Richard Donner Superman films.
“I think Donner nailed it,” Vaughn said. “I think Wonder Woman worked very well because it was basically a Donner Superman film, but reimagined as Wonder Woman. I would’ve done a modern version of the Donner [films].”
“Our big idea,” he continued, “was the twist that Krypton doesn’t blow up. It does eventually. The dad was right, he just got his timing wrong. So when Superman’s grown up, suddenly there’s a mass exodus and then all hell breaks loose, and that was our idea.”
The main villains would be “Zod and Brainiac, basically,” with Lex Luthor as the main villain “until Krypton explodes.”
Vaughn also mentioned that he would like to take a crack at rearranging Star Wars. He was asked if he would find it hard to turn down hellming a film in the franchise. “Now, not so much,” he quipped. What does interest him is potentially rebooting the franchise’s more familiar characters, with all-new versions of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
“I would say, for me, doing a Star Wars movie is to play with the characters I loved,” Vaughn said. “So if they said to me, ‘Do you want to reboot Star Wars and actually have Luke Skywalker, Solo, and Vader, and you do your version of it,’ everyone would say, ‘You’re an idiot to try,’ but that would excite me.”
Vaughn understands that he’s playing with fire by even suggesting tampering with the canon. “Why not [reboot]? Bond, do you mind Bond? I mean, you asked me who’s going to play the next Wolverine. Why are these [Star Wars] characters so hallowed that from ’77, you can’t redo it for a new audience?”
Vaughn suggested that moving away from those characters is one way the franchise has taken a misstep. “Star Wars is the Skywalker family, and that’s where I think they’ve gone wrong. They’ve done brilliantly in the TV [shows on Disney+], but it needs an epic new film, and that’s what I would do.
He added, “Everyone’s going to go batsh*t crazy, but let’s bring it on, because if you want a new generation, make the movie for them. The old generation can hopefully make it well enough that they go, ‘Okay, I’m enjoying it.’”
Vaughn’s newest movie, Argylle, is set to hit theaters on Feb. 2, 2024.
