James Wan, the creator of the Conjuring franchise and helmer of some recent big screen titles like Aquaman and Fast & Furious 7 is involved with directing the pilot episode of Mark Millar‘s The Magic Order for Netflix.
According to Collider, Millar actually devised the show first with Netflix (since they acquired the rights to Millarworld, his personal comics company in 2017) before hiring artist Olivier Coipel to make the script into a graphic novel; it’s not surprising however that Netflix has this much faith in the prolific comic book writer as other of his works of his have gotten the big screen treatment over the years and yielded such successes as Wanted, Kick-Ass, Kingsman and several Marvel titles that have strongly influenced the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Mark Millar has described The Magic Order as:
“the Sopranos meets Harry Potter, a magical fantasy-crime thing.”
The plot synopsis for the book describes an adult-themed urban-fantasy setting:
Wan is keeping busy, not only with the announcement that he’ll direct an Aquaman sequel for Warner Bros but also has a heavy slate of production duties, mostly to do with his Conjuring-verse. But this is not the first time that he’s decided to lend his directorial expertise to a television show, having directed the pilot episode for the MacGyver reboot in 2016.
Like MacGyver, Wan is expected to continue involvement in The Magic Order with the executive producer title.
As we all know since the decision to move away from Marvel properties Netflix has started mining some lesser known but no less impressive titles from the big bad world of graphic novels. Their acquisition of Millarworld has meant that there is plenty of fodder for the streaming giant; Millarworld titles like Empress, Huck and Sharkey the Bounty Hunter have already been optioned for film treatments while Jupiter’s Legacy, Supercrooks, American Jesus and of course The Magic Order are all in various early stages of development.
What do you guys think? I predict that the original content lineup for Netflix will be a weird and hopefully interesting thing in the future; for the various minor flaws in The Umbrella Academy, it was still a fairly faithful and suitably-budgeted show and if that’s the standard, I can’t see many people being disappointed with what they create next.
Let us know your thoughts on The Magic Order in the comments below!