‘Free Fire’ Director Ben Wheatley Would Totally Make a ‘Marvel Zombies’ Movie
Filmmaker Ben Wheatley occupies an interesting niche in Hollywood. While Wheatley frequently works with A-list talent, he studiously avoids the type of prestigious films that might cement him as one of our best living directors. Movies like Kill List, High-Rise, and Free Fire may have devoted fandoms, but there’s no denying that they’re too idiosyncratic — too out of place in an industry that needs everything to fit into the blockbuster or art film buckets — to ever make Wheatley more than a filmmaker who draws people to him because he does his own thing.
So don’t expect to see Wheatley directing a Marvel movie anytime soon, with one major caveat. In a recent conversation with Little White Lies (via /Film), Wheatley admitted that while he’s intrigued by the Marvel franchise, the only title he’d ever want to adapt is the one title they’ll probably never make:
I don’t really know how those things work. Marvel Zombies hasn’t been done which is what I’m interested in. Maybe that’s a bit too niche. Marvel’s interesting in that it’s kind of a hybrid of cinema and television. A very, very expensive TV show that you buy a pass for every three months.
If you’re unfamiliar with the premise of the Marvel Zombies miniseries, it originally came out of the Ultimate Marvel comic books and is primarily the fault of the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards. In his exploration of Earth’s parallel universes, Richards discovered one where our planet had been devastated by a zombie apocalypse, with only the superheroes and villains surviving. Now mostly infected by the virus, the zombies of Marvel Zombies still retain their abilities and their personalities, but are driven by a relentless hunger that inspires them to eat the living. Imagine Captain America eating people and feeling super bad about after he’s bounced back from his ravenous hunger and you’ve got an idea of what’s going on.
Maybe this’ll happen one day, but until then, I guess we’re stuck enjoying movies like Freakshift, Wheatley’s upcoming project about a group of soldiers who fight monsters in the sewers. Wait, you know what? That sounds way better than Marvel Zombies anyways.