DC comics film slate: I’ll believe it when I see them

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke recently scooped the rest of the entertainment press with a list purporting to detail Warner Bros. and DC’s plans for big-screen superhero movies in the near future.

Here’s the list:

• May 2016 – Batman v Superman

• July 2016 – Shazam

• Xmas 2016 – Sandman

• May 2017 – Justice League

• July 2017 – Wonder Woman

• Xmas 2017 – Flash and Green Lantern team-up

• May 2018 – Man Of Steel 2

Nope. Not happening.

I mean, in many ways, I wish it would. As satisfying as Marvel’s big-screen universe is, I’d like to see DC comics heroes – the most accessible and familiar heroes in the world, in many ways – finally achieve lift off on screen.

Last year’s “Man of Steel” had so many things wrong with it, and with writer David Goyer and others behind the scenes who are plainly ashamed of superhero names, colorful costumes, origins and storylines, I don’t have much hope for future movies in the series.

And in particular I doubt that the studio can pull this off.

Lookit: WB and DC have only just gotten rolling on “BvsS.” How quickly can they turn around “Shazam,” which is supposed to follow the May 2016 release of “BvsS” by a couple of months?

And if they haven’t been able to figure out a big-screen “Wonder Woman” or “Green Lantern,” how can they pull off an oddity like “Sandman?”

Not to mention the whole “seven movies released within two years” thing. That’s a feat that I’m not sure even Marvel, with its assembly-line methods, could pull off.

I’ll go see whatever DC movies get released in the coming years, no doubt. But I’m afraid I’ll find them as lacking as “Green Lantern” and “Man of Steel.”

And I sure don’t think we’ll see one every few months.

Edgar Wright, ‘Ant-Man’ and the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The news today that Edgar Wright would no longer direct “Ant-Man” – but that the movie, set to kick off the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Three, immediately following 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” would continue under another director – seemed like a bump in the road that Marvel’s been building since before “Iron Man” came out in 2008.

Maybe a major bump.

It’s possible we’ll find out what “creative differences” occurred between Wright, maker of “Shaun of the Dead,” and Marvel and MCU honcho Kevin Feige. These things happen, but aside from some disgruntlement from writers and directors and Jon Favreau’s departure after “Iron Man 2,” we haven’t seen a lot of discord in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As a matter of fact, compared to DC/Warner Bros.’ problems getting its superhero slate booted up, Marvel has had a pretty smooth time of it. Despite the fact that Marvel is somewhat notoriously cheap in its movie-making.

But Wright’s departure, we have to believe, doesn’t come about because of money. There must have been some fundamental disagreement in how “Ant-Man” was going to come out and how it would fit into the MCU.

What’s even stranger is that Feige recently said that Wright – who has been working on “Ant-Man” since 2006, before most people even knew there was an MCU – was integral in how the universe was developed.
Feige said:

“We changed, frankly some of the MCU to accommodate this version of Ant-Man. Knowing what we wanted to do with Edgar and with Ant-Man, going years and years back, helped to dictate what we did with the roster for Avengers the first time. It was a bit of both in terms of his idea for the Ant-Man story influencing the birth of the MCU in the early films leading up to Avengers…”

Since the movie has mostly been cast, with Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd as older and younger Ant-Men Hank Pym and Scott Lang, and the movie was about to start filming soon, it seems unlikely we’ll see major changes in the story. More likely it will be a matter of tone and execution. Wright was going to do his movie his way and Marvel couldn’t abide by that.

I was excited about “Ant-Man” for a couple of reasons. For one, the character is a lynchpin of the comic-book Marvel universe. He was a founder of “The Avengers,” for pete’s sake.

And the apparent plan to use “Ant-Man” to flesh out the mostly unexplored middle years of the MCU – with Douglas as Pym active in flashback scenes in the 1960s or 1970s – was even cooler.

We still might see that all play out.

Or we might not.

“Ant-Man” might be terrific even without Wright. After all, we all hated the thought of Favreau leaving the “Iron Man” series.

We’ll all be lucky if the MCU can continue on smoothly after this bump in the road.

 

What we want from ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’

We’ve seen a little bit of director James Gunn’s 2014 Marvel outing “Guardians of the Galaxy,” so we kind of know what to expect.

Granted, we haven’t seen much. Just a half-minute of footage released at Comic Con last year – it’s subsequently popped up online – and a minute of Gunn-directed footage in the middle of the credits of “Thor: The Dark World.”

Yes, the “Thor” footage isn’t from “GOTG.” But Gunn directed it and it features Benecio Del Toro as a “GOTG” character, the Collector. And yes, he’s acting weird. It is Del Toro, and it is a Gunn-directed performance.

So based on what we’ve seen so far and what we hope, what do we want to see next summer?

Action. Based on the Comic Con preview, I don’t think we have to worry about this. The 30 seconds of footage I’ve seen has a ton of fighting and shooting and other good stuff.

Humor, but not too much. All the Marvel movies have their share of humor. The way Gunn is approaching “GOTG,” it looks like it might be the funniest of all the Marvel movies so far. But Gunn has, based on “Slither,” the ability to summon up the dramatic and horrific as well as the funny.

A little bit of weird, but not too much. Okay, so you’ve got Rocket Raccoon, a hard-bitten … raccoon who is an incredible fighter, and you’ve got Groot, an alien that looks like a tree that says only, “I am Groot!” Gunn has to be careful to not push the rest of the movie over the line into total weirdness. I’m a little worried about how Del Toro will come off, but he’s not a central character.

Thanos. We know the Mad Titan is likely to be the Big Bad in “Avengers 3.” But he’s a Guardians antagonist and Gamora, the Zoe Saldana character in “GOTG,” has ties to Thanos. So how about a little Thanos action in “GOTG?”

Ties to the Marvel Universe we know. Considering much of the story is apparently set in another corner of the galaxy, it’s hard to imagine Captain America popping in. But …

Iron Man! Tony Stark’s armored avenger is a member of some incarnations of the Guardians in some comics. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Robert Downey Jr. interact with Rocket Raccoon?

And it would be good preparation for “Avengers 3,” when I think all of these colorful characters are going to be all together for a cosmic blowout.

 

‘Thor’ sequel setting the stage for cosmic Marvel

When Marvel released “Thor” in 2011, I doubt that most of us on this side of the screen realized how important the adventures of the Thunder God would become to big-screen Marvel.

I liked “Thor” really pretty well. Maybe not as much as “Iron Man” or “Captain America,” but I thought the movie did a very good job of introducing the more fantastic elements of the Marvel Universe to the moviegoing audience. With “Thor” a success, how far behind could “Dr. Strange” or the cosmic Marvel stories or even the horror-tinged reaches of the Marvel universe be?

As it turns out, Marvel and director James Gunn are making the “Star Wars”-ian “Guardians of the Galaxy” now, for release next year. There’s a connection between “Thor” – spoilers ahead, I’ll warn you before – and “GOTG” but after duty in “The Avengers,” the Asgardian god of thunder returns in “Thor: The Dark World,” which stakes out, even more than the original, the more mystical, more space-bound corner of Marvel.

I won’t go very deep into the plot. Suffice it to say that Thor (Chris Hemsworth) returns to face an enemy (former Doctor Christopher Eccleston) intent on avenging himself on Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and Asgard and recapturing the Aether, force of cosmic power not unlike the Tesseract, the mystical Cosmic Cube from “Captain America” and “The Avengers.”

The movie skips from Asgard to London, where Thor is reunited with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and her crew, and to other stops among the Nine Realms.

Director Alan Taylor (“Game of Thrones”) and the screenwriters make this sequel a far grittier – literally and figuratively – story than the original. Asgard has texture and the Dark World itself is a nightmarish landscape. London is the steely blue/gray we’re familiar with in modern-day TV outings like “Sherlock.”

The action is thrilling and the realm-skipping action shows every penny of the production budget.

Hemsworth is so at ease as Thor it’s fun to imagine him  playing the part for years to come. Likewise, Tom Hiddleston is such a welcome presence as Thor’s trickster brother Loki that I hope he becomes omnipresent in movies.

“Thor: The Dark World” could feel like just another step in setting up the decade-long Marvel movie plotline, as I talked about in this recent entry. But it doesn’t. It never feels perfunctory. It’s a grand, thrilling adventure in its own right.

Random observations:

Spoiler this line only: What I reported the other day about the two end credits sequences was correct. The first featured Benecio Del Toro as the Collector and sets the stage for “GOTG.” It’s a fun if oddball scene, directed by “GOTG” director James Gunn. It’ll be interesting to see how “GOTG” comes out next year.

Obviously Chris Hemsworth’s contract calls for a minimum of one shirtless scene per “Thor” movie.

Hiddleston gets to play more vulnerable and more multifaceted here than in “Thor” of “The Avengers.” It’s great and unsettling at the same time.

No spoilers here, but I loved the cameo. That’s the advantage of a shared big-screen universe.

‘Thor: The Dark World” marks the eighth movie in the official big-screen Marvel universe. Eighth.

 

Save the dates: More Marvel movies

The least surprising news out of Hollywood this week: More Marvel Comics movies are on the horizon.

Marvel announced a still-unspecified movie would debut in theaters on July 8, 2016.

That’s in addition to Marvel movies – also unspecified – set for May 6, 2016, and May 5, 2017 that were announced in recent weeks.

Those are all in the wake of previously-announced – and specified – Marvel movies for 2015, namely the sequel to “The Avengers” and “Ant-Man.”

We’ll know – maybe as early as next month’s San Diego Comic Con – details of those 2016 and 2017 movies. Last year, for example, Comic Con audiences were the first to hear the full titles for upcoming Marvel movies like “Thor: The Dark World” (out this November) and 2014 titles like “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”

So we’ll know before long if those upcoming movies will be sequels featuring Thor and Cap or new movies featuring the likes of “Dr. Strange” and “Black Panther.”

Some online reports this week indicated that “Dr. Strange” – the movie and character – would be a running thread through future Marvel movies not unlike the way Iron Man has been in the first set of movies.

It would be an interesting choice, considering that Stephen Strange, surgeon turned master of the mystic arts, is a more fantasy-oriented character than any we’ve seen so far (with the possible exception of Thor) and making him a central character like Iron Man is an indication that Marvel is edging further “out there” in its films. It would also, if cast correctly, be a character that could equal Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the hearts of moviegoers – a good move since Downey is only so far signed to appear in the two “Avengers” sequels.

Here’s looking forward to some new news.

‘Fantastic Four,’ ‘X-Men’ movies getting back on track?

We’re accustomed by now to how Marvel’s in-house movie process works – and how well it works. With “The Avengers” done and Marvel’s big-screen “phase two” on the calendar, leading up to an “Avengers” sequel in 2015, the comic characters controled by Marvel seem on track.

This week, news broke of moves that could help ensure some continuity for other Marvel characters that don’t fall under Marvel’s control.

No surprise here, really, but “Amazing Spider-Man” director Marc Webb and star Andrew Garfield will return for a sequel and Emma Stone is likely to return as Gwen Stacy.

There were a number of things to like about Webb’s first shot with the character. While the Lizard wasn’t a compelling antagonist, Garfield and Stone were well-cast and had great chemistry. The tone of the movie was right, although the story failed in its (I think) misguided efforts to build some mystery into Peter Parker’s past.

But the movie was pretty entertaining and a sequel – without the burden of having to explain the origin story yet again – could be fun.

Maybe more importantly, 20th Century Fox announced this week that they’ve signed longtime comic writer Mark Millar to consult on future film adaptations of Marvel comics like “Fantastic Four” and “X-Men.”

Millar’s Ultimate X-Men comic forged a new direction for the longtime super team and his Ultimates take on the Avengers influenced the movie version.

Millar has plenty of experience writing comics, but more importantly he might be a creative decision-maker not unlike Joss Whedon has become for Marvel’s in-house movies.

Marvel movies producer Kevin Feige provided the structure and strategy that led to Whedon’s “The Avengers.” Whedon might also help shape the future of Marvel movies. It’s the kind of long-term cohesive thinking that Warner Bros. wishes it had with its DC adaptations.

It’s too much to hope for, but Millar’s role in both these properties might also lead to some cross-over on film.

Marvel movies: Rumors, facts and portents

So “Iron Man 3” comes out in May, followed over the next couple of years by “Thor: The Dark World,” “Captain America: Winter Soldier,” “Guardians of the Galaxy” and an “Avengers” sequel, with a possible Ant-Man movie thrown into the mix somewhere along the way to 2015.

And we’re getting a little antsy for new Marvel Comics movie developments.

So can anyone blame the online contingent that freaked out (I originally wrote that as “fraked out” but let’s not mix franchises here) when word circulated that the U.K. version of the “Avengers” DVD and Blu had an edited version of SHIELD agent Coulson’s death at the hands of Loki? A version that didn’t show Loki’s blade protruding from Coulson’s chest?

One that might confirm that Coulson is resurrection bound, possibly to return in the “SHIELD” TV series and future Marvel movies?

Of course, the explanation was the simplest one: Disney decided to tone down the gruesome, blade-penetrating part of the death because it was too awful for Brits to see, apparently. Even the ones who had already seen it on the big screen early this summer.

So, anyway, don’t even think about Clark Gregg coming back as Agent Coulson (“His first name is Agent”). And definitely don’t even contemplate Gregg coming back as the synthetic Avenger known as The Vision.

Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.

(Above is the edited and un-edited scene.)

We move from the news that wasn’t really real to the news that was kinda real. Some online headlines blared the other day that Chris Evans might have a small part as Captain America in the “Thor” sequel. Clicking through, however, we see that Evans is saying he would be down with hanging out with his pal Chris Hemsworth in the movie. It would make sense and would serve the old Marvel tradition of brief comic book crossovers.

While we’d all like to see guest appearances by all the Avengers – and more – in upcoming solo adventures, we know that will happen only if it fits into Marvel’s Phase Two plans.

And now from the news that was definitely real department: Director James Gunn, previously rumored to be the company’s pick for the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie, announced that he is officially onboard for the adventures of Starlord, Drax and Rocket Raccoon, the cosmic version of the Avengers.

Gunn, whose horror movie “Slither” is a little gem of funny weirdness, seems likely to give Joss Whedon a run for his money in the quip arena:

“As a lifelong lover of Marvel comics, space epics, AND raccoons, this is the movie I’ve been waiting to make since I was nine years old.”

It sounds like Gunn will make us believe a raccoon can fly … a spaceship.

 

 

First ‘Iron Man 3’ photo plus ‘The Black Panther’ movie

In the wake of “The Avengers” — and until “Iron Man 3” comes out in May 2013 — all of us comic book movie fans are going to be bouncing off the walls with every little bit of news that comes out.

So how about the bits that have come out in the past 24 hours?

Above is the first official photo from “Iron Man 3,” released by Disney and Marvel a few days after those leaked set photos of the Iron Patriot a few days ago.

Looks like RDJ as Tony Stark, surveying his ever-growing line-up of suits.

I have to say, though, I’m more excited about today’s news that it’s likely that one of the so-far-unnamed Marvel movies coming out in the next couple of years could be … “The Black Panther!”

As more than a few websites have pointed out, the Black Panther — secret identity of T’Challa, king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda — fits very easily into the Marvel movie universe that has built, over the past four years, into “The Avengers.”

There have been little Easter eggs, or at least references, to the Panther (co-created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for a 1966 issue of “The Fantastic Four”) in previous Marvel films. A SHIELD map of the world in “Iron Man 2” had an indicator over the approximate location in Africa of Wakanda. And the shield (of another kind) slung by “Captain America” was made of vibranium, the ultra-rare metal found only in Wakanda. The sale of vibranium is the source of Wakanda’s riches and its high-tech society.

And T’Challa has been an Avenger — including a stint during the classic Kree-Skrull War series — and would fit right into an “Avengers” sequel.

The Panther — named before the founding of the 1960s political party, he was the first black comics superhero — has had a long history in the comics and is currently appearing as a member of the group in the Disney XD “Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” animated series.

Here’s hoping the rumors are true and a “Black Panther” movie gets announced, maybe even at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con.

By the way … there are some other really cool characters out there that would also fit right into an “Avengers” sequel or their own Marvel movies.

Sweet Christmas! That’s right! I’m talking about Luke Cage, none other than Power Man (AKA the Hero for Hire).

Here’s hoping.

The road to ‘The Avengers’

It’s been a long road to “The Avengers.”

Not just the four years since Samuel L. Jackson showed up at the end of “Iron Man” and freaked out fans — at least those who were sufficiently clued in to hang out in the theater until after the credits — by telling Robert Downey Jr. he wanted to talk to him about “The Avengers Initiative.”

There’s been a lot of anticipation since 2008, but considering the decades since Captain America was introduced in Marvel Comics (actually, Timely Comics back then), the past four years have been a breeze.

Here’s part one of a highly selective look at the road to “The Avengers” movie.

“Captain America Comics,” issue one, dated March 1941 but on stands months earlier, debuted as the world grew edgier about the war in Europe. The character — 98-pound patriot Steve Rogers, turned into Captain America through the Super Soldier experiment — was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Comics were a  huge deal back then, with far higher sales numbers than today, and Cap was a hit — especially with the punch he landed on Hitler’s jaw on the cover of one issue — and the movies beckoned.

“Captain America” the movie serial was released by Republic Pictures in 1944 starring Dick Purcell as Cap. But Cap wasn’t soldier Steve Rogers in this movie. He was a crime-fighting district attorney. And Purcell was kind of … egg-shaped. At least his head was. Cap continued in the comics but didn’t come back to the screen for decades and his fellow Avengers didn’t get their big-screen chance for an even long time.

The “Avengers” comic debuted in September 1963, the creation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and — like Marvel’s other early team, The Fantastic Four — was a cool variation on DC’s happy family the Justice League. The Avengers bickered and fought among themselves — the lineup was constantly changing, which was one of the comic’s charms.

“Avengers” issue four marked a real turning point as Cap was discovered frozen in ice and thawed. While he joined the Avengers — and quickly became the team’s leader — he was an essentially tragic character. Most of the people he knew, with the exception of former commando Nick Fury, were dead. Most tragically, his World War II sidekick, James “Bucky” Barnes, had died in battle. Bucky would, amazingly, stay dead for decades to come.

In 1979, the first of two made-for-TV “Captain America” movies was made. The movies starred Reb Brown and seemed to be a bizarre attempt to cash in on Evel Knievel, the motorcycle stunt rider, since Brown spent more time on a bike than on two feet.

While he continued in the comics and, along with many other Marvel characters, showed up in various animated series, Cap didn’t return to the big screen until the 1990 Albert Pyun “Captain America” movie, starring Matt Salinger as Steve Rogers and Scott Paulin as the Red Skull, bizarrely changed from a Nazi to an Italian facist. Once you get beyond the novelty of seeing live-action images of Cap and the Skull, the move is pretty dreadful. Its low budget doesn’t allow for much action.

For years, attempts to bring Marvel characters to the screen fell by the wayside and it seemed as if fans would never see their favorite heroes in action.

Then Fox released Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” in 2000. The movie was a hit and the studio followed it up with films based on the Fantastic Four.

It was only a matter of time until Cap and the Avengers got their chance.

(More to come.)