Our weekly round-up of all the talking points from the world of movie superheroes…
With Green Lantern arriving this coming week Warner Bros. have really ramped up the publicity with eight new clips from the film, in addition to a host of video interviews featuring director Martin Campbell, screenwriter Greg Berlanti, producers Geoff Johns and Donald DeLine and stars Ryan Reynolds (Hal Jordan), Blake Lively (Carol Ferris), Angela Bassett (Dr. Amanda Waller), Geoffrey Rush (Tomar-Re), Mark Strong (Sinestro), Michael Clarke Duncan (Kilowog), Peter Sarsgaard (Hector Hammond), Temuera Morrison (Abin Sur) and Tim Robbins (Hammond). If that’s not enough to satisfy your Green Lantern thirst, then you might want to check out this series of press junket videos along with fifteen minutes of B-roll footage from the upcoming film.
Moving on to Warner Bros. big superhero offering of 2012 and a few new set photos have emerged from the shoot of The Dark Knight Rises. Now, there’s been a lot of talk these past few weeks about Alfred (Michael Caine) ending up in the hospital, where it’s rumoured that Bane (Tom Hardy) will attack Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and possibly throw the billionaire out of a window. Quite how Bruce would manage to survive such a fall is anyone’s guess (I mean, it’s pretty high – take a look for yourself), but the bigger question is, just who is that masked man? Bane? Black Mask? Some random League of Shadows goon? Or maybe it’s the stuntman that Anne Hathaway clocked…
Elsewhere, ComicBookMovie got an unconfirmed ‘scoop’ (presumably from someone who’d just finished reading Knightfall) about a major plot point in The Dark Knight Rises, while in other Batman news we got a look at some concept art for James Gordon and Catwoman, albeit from the upcoming DC Original Animated Movies adaptation of Frank Miller’s Year One, which you can check out here.
X-Men: First Class opened last weekend and while it seems to have been well received by the fan community the 60s-set prequel hasn’t exactly set the box office alight. First Class topped the US chart with a debut weekend of $55.1m, the second-lowest of the X-Men franchise after Bryan Singer’s original, while here in the UK it was saved from the wooden spoon by two days of preview screenings, giving it an opening haul of £5.4m. First Class currently sits on a world-wide gross of $148m, and at this rate it’s going to struggle to overtake Thor in the race for 2011’s biggest superhero movie, especially given the competition it will face this month from the likes of Super 8, Green Lantern, Cars 2 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Shifting over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a new TV spot for Captain America: The First Avenger has given us the first words from the Red Skull himself, Hugo Weaving, in advance of the new trailer premiering tomorrow at the Hero Complex Film Festival. Chris Evans (Captain America), Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) and Mark Ruffalo (The Incredible Hulk) have also dropped a few brief updates about Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, while a Twitter user by the name of Lionheart3rd seemed to be providing updates directly from the shoot until his account was disabled. ComicBookMovie managed to collate the tweets, which don’t contain all that much to be honest but – if true – do serve as extra confirmation that aliens will be present in the film, which I think everyone pretty much suspects to be the case by now anyway. If they are, it’s probably a good time to make it official.
Rounding up the best of the rest…
…Last week director David Slade teased some info on his upcoming Daredevil reboot and now Fox have announced that Fringe writer Brad Caleb Kane has been hired to pen the screenplay, which will be based on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s acclaimed ‘Born Again’ run. Still now word yet on potential candidates to replace Ben Affleck as the Man Wihout Fear…
…Ryan Reynolds had a few words for MTV about Deadpool, praising director Tim Miller and explaining that the X-Men Origins: Wolverine spin-off is likely to be “pretty nasty, and pretty hard”, while he’s likely to start the film after his next project R.I.P.D…
…Sticking with the various X-Men spin-offs, a couple of weeks back it was revealed that eight directors were under consideration to take over from Darren Aronofsky on The Wolverine. Well, now we can scratch Mark Romanek off that list as the Never Let Me Go director confirmed to DigitalSpy that he is officially out of the running, while Doug Liman and Antoine Fuqua have also moved on to other projects…
…It’s been rumoured that we’ll get our first look the trailer for next year’s The Amazing Spider-Man when Transformers: Dark of the Moon hits cinemas later this month….
…And finally, be sure to enter our fabulous Superman giveaway for your chance to win The Superman Motion Picture Anthology on Blu-ray, along with seasons 1-9 of Smallville on DVD!
Gary Collinson
