Sunday, July 27, 2014

San Diego Comic Con News Round-Up


Comparisons to Xena are obvious, and I can't help wondering if Lucy Lawless is either pissed or relieved that she didn't get put into this role five years ago.


Of course, she'd still 47 or so, and she still looks great, so there is, in fact, no reason at all why she couldn't play Wonder Woman now, but clearly that's not the way Hollywood thinks.  Still, it would probably be a more interesting movie if they cast Lawless--at her current age, with her current stature and gravitas--to play a mature female superhero in the prime of her powers.  A move like that would catch people so far off their guard that they'd be scratching their heads about it still fully ten years from now.

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The Guardians look set to take over the world next week.  Sally and the girls and I went to the beach last night for Stratford's Blues on the Beach, and some of the guys and I got to talking about the movie.  Interesting discussion.  The guys had no clue at all what the movie was about, but they knew about it and wanted to see it if they got a chance.  That's about as good as it gets when you're talking about a bunch of 40-something professionals with lives and hobbies and families.

I like Marvel's strategy here.  We've had a decade or so of movies about characters that people have heard of--Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, the X-Men, etc.  People are ready for something new.  They're praying for it.  And Marvel's giving it to them, albeit with the power of their brand firmly behind the new property.

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Joe Hill is perhaps best known as the son of legendary writer Stephen King.  His Locke & Key series was at one point heading for FX network as a TV show, but that fell through after the pilot was shot, and now apparently they're making it a movie trilogy.


The series is great.  It's a suburban horror fantasy set in coastal New England, but it came out in either five or six volumes, each five or so issues long...  That doesn't immediately scream "two hour adaptation", so I'm glad they're not trying to showhorn it into a single movie.  Still, I thought episodic TV was the way to go with it, and yeah, it's great that they're making movies, but the show would've worked great had it been done over a longer time horizon.

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This is supposed to be a new trailer for the show Gotham.  Most of the footage looks familiar, but they've done a nice job showing how scary the Riddler can be.


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This is confusing.  Janet Van Dyne is the Wasp, the wife of Hank Pym, who is Ant-Man / Giant-Man / Yellow Jacket.  But Marvel also cast a separate Yellowjacket, and it's House of Cards' Corey Stoll, playing Darren Cross, a character I've never heard of.

Meanwhile, the script is still being rewritten, they just replaced the movie's director, and yet Marvel swears this thing is coming out next year?

If GotG is the surprise movie that's going to take over the world, this one is the one that's going to surprise folks by being terrible.  I want to believe, but at this point, I'm becoming highly skeptical.

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The new series is set to take place immediately after A New Hope.
Godzilla, Mothra, and more...




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I feel vindicated.  I suggested adding Mockingbird to the show last year, and now here we are.  That said, I prefer this look to that old-school 80s version of the character.

This is still sexy but it's just (barely) possible that you could fight in it, too.
For what it's worth, I also suggested making a Power Man & Iron Fist TV show.  Which just goes to show the massive influence that this blog has.
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 29, 2014 at 9:22 PM

    Mockingbird on Agents... is such great news! Did they lose Edgar Wright as director on Ant-Man? That's bad news... I heard the film would be almost a heist film with Michael Douglas' Pym as an older mentor to Rudd's Scott Lang.

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    1. Danno E. CabezaJuly 31, 2014 at 11:17 AM

      They did lose Wright. I gather that there was a fundamental difference in the way the sides wanted to approach some part of the movie. Marvel has an interest in a certain inter-relationship to it's properties, and while I don't KNOW that caused the split, it seems a likely culprit.

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