It was a Dark Horse weekend at Golden Apple Comics in Hollywood– first Felicia Day and the cast of The Guild Friday night, celebrating the release of the first Guild comic, then Zack Whedon on Saturday, signing copies of Terminator 2029. Golden Apple is where we’ve been getting our fix since 2004, and owner Ryan Liebowitz was kind enough to permit me ten minutes to interview Zack about Terminator 2029, what he’s reading these days, and why he thinks we deserve a better Daredevil movie than we ultimately got.
CC: I suppose we should start with the difficulty of writing within the Terminator franchise, specifically the Dark Horse-licensed original film. Where do you find story niches that aren’t already occupied? I talked to Matt Wagner once about Batman, and he said “I can’t write anything after the introduction of the Joker, there’s no room in the timeline.” So if you’re stuck, where are you stuck at? Where do you find those spots?
ZW: Well, you know, it was difficult, but it was beneficial in a way because I had to focus on Kyle. I mean, it was an obvious choice to focus on Kyle because in the first movie that’s the character that’s sort of been explored the least and, you know, that was beneficial because I didn’t end up focusing on John Connor which is I think sort of what everyone else has done and there isn’t a lot of new territory to cover there.
CC: Your brother Joss is on the shortlist to direct the eventual Avengers film. If you had one comic franchise to yourself, to remake as a film, which one would you take?
ZW: Wow, I don’t know. That would be a hard choice. It seems like something like Thor or Wonder Woman would be a very hard comic to adapt. I don’t know what [director] Kenneth Branagh has in mind for Thor, but I’m interested to see how it’s done. For myself, the big movie experiences have been Die Hard, The Matrix… Terminator is actually as close as it comes for me, I think. [Brother] Jed took me to see Terminator 2 twice in the same day when it came out, maybe on two separate days, and that was huge for me.
But, as far as comics go, I think there should have been a better Daredevil film than the one we got. Daredevil seems like such a cinematic character, it seems like it would be a natural transition… and it seems like it could have been adapted into a really good film. Maybe someday.