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'Starlight' live action film based on Mark Millar comic takes flight with director Joe Cornish
Yet another Mark Millar property is coming to a screen near you! A movie adaptation of 2015's Starlight comic (drawn by Goran Parlov) is finally coming to fruition after years of development at 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox prior to Disney buying out the studio in 2018). According to Deadline, filmmaker Joe Cornish — known for inventive and cult favorite genre flicks such as Attack the Block and The Kid Who Would Be King — has been tapped to direct the movie.
Unrelated to The Boys' superhero of the same name, the Buck Rogers-ish Starlight centers around Duke McQueen, a space adventurer, who once saved the entire universe. After returning to Earth, he started a family and grew old. With his wife now dead and children moved away, no one remembers Duke's swashbuckling cosmic exploits. All he has are his memories to keep him company... until a call from a distant world beckons him back into space once again.
X-Men franchise veteran Simon Kinberg is producing the film under his Genre Films company with Audrey Chon (The Twilight Zone). Nira Park, who previously worked on Cornish's last two directorial efforts, will produce as well.
Netflix currently owns the screen rights to all of Millar's creator-owned titles (published under the "Millarworld" banner). The streamer's first Millar-inspired project, a TV series based on Jupiter's Legacy (co-created with Frank Quitely), premieres Friday, May 7. Watch the first trailer right here. Answering a fan question on Twitter last January, Millar admitted that Starlight's big screen production was in flux due to rights issues between Netflix and 20th Century.
"Netflix own[s] Starlight like all the other Millarworld properties bought in our company sale, but Fox [is] holding the film rights for a few more years," he wrote. "It's such a shame. Those fine folk are part of Disney now, as they have so many other things and this would have been awesome."
