Tagged: Iron Man

‘Secret Invasion’ #8 to be a Week Late

  • News
  • October 28, 2008

Marvel has issued a release indicating the final issue of Secret Invasion will now be in store the first week of December, a week later than anticipated.

“The additional pages in #8 did both Leinil and the schedule in,” explained Executive Editor Tom Brevoort in a press release. “Anybody who pored over the artwork from #7 a week ago can easily see how he and Mark Morales have been putting their all (and then some) into every page and every panel, and that effort has finally caught up with us. Hopefully, retailers and fans will forgive us these extra two weeks as we make sure that everything is in the shape it should be in for the extra-sized climax—and from there, it’ll be smooth sailing straight into Dark Reign.”

David Gabriel, Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Sales, said in the release, “In speaking with retailers, Marvel decided it was more important to preserve the creative integrity of the series, rather than rush out the final issue. This not only creates a stronger product for our loyal readers, but also for our retailer partners, whose support helped make Secret Invasion a huge success.”

A mammoth event like this shipping late is no surprise and keeps the creative team intact as opposed to DC’s Final Crisis that recently announced the final issue will be illustred by Doug Mahnke and not J.G. Jones. (more…)

The Hulk: Is He or Isn’t He?

  • News
  • October 24, 2008

Rule number one of The Hulk: do not make Hulk angry. Rule number two: do not make Hulk angry.

You’d think that the bigwigs at Marvel Studios would’ve gotten that memo, but the way they’ve been playing with Bruce Banner’s bigger half says otherwise. After Ang Lee’s widely panned Hulk, Marvel re-rolled the dice with The Incredible Hulk. The film, starring Edward Norton as the Jade Giant, didn’t do nearly as well as Iron Man but still managed to stomp on its 2003 predecessor in terms of critical acclaim. The DVD of the film was released this past Tuesday.

Still, Hulk’s on-screen future is uncertain. Recent reports pegged the character as the villain for the upcoming Avengers film, with Marvel Studios’ own president of production Kevin Feige echoing the idea. Feige later said that a direct Hulk sequel was up in the air.

"The truth is that Hulk has had two films in the past five years, and it’s time to give some of the other guys a turn," Feige recently said in an MTV interview. "I would expect that people may see the Hulk again soon [possibly in The Avengers] before he is again carrying his own film."

That was the official scoop as of Monday, October 20. Now comes a conflicting report from Gale Anne Hurd, producer on both Ang Lee’s Hulk and Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk. Hurd says that she has every intention of bringing the Green Meanie back to theaters. (more…)

Marvel’s Maisel Discusses Film Franchises

  • News
  • October 23, 2008

David Maisel, Executive Vice President, Office of the Chief Executive, and Chairman of Marvel Studios spoke to investors last weekend and IESB has a complete transcript up for those interested.

Highlights of the talk, though, indicate that Marvel is working hard to maximize their film franchises without blowing the budget on any single film and prefer controlling the films since that gives them the latitude to maximize scheduling.

Investors questioned if Spider-Man 4, were it to come out in 2010, would complicate Iron Man 2 and Thor?  Maisel said, “It would be a nice situation to have, I think there’s room enough for all three and we’d work that out. But it would absolutely be a nice situation to have for Marvel’s fiscal results that year.” On the other hand, Sony has announced Spidey 4 as coming in 2011.

“This is one of the reasons we did our own studio,” Maisel explained to the room full of non-fans, “because not only, well, three reasons. One, we’ve got, now, the economic upside to the movies, we have 100% the economic upside from Iron Man and from the merchandise of Iron Man, whereas before we only got the small license fee and we had to share merchandising. The second reason is, we can control our destiny, we can announce, ‘hey, Iron Man 2 is this date and we’re making this movie and we’re making Thor and we’re making Avengers and Captain America.’ Sony controls that with Spider-Man and so I can’t comment on when the movies come out beyond what they’ve said. I guess all I can say is that Spider-man films have done so well, that it would be, I would assume, unlikely that we wouldn’t see a steady stream more of Spider-Man films going forward. The exact timing and year is up for them to announce.” (more…)

Studios Shuffle Holiday Schedules

  • News
  • October 21, 2008

As films falter in meeting their deadlines to make their scheduled release dates, studios are constantly shuffling the calendar.  This time of years the gamesmanship is especially tough as studios eye projects with the hopes of securing Academy Award nominations. The dominoes have been falling with particular speed in the last week so here’s a recap.

With The Weinstein Company most likely bumping The Road from November to December to 2009, it has put its marketing efforts behind The Reader.

This was seen as a good opportunity for Paramount which had a lot of faith in the Robert Downey Jr. film, The Soloist.  Instead, they surprised prognosticators and moved the film to March 13, 2009. Word is that test screenings did not go well and rather than spend extra dollars to rush, Paramount’s budget cutting has prompted the schedule shift.

The studio has also delayed Defiance, the World War II drama starring Daniel Craig, to open on December 31, just in time to qualify for the Oscars but away from the box office competition in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

What this does is also shift which performers will receive studio dollars behind Oscar bids.  As we wave farewell to Viggo Mortenson, Jamie Foxx and others, the field now turns to focus on Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Mickey Rourke (Wrestler), Josh Brolin (W.), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) and Sean Penn (Milk).  Downey is likely to be pushed by Paramount for both Iron Man and more likely a supporting nod in Tropic Thunder while Warner Bros. will most certainly launch a major campaign for Heath Ledger’s role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

The final bit of scheduling news also involves Downey as his Sherlock Holmes has been pencilled in for November 20 2009.

Review: ‘Incredible Hulk’ DVD

025195039918-z-incrdcrfu-21-2312374Ang Lee’s [[[Hulk]]] film failed because he spent too much time on the Jekyll/Hyde aspects, the very ones that inspired Stan Lee.  After all these years, people wanted to see the Hulk leap and smash things.  When he leapt, we cheered, but there just wasn’t enough of it.

Director Louis Leterrier achieved a far better balance in this year’s [[[Incredible Hulk]]] which builds on the mythos while firmly settling into the new Marvel Cinema Universe. He wisely covers the obligatory origin materials during the title sequence and then gives us a story.

Unfortunately, the story just wasn’t as gripping as we had hoped.  The film, arriving Tuesday on DVD, is largely the Army hunting the Hulk as Bruce Banner searches for a cure.  While that worked fine in the 12-page [[[Tales to Astonish]]] stories, it’s not nearly enough for a feature film.  The biggest problem with Zak Snyder’s story is that the Super Soldier formula that is now linked to the Hulk and the Abomination is clearly able to turn people into weapons of mass destruction and all the military sees is a weapon.  Not a single person in uniform saw it as anything else and frankly, we’ve seen this theme before and done better elsewhere.

The notion that Emil Blonsky is a soldier towards the end of his career, with nothing to lose, and therefore more than willing to become the Abomination is a nice way to integrate the character from the comics to the film.  But, he’s as single-minded as everyone else in the story, which is a shame.

Penn’s script lifts the Mr. Blue character from Bruce Jones’ celebrated run on the title but reveals him to be Dr. Samuel Sterns, and frankly, I just didn’t buy their connection or the way Sterns suddenly switches from dedicated scientist to Colin Clive in [[[Frankenstein]]]. The fact that in the comics Stearns evolves into the Leader complete with big green head means he’s around should the movie franchise continue so hopefully he’ll be rounded out.

As presented, Leterrier’s film is pretty much A to B to C with pauses for Hulking out and destroying things until the climactic fight in Harlem.  I’ve certainly seen worse, but had hoped for something better considering [[[Iron Man]]], released just weeks prior, showed that serious issues could be addressed through fantastic means.
 

(more…)

The Theory of Webcomics: The Daily Grind

  • News
  • October 19, 2008

The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge is a competition between online comic artists to see who can maintain the longest Monday to Friday update schedule, following a strict set of rules. Each artist lays $20 USD on the line. The last man left standing takes the entire pot. The competition started on Monday, February 28, 2005, and is still going with ten contestants remaining.

Webcomics giants like Scott Kurtz, Chris Crosby, Steve Troop, and Jennie Breeden have all missed updates and been beaten out for the top spot. Conversely, none of the remaining contenders feature on Wikipedia’s list of Self-Sufficient Webcomics. Does this seem counter-intuitive?

Any successful webcomic creator will tell you that regular updates are important — in order to build an audience, you need to provide regular content to keep people coming back to the site. And very few comics have come into success with only one comic a week — you could pretty much count them on one hand — so you’d need at least two or three updates each week. If you can stretch it, five is optimal, because it gets the working world checking your site as part of their daily routine.

If your readers have the right sort of personalities, an irregular update schedule could work in your site traffic’s favor. Studies of gamblers has shown that irregular rewards — that is, receiving a reward only sometimes, and seemingly at random, for the same action — play all sorts of fun games with human brain chemistry. This is pointed to as the cause of the Las Vegas zombies who sit at slot machines for days. Is that any different from checking Order of the Stickevery day hoping that one of the three weekly updates will be there?

(Well, how different it is depends on how much of a reward you consider a new OotS comic to be. Money is a pretty universal reward. The comic needs to be good enough to trigger a “reward” response, because a sporadic, unfunny comic quickly gets dropped, rather than obsessively watched.) (more…)

The Man of the day After Tomorrow, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • October 16, 2008

And every fair from fair sometime declines / By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d

Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

smallville-2-figures-8099962

 

The Superman of today is not the Superman of the Thirties, nor of the Eighties, nor the Superman that will be. At some point the Man of Tomorrow becomes the Man of the Day After Tomorrow. He will evolve and change as he has since his creation. Everything changes, everything evolves. The alternative is death and extinction.

The principal problem (IMO) with the most recent Superman film, Superman Returns, is that director Brian Singer wanted to go back and make the Superman 3 film that he felt should have been made. However, that interpretation of Superman belonged to the era in which the original Christopher Reeve Superman was created. Say what you want about Smallville, it at least re-interpreted Superman as if he had come to Earth recently and was a young man today. Sure, at the start it was a little Superman 90210, but so what? It translated the mythos into something recognizable for our era. In fact, in this its supposedly last season, after losing two of the lead supporting cast members, I think the show has gotten better. It borrows heavily from the comic book mythos that spawned it but has consistently thrown a new spin on that mythos. Superman Returns didn’t.

It’s not just Superman; comics as a medium needs to re-invent itself, to adapt to changing times. I love, honor, and respect the comic book retailers but they are in hard times and its going to get harder. Comics are a niche market and the retailers are part of that niche.  There’s x amount of fans buying the books and they have y amount of cash to spend on them. DC and Marvel play the same games from the Eighties with continuity heavy crossovers and attempts to crowd one another off the shelves. None of this grows the market.

One of the things I like about ComicMix and other sites like it is that we are where the eyeballs are, where the future of comics is going to lie – here on the Internet. This is where you can grow the market. It’s cheaper to produce stories on the Internet – no cost for printing or shipping, no distribution or retailer percentages – and you can still package the material for trade paperbacks which is where the real money is in comics anyway. Most of all, it has the potential to reach people who don’t go to comic book stores.

(more…)

Guggenheim talks ‘Green Lantern’

  • News
  • October 14, 2008

There’s been a lot of talk about new, darker toned movies being made of DC Comics properties based on the success of The Dark Knight. That’s had one aisle of comic fans pretty psyched, as the more mature direction of Batman’s big screen adventures have definitely upped the gravitas factor. On the other hand, not every character lends itself to a "dark tone," such as the impending Superman relaunch.

Luckily, it sounds like Green Lantern is going to shine through the blackest night for a full on "respectful approach to the character [of Hal Jordan, and] a loving approach to the entire mythos."

That’s according to Marc Guggenheim, the writer of the upcoming Lantern feature. He spoke to Newsarama about the film’s progress, saying that "it’s pretty far along." The television producer and part-time comic book writer has worked on the script with Greg Berlanti and Michael Green.

"We’re reasonably deep into [Green Lantern]," he tells the website. "I’m never really comfortable publicly commenting on the movie because unlike the TV show, I’m just one of three writers and I’ve sworn a blood oath to secrecy. But we’re in the thick of it. We’re moving along at a pretty hefty clip."

And, according to Guggenheim, the alleged "revamp" of DC film properties hasn’t effected Hal Jordan in the slightest.

"I know a lot’s been made in newspapers and magazines about a revamping of DC’s approach," says Guggenheim. "That hasn’t been my sense. Maybe a focusing; maybe a ratcheting up of pace and energy. Whatever it’s been, it really hasn’t affected this project in the least. All the drafts have come in on schedule. All the notes have been the same kind of notes that we would have gotten in the absence of any ‘revamping.’"

Guggenheim tries not to pay attention the rumors and speculation about the project, but couldn’t avoid hearing the biggest rumor of ’em all: Ryan Gosling as Hal Jordan.

"I read that online," Guggenheim says. "As one of the writers, I’m not really involved in the day-to-day pre-production on it all. But I think it would be pretty amazing [casting.] I’ll go on record saying that."

Regardless of how the production aspect shakes out, there’s no question that it’s a wonderful time for comics on film.

"The kind of summer we just had, with movies like Iron Man and Dark Knight, makes a fertile marketplace for all comic book movies," Guggenheim says. "the timing could not have been better for us with [Green Lantern]."

Earlier this month, Latino Review scooped that Green Lantern was aiming for a 2010 release date. By all accounts, it looks like Hal Jordan will be on time for lift off.

Giggenheim and Berlanti’s Eli Stone has its second season debut on ABC tongiht.

Superheroes Come Home, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • October 14, 2008

I guess we’ll have to get our superhero fixes from comic books for a while, though I’m not complaining, because isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? My glances through the various newspapers and magazines that come to this house tell me that there are no superhero movies coming to a theater near me, and the closest thing to a new superhero on television is those can-do wheels on Knight Rider, whose ancestor is the Batman utility belt of the middle-period comics and the early Green Arrow quiver; whatever the situation calls for…well, here it is – just the thing. Some of last season’s superdoers are back, and some of them will be on our living room screen, though the plot(s) of one seem to be unfocused and the future of another, The Sarah Conner Chronicles, seems to be iffy, which saddens me because one of the stars makes my dirty old man merit badge pulsate.

Superheroes and summertime seem to be yoked. As usual, commerce rather than aesthetics seem to be the reason. Until recently, and maybe even now, publishers felt that their comic book audience – kids – had more disposable income and more leisure during the hot months and so they saved their annuals and double-sized issues and important stories – Reed and Sue get married! – for the time when the young’uns lucky or unlucky enough not to have jobs didn’t recite the pledge of allegiance every morning.

(Ah, I can remember – or almost remember – the feel of the cool concrete of a front porch under my prone body as I looked at the funny book and wondered why his shirt was red if his name was Green Lantern and couldn’t his cape at least be green? Was there an editor in the making here?)

(more…)

Captain America Hulks Out

  • News
  • October 13, 2008

A while back, The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier claimed that a scene was shot in which Bruce Banner travels in the arctic. In the scene, the filmmaker hid one heck of a red, white and blue easter egg: Captain America buried beneath the ice, shield and all. The film’s producer Gale Anne Hurd later denied the claim, saying that "Captain America was not visible in that scene."

Welp, time to call bull puckey on that line of defense. Film School Rejects got their mittens on a copy of the Incredible Hulk DVD (available on October 21 and one we’ll be reviewing here soon) and watched the scene in question. Sure enough, Steve Rogers himself is indeed in the film, though you might need a magnifying glass and a few stiff drinks to catch the cameo.

Towards the end of the 2:25 long scene, an avalanche occurs that crashes at the camera. It’s during this sequence that Captain America’s star-spangled body can be seen just beneath the ice. Looks like Letterier has won this round, Ms. Hurd.

For those keeping track, this marks three direct references to Captain America in the Marvel Studios film lore thus far. In Iron Man, there’s a brief shot featuring the fabled Avenger’s shield in Tony’s workshop. In Hulk, there are two mentions of Corporal Rogers: the use of "super soldier serum" by Emil Blonksy and, of course, the hero’s newly discovered icy tomb.

If these references are to be taken as canon, then Hulk‘s snowy prologue takes place before the events of Iron Man, since Steve’s shield is buried beneath the ice. That implies that Rogers’ body was discovered at some point between the two films, possibly before Tony Stark is fully immersed as Iron Man. Keeping the two films’ endings in mind, namely Tony’s encounter with Nick Fury and his conversation with General Ross, it’s possible that The Avengers are already in place by the time The Incredible Hulk concludes. Perhaps, then, the superhero team-up feature will take place soon after Hulk’s ending with the Avengers pursuing the Jade Giant.

So, has Marvel tipped its hand and revealed how the cards are falling together on screen, or do we just have too much time on our hands? Tell us what you think below!

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks