…You can tell there’s an Amazing Spider-Man movie out, as producer and former Marvel chief Avi Arad can’t stop talking about Marvel Studios and The Avengers. This week, he decided to respond to an article from BusinessWeek which had praised Kevin Feige as the mastermind of the Cinematic Universe, with Arad claiming he was “single handedly putting together the Marvel slate”. You can read Arad’s diatribe in full here…
…For all of Arad’s importance, he must be left scratching his head as to why The Amazing Spider-Man 2 failed to match the box office opening of Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier when it made its long-awaited North American bow last weekend, with the Spidey sequel pulling in an opening weekend haul of $92 million compared to The Winter Soldier’s $96 million. The film has been playing internationally for a couple of weeks now and should cross the $500 million mark this weekend, but with Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past on the horizon it looks like TASM2 could end up being the lowest-grossing instalment of the franchise – a spot previously occupied by The Amazing Spider-Man on $752.2 million…
…If you’ve seen The Amazing Spider-Man 2, or you don’t care about spoiling yourself, then you might be interested to read the thoughts of Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone and producer Matt Tolmach on the film’s conclusion, which you see here…
…So, now that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is here, Sony appears to be pushing full steam ahead with its plans to expand the universe with its further solo sequels and spin-offs for Venom and The Sinister Six. This week, Marc Webb discussed possible new villains for The Amazing Spider-Man 3, although he basically just name-dropped the teased line-up of the Sinister Six, albeit with one particular bad guy standing out: “Kraven. Kraven. I like the idea of Kraven. The Vulture. Ock. I always thought the idea of Mysterio was interesting. Maybe Scorpion. But really, Kraven I think is kind of interesting.” Who would you like to see Spidey taking on next..?
…Shifting to Warner Bros. now and after the big Justice League announcement, it’s time to start speculating which characters will be joining Superman (Henry Cavill), Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) in the post-Batman vs. Superman DC team-up. You’d have to imagine that Green Lantern would be one of those characters, and Green Lantern co-writer and Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has expressed his excitement about the possibility of seeing the Emerald Knight back on the big screen, stating that: “I would love it. At the end of the day, I just want to see a great Justice League movie. I think they’re putting a lot of really cool pieces into play with the first two Superman movies and I’m basically a sucker for a great comic book movie. As long as they’re doing something awesome, I’ll be the first one in line…”
…As for Arrow, the hit superhero show is set for its explosive season finale this Wednesday with the final showdown between Ollie (Stephen Amell) and Deathstroke (Manu Bennett); we’ve got a couple of promos [see here] and a poster and images [see here] from the season finale ‘Unthinkable’, while you can also check out Jessie Robertson’s review of the previous episode ‘Streets of Fire’ here…
…Great news for DC fans – Arrow will have plenty of company on the small screen when it returns for its third season later this year, with Warner Bros. Television securing a clean sweep with all four of its DC pilots getting picked up for full season orders. Joining Arrow on The CW is the Grant Gustin-headlined spin-off The Flash (along with iZombie) [check out a series synopsis and cast list here, as well as the first poster here] while David S. Goyer (Man of Steel) and Daniel Cerone’s (The Mentalist) Constantine has been picked up by NBC, and FOX has also picked up the Batman prequel series Gotham…
…FOX wasted very little time in giving us our first look at Gotham, debuting a rather impressive first trailer and new cast photo, while showrunner Bruno Heller (The Mentalist) has spoken about which villains we can expect to see during the first season: “Obviously, the Penguin, Riddler, young Catwoman… Possibly Harvey Dent. Poison Ivy. Um … and then there will be others, but I hate to — I’m so used to doing a police procedural, so I’m used to telling, ‘Next week he’s going to go there.’ With this, it’s very much storytelling. So I would be remiss to tell you who will show up when. I will say we’re not going to skimp on giving people the characters they want and expect from Gotham. But when and how they’re going to show up is half the fun. Penguin is one of those guys that, as soon as you see him, you go, “Oh, that’s the Penguin.” It would be hard to disguise him as somebody else… [The Joker] is the crown jewel of the Batman villains. He will be brought in with great care and a lot of thought… [Heath Ledger gave] a wonderful performance and — apart from everything else — wonderful make-up. And we should try to live up to that. It will be a different character. It’s certainly going to be more Heath Ledger than Cesar Romero. But like I say, all of these people are real people with feelings and emotions and history and parents. I just build from that…”
…Coinciding with its DVD and Blu-ray release this past Tuesday, Warner Bros. dropped a new clip and stills from the latest DC Universe Animated Original Movie Son of Batman, as well as releasing a synopsis, cast list and details of the special features set to accompany WB’s next animated offering Batman: Assault on Arkham. Set to join Kevin Conroy’s Dark Knight in the video game spin-off are Neal McDonough (Captain America: The First Avenger) as Deadshot, Troy Baker (The Last of Us) as Joker, Matthew Gray Gubler (Criminal Minds) as Riddler, CCH Pounder (The Shield) as Amanda Waller, Greg Ellis (24) as Captain Boomerang, and Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) as Black Spider, and the film will hit shelves on August 12th…
…Director Joe Carnahan (The Grey) has given us with an update on his planned adaptation of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s ultra-violent cult comic book series Nemesis, stating that: “I think the biggest challenge with Nemesis is that it’s just a motherf*cker of screenplay in that it pushes a lot of buttons and does things that both expand and violate the traditional mores of the ‘comic book adaptation’ and that’s a scary conceit when The Dark Knight is considered the socio-political lynchpin of that particular universe. I think Nemesis f*cks with the genre in such a thumb-in-the-eye fashion that it might simply be something for another time and place. It’s incredibly topical and remains infuriatingly so. I chalk it up to another really wonderful script that my brother and I wrote that simply may be too smart-assed for its own good… My brother {Matthew Carnahan] and I took our real inspiration from Nemesis in the fact that only one character, the bad guy, wore a costume. From their it deviates from the source material in a number of ways but what remains alive and well is Millar’s simmering disdain for the status quo and the relentless violence that characterizes the graphic novel…”
…And finally, Carnahan also touched upon his aborted Daredevil movie for Fox, which fell apart after the rights to the Man Without Fear reverted back to Marvel Studios: “What people don’t realize about the DD project is that the producers of the film, got to me very late. They had a script that I read and I thought that while the action was wonderful, the story didn’t really have any additional bite. There was nothing. I suggested a trilogy as follows. ‘Daredevil ‘73’ ‘Daredevil ‘79’ and ‘Daredevil ‘85’ where I was going to do a kind of ‘cultural libretto’ and make the music of those eras a kind of thematic arc . So the first one would be Classic Rock, the second one would be Punk Rock and the third film would be ‘New Wave.’ The problem was, the option was almost set to lapse so we made an eleventh hour bid to Marvel to retain the rights for a bit longer so I could rework the script. Unfortunately, it just didn’t happen. Marvel wanted the rights back. I don’t blame them.”
Gary Collinson is a writer and lecturer from the North East of England. He is the editor-in-chief of FlickeringMyth.com and the author of Holy Franchise, Batman! Bringing the Caped Crusader to the Screen.
