Anna Daniels
Mintz — who previously worked as an executive producer on Looper and Iron Man 3 — took full charge of Valiant through his company, DMG Entertainment, back in 2018 with the goal of elevating the company’s film and television production to the “next level.” With Bloodshot, that next level is here, and Mintz is hard at work crafting a future universe of characters and individual franchises within the Valiant umbrella.
Speaking to Looper in an exclusive interview about his perspective on what Valiant has to offer to superhero filmmaking, Mintz focused specifically on the kind of storytelling he feels his characters can present, in part because of the time in which they first emerged.
“Looking at it just from the perspective of the mentality and a product of its time, DC is kind of the ’30s, right, when it was really incepted. Obviously, it’s been reinvented many times, but it’s got those roots that [are] authentic to who they are. Marvel is the ’60s, and Valiant is the ’90s,” said Mintz. “Right from the beginning, the outlook is very different. It’s much more of a worldview. The characters are much more diverse. They’re much grayer, for sure.”
He continued, “One thing that I very much like to focus on in films in general — and [one of] the things that [draws] me into films — is the dilemma. I sit there and I look at a dilemma. If I can look at the screen and go, ‘What would I do? I’m not exactly sure what to do,’ then I’m in the story. If I look at something and I go, ‘Just run out of the house!’ or something like that, then it kind of takes you out of it a little bit. I think dilemma is a big part of that.”
That kind of dilemma-driven storytelling is certainly present in Bloodshot, which follows a technologically enhanced super-soldier who learns that the way he sees the world has been manipulated by the very people he thought were his saviors. It’s that kind of story — when you’re not always sure who the good guys are — that Mintz hopes to keep pursuing with Valiant movies, with some very clear stylistic influences thrown in for good measure.
“A Marvel dilemma to me is ‘We know who’s right, we know who’s wrong, now let’s watch them go and take care of business.’ It’s a little bit different [with Valiant],” he explained. “When I look at Valiant films in the future, I really see kind of Inception meets The Wire. Something that’s big, something that is very broad, something that grabs you, but also that has a certain amount of grit, has a certain amount of anchor in what’s happening in the world, and really delivers a little bit deeper on some characters.“
Written by: Looper
