Netflix Superhero Show Jupiter's Legacy Has a Huge Cast, Massive Explosions

Its hardly news that superhero stories are big business these days with Marvel and DC movies alike regularly passing the $1 billion mark. Those mega-sized super tales are usually reserved for the cinema, but Jupiter's Legacy from Mark Millar and Netflix hopes to be the exception, according to a new interview with Millar by Empire.

"It's part 2001, part Avengers, part Godfather II," said creator Mark Millar in a new interview with Empire. Millar is one of the most-adapted comic creators out there, with original stories like Kick-Ass, Wanted, and Kingsman having made it to the big screen. Millar also wrote Marvel's Civil War comic series, which became one of the biggest Marvel films. Then, he cut a deal with Netflix to bring his work to the streaming service a few years back. Jupiter's Legacy will be the first project to make the leap to live-action.

Empire described Jupiter's Legacy as "a sprawling superhero epic with an almost limitless ambition," and Millar says the story is a "50-year story self-contained inside one franchise," and that it has a cast of "50 or 60 super-characters," which seems almost incomprehensible. The show stars Josh Duhamel (Transformers) as Sheldon Sampson/The Utopian. Other cast members include Ben Daniels, Elena Kampouris, Andrew Horton, Mike Wade, Kara Royster, and Matt Lanter.

"The story starts in 1929 and runs until the end of time," Millar continued, saying that it gets into the mystery of human existence. You know, the small stuff.

All the while, though, Millar says Netflix has had his team's back throughout production. "There hasn't been one conversation where someone said, 'Can we make that explosion slightly smaller?'" Millar said. "Ambitious ideas are being rewarded."

Netflix acquired Millar's Millarworld comic book company in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, and that deal included all of Millar's works that didn't already belong to another production house.

"Mark is as close as you can get to a modern-day Stan Lee," said Netflix's chief creative officer Ted Sarandos, at the time of the sale.