Writer/director James Gunn is a guy you can trust when it comes to movies about a team of superheroes. After all, he's the guy who absolutely blew our minds last year with Guardians of the Galaxy - which was not only a box office hit, but a critically-beloved one as well. As such, his opinion carries significant weight when it comes to the idea of bringing other superhero teams to the big screen, which is why it's exciting that he's both backing and suggesting the idea that Marvel Studios get to work on a movie based on the comic series The Runaways.
As he has been known to do, Gunn took part in a quick Q&A session with his Facebook followers this weekend, and it was in answering a question about a potential live-action future for The Runaways that the filmmaker revealed his support of the idea. Asked if he would ever consider making the movie himself, Gunn replied,
I love the Runaways. I was just talking with the Marvel folks the other day about how that movie should be made. Great work by Brian Vaughn in the original series.
As noted by James Gunn, The Runaways was a Marvel comic that was originally created by the amazing Brian K. Vaughn (author of Y: The Last Man), and first published in 2003. The story began following a group of six kids - Alex Wilder, Nico Minoru, Karolina Dean, Chase Stein, Gertrude Yorkes, and Molly Hayes - who uncover a terrible secret: their parents are actually all members of a secret, powerful group known as The Pride, and are doing what they can to try and end the world. Unwilling to just stand-by and do nothing while their parents plan their evil schemes, the kids decided to runaway from home and try to create a plan that will stop their moms and dad's evil schemes.
The book continued to run through 2009 (with Joss Whedon at one point replacing Brian K. Vaughn), and most recently Marvel has been publishing new issues of Runaways as part of their on-going "Secret Wars" crossover event.
The Runaways is an amazing story, and one that could work extremely well on the big screen - and what's interesting is that James Gunn is not exactly the first person at Marvel Studios to bring up the idea of making the film. Back in 2010 the company actually hired Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist filmmaker Peter Sollett to helm the project, and future Iron Man 3 co-writer Drew Pearce to pen the script. There were even talks of plans to have the shooting schedule start all the way back in March 2011, but obviously that never actually happened. Instead, the whole thing was put on pause so that Marvel could put all of its focus towards the first Avengers movie, and sadly it hasn't been able to get off of the shelf since.
Given that Marvel Studios has laid out its entire schedule through the year 2019, it's unlikely that the Runaways movie will be announced or happen any time soon - but the good news is that the source material's immense potential isn't going away. Hopefully there will be a point in the future where the company could get the film made (and perhaps even with James Gunn at the helm).
