Superherohype posted an interesting interview with Zack Penn on his work for Marvel’s THE AVENGERS and SyFy’s ALPHAS.
“I grew up reading X-Men. When I first got to Hollywood when I sold my first script, the first thing I said was, “Can I write the ‘X-Men’ movie?” At the time Marvel was… I don’t know if I remember if they were owned by foreign nationals or what was going on, but I’ve always been into comic books, and I’ve always really been into science fiction. But I grew up on Cameron and Spielberg and a very naturalistic sense of science fiction, and even the comic books I liked were the ones that were the most real. You know, the ones that bled over into reality the most, so that’s kind of where my heart lies.
I always point out to people AVENGERS is the first superhero movie I’ve ever written, because XMEN, THE INCREDILBE HULK, even ELEKTRA— none of those are really superhero characters. They’re all either science fiction premise, or something like the Hulk is not a superhero at all, and Elektra is an assassin. So THE AVENGERS is the first legitimate superhero movie I ever wrote, ironically.”
On his “real-world” superhero series for SyFy, Penn say he’s working from a “different paradigm”.
“… The show is probably closer to THE MENTALIST or THE X-FILES in its pitch. Seriously, that’s where we started from. And then I kind of got in some of the stuff I always wanted to do in superhero genre. I managed to find the real world equivalent of it.
So as opposed to HEROES, which is completely serialized—I haven’t watched the whole series, but it is a lot like X-MEN. We purposely started from the totally other direction in terms of what the show is actually like. In the same way that LAW & ORDER is nothing like HEAT. They’re two opposite ends of the genre. ”
I think for me I was less worried about that than I was about other procedural type shows that had some overlap with us. But luckily they all got cancelled.”
Read the entire interview at the link above.