Apparently Marvel Comics is punch drunk on a small taste of success.

True, Iron Man did very well at the box office last weekend, and it is expected to do well again this weekend, but it seems to have made them think that they are untouchable. This was their first film production under their own movie studio, and they seem to be under the impression that one success means you can go hog wild.

Let’s take a look at their upcoming slate of releases, shall we?

The Incredible Hulk – June 13, 2008
Punisher: War Zone – December 5, 2008
X-Men Origins: Wolverine – May 1, 2009
Iron Man 2 – April 30, 2010
Thor - June 4, 2010
Captain America – May 6, 2011
The Avengers – July 2011
Ant-Man – To Be Announced

Okay, the films in bold are done for a reason, and that’s because they will loosely form a series. It started with an after-the-credits scene in Iron Man, which I won’t spoil entirely, but “The Avengers Initiative” was mentioned. Rumor is that a similar scene will happen in The Incredible Hulk… then Thor… then Captain America… all building to these characters forming The Avengers for the film of the same title.

For those of you unfamiliar with them, The Avengers is a team of super-heroes in the Marvel universe that has an ever-rotating line-up of super powered beings that join together to fight various evils that pop-up from time to time. I think just about every Marvel character has rotated through the team at one time or another, but the original team was Ant-Man, Wasp, Thor, Iron Man and the Hulk, but Captain America quickly replaced the Hulk. As you can see, it looks like Ant-Man will spin out of this “event movie” as opposed to others leading into it, but his film would still count as part of the series.

While this sounds like a cool idea: get the origins out of the way in their own separate movies, let the team movie just be about a big fight where we only have to deal with the bad guy. The problem is that if even one of these movies is mediocre, the whole thing could get tainted. Take The Incredible Hulk movie for instance, he has already had one failed movie, and now there is a second one coming out that has mixed vibes coming off of it. If it sucks, as some suspect it will, would people be thrilled to see him again in three years as part of a team?

While I personally find Thor a lot of fun to make fun of (for reasons I won’t go into), it is going to be difficult to pull him off as a movie. If they follow the comics closely, it will be about a man who is not aware he is the Norwegian God of Thunder. Once he accidentally discovers it, he can tap his cane on the ground, and it will transform into Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer, and him into the god himself. What will follow is a whole lot of odd Norwegian-God talk. I’m not sure how popular this is going to be with the masses. He’s a cool character, and he’s had a long run, but it’s going to be an odd sell to the general movie going public.

The whole idea of what will really amount to a six or seven film series isn’t the only problem for the studio. X-Men Origins: Wolverine will probably do well, but Punisher: War Zone… ugh. This will be the third time that Marvel has attempted to launch a Punisher film, and the last two did not do well at all, so why do they think the third time is the charm? There are numerous other characters they could try in a movie before returning to a failed one for a third time, so this really makes no sense to me.

As a comic book fan, I am thrilled to see so many properties coming to the big screen, and they are obviously doing things with more forward thought than DC Comics, but I think now they may just be rushing things a bit too much. For all of my quibbles with the way DC Comics is handling things, at least they are taking a measured approach and not trying to just slam out movies to get them out there.

I may be completely wrong, and this plan may come off with flying colors, but I worry if even one fails, the whole row of dominoes will fall apart. The lynch pin will be the Captain America movie in my opinion (who, oddly enough, is currently “dead” in the comic books) because it will be released only two months before the central movie of the whole series. That will be the last taste in everyone’s mouthes before we launch into a film that will probably have an insane budget due to the number of actors involved, and a gigantic number of special effects. I also pity whomever gets picked to play Cap because they will probably be filming two films very quickly to appear in both their solo film and the team project.

More power to them if this comes off without a hitch, but I will be fairly surprised.

Recently, Pete Cashmore, my boss at Mashable, had a chance to chat with well-known rapper, Chamillionaire. I know, it made me scratch my head also until I watched the video, and then it actually made sense.

It seems that Mr. Millionaire (er…) has done his homework on digital media and is embracing it on a personal level. He wants to be where the kids are, and that’s on sites such as YouTube, MySpace and so on. All-in-all, he seems to be honestly into the new media space as opposed to those who say they are, but immediately buckle under questioning, so kudos to him.

As for what got me to blog about this, at around the 2:43 mark, Pete asks Millionaire (okay… there’s something I never envisioned writing…) about his ringtone sales. The digital ringtone for “Ridin’ Dirty” sold over 4 million units, making it the most successful ringtone to date, while his actual album sold 1.4 million copies in comparison and this is where the “dirty little secret” I refer to comes in.

As you can see, he addresses the fact that if someone goes on to a download site and purchases 9 of his 10 tracks, the record company does not report this as an album sale because the consumer did not purchase the full album. Fair enough, you can’t argue with that logic. The problem is that record companies continue to always point to “declining album sales” as how badly the industry is doing as a whole.

However, were are the metrics to factor in the singles sales? While certainly not an infallible system, what if lets say an album has 10 tracks on it, when 10 singles are sold from it, no matter if it’s the same song 10 times, it could be counted as an album sale. I am not in love with this idea, but it is certainly better than droning on and on about how piracy is killing “album sales”.

This is also a clear indication of what I have been saying for years: Why should people buy a full album when the majority of it will be fluff? Services such as iTunes have finally put the power into the hands of the consumers, and they are voting with their wallets, telling the music industry that they will no longer be force fed the pablum that they pass off as “quality” any longer. If artists would focus on quality as much as they do their images, they would see single sales convert far more easily in to full album sales, making everyone involved happier.

Chamillionaire is 100% correct in his comments, and one can only hope that someday, those suits at the record companies will listen when their artists speak up like this.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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Anyone ready for “Strike 2008 Round 2″?

It seems those lovable, huggable folks at the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) have walked away from the table talks with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), just as they did at the end of the last year with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA).

According to Deadline Hollywood, it seems the AMPTP may have been aching for a strike.  It is reported that on the first day of negotiations, Nick Counter, president of the AMPTP, came to the table and said, “These proposals are unreasonable. Well, I guess you’d better prepare for a strike.”  Nice to see they came into the negotiations with an open mind.

Apparently, if reports are to believed, SAG, in a good faith gesture, pulled DVD residuals off the table to smooth things over with the AMPTP, but the producers came in wanting to do away with the actor’s “French Hour”, which is an odd name for their lunch hour.  Er… okay.  They also want the right to use up to 5 minutes of television footage, and 10 minutes of film footage, without paying the actors for the use, nor ask permission to use the footage in a way they see fit.  So, get ready for George Clooney footage being used in advertisements for the Ku Klux Klan!

As I have said in the past, I am not big on unions, but there is something about the AMPTP that just makes my skin crawl.  Who does away with the right to lunch?  It seems when you look at the way this group of media moguls handled the WGA, and now SAG, they essentially want everything for nothing.  They wanted the writers to work without payment for Web content, and now they want the rights to use actors, whose endorsements can be worth millions of dollars, in any way they chose without some form of reimbursement to them.

I don’t get this.  Perhaps someone wiser than I in the ways of Hollywood can explain to me why the producers, people who are not involved in the creative process at all, should be allowed to use so many things for free.  Yes, they come up with the money to fund projects, but I would love to know why they feel this entitles them to things they ask for.

Now, if SAG does strike at the end of June, I highly doubt it will stretch on like the WGA did.  There were stockpiled scripts ready to go in case of a strike, but that’s a bit harder to do without any one to act them out.  If this strike does happen, it won’t be noticeable quite as quickly as the writer’s strike was, but expect next Summer to be a bit lite on films.

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power…Green Lantern’s light!

Where is my Green Lantern movie? All of these comic book movies being made, and doing well, and I still see no sign of a Green Lantern movie!

True, DC Comics has not had the film success of Marvel, but if any other character in the DC stable, outside of Superman and Batman, screams for a movie, it’s a movie about Hal Jordan and his spiffy ring.

For those of you unfamiliar with the character… for shame… but I shall be kind and fill you in any way.

Hal Jordan was a test pilot for Ferris Industries, and one day while sitting in a simulator, he found himself enveloped in a green light that tore the cockpit from it’s bolts, and sent him sailing across the desert landscape. When he landed, he found himself outside of a crashed spaceship that held an injured alien named Abin Sur.

Abin told Hal that he was the Green Lantern and that he was dying, and that he must pass his ring on to someone who was worthy of it by being a good person and having a strong will. He passed the ring to Hal, along with it’s accompanying power battery. Every 24-hours Hal must recharge the ring by saying the words I put at the top of the post, and then he can create anything he can imagine with the power of the ring. The only caveat to the ring’s power is it is ineffective against anything yellow due to an impurity in the ring.

So, of course, his main enemy has to be a guy named Sinestro who has a yellow version of the power ring. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

As the series progressed over the years, you learned that Hal was but one of 3600 Green Lanterns, each with their own sector of space to patrol (Hal’s was Sector 2814), and that the rings were invented, and maintained, by the Guardians of the Universe.

Well… where is it? Maybe it’s just me, but all of the elements are here for a great movie (action type hero… aliens… sci-fi… built-in villain… an obvious weakness… easy merchandising), but yet nothing ever seems to come of this idea. There have been rumblings here and there over the years of a potential movie, but then it never goes anywhere. What exactly is the issue? For crying out loud, they got that disaster of a movie, Catwoman, onto screens, so surely they could do this one!

I think this only bugs me because it is almost conspicuous in how this movie does not exist in that DC is owned by Warner Brothers, a major movie studio. Are they incapable of looking at their own intellectual properties and seeing what they can do with them? I man, for crying out loud, Marvel is giving the Punisher a -third- try after the first two failed! Don’t get me wrong, you all know how excited I am for The Dark Knight, but I think it’s time to move on past “the big two” in the DC Universe and give some of the other characters a go. Did any one really think Blade, a character barely known in the Marvel comics universe would spawn three movies? So, there is a precedent for lesser known characters making successful transitions to film.

Come on, DC… give us a Green Lantern movie!

The way online video is exploding is a bit mind boggling to me. Sure, we’ve had clips for a while now, but the idea of full episodes of television series, let alone movies, online, for free, and embeddable in any site is just… wow. True, they are ad-supported, but isn’t that a small price to pay for watching full television episodes for free when you want?

The site that blows me away is Hulu, which I have discussed before, from NBC. New episodes of television series are up within a few hours of when they air, and they are putting up entire older series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Dragnet and my much beloved, Arrested Development. Embedded below is the complete first episode of the first season, but if you head over to the site, you can watch the entire three seasons.

To my readers outside of the United States, you probably can’t watch this video, but Hulu is working towards international viewing also as soon as they finish some deals.

This isn’t to mention that you can now head over to SouthParkStuidos and watch every episode from all twelve seasons, go to sites like CBS and watch every episode of this past season of Big Brother, and on and on.

I think the questions to all this is what they will end up doing to damage television airings and DVD sales? Why should I, or anyone else, go out and buy a South Park DVD set when I can just head to their site and watch any episode I want on demand?  Less storage in my house, less impact on the environment and it saves me money, so what am I missing?  Yes, they are earning advertising revenue, but is it really enough to make up for the lost revenue in DVD sales?

In the cases of defunct series such as Arrested Development, it is breathing new life into the series as people who had never seen it before are discovering it, but current shows?  I just don’t get it.

A new trailer is out for The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins. I swear the more I see of this movie, the more excited I get, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing or not.

Getting this hyped up for a movie almost always leads to disaster for me, but based on how good the last movie was, and how good this one looks, it’s difficult to not get excited. And considering how good the little bits of Heath Ledger’s performance we’ve seen, he looks to have turned in an amazing performance. (Though sadly his last completed performance)

Yes, it does appear that they’ve changed several aspects of the character (his skin is not stained, he has a smile-scar, looks to be just plain old plum nuts), but they all look to be changes I can live with once to put the character in more of a reality-based atmosphere.

For me, of all people, to say I’m okay with changes to a character, you know I have to have good reasons. For me, the seminal work of this character comes down to one work by Alan Moore that made me realize that this character HAS to be handled as completely insane, and that was Batman:The Killing Joke. This book demonstrated more clearly than any other work that Batman and Joker are both clearly insane, and are locked in a dance of death that does not allow one to exist without the other. They are BOTH insane, one is just more socially acceptable than the other, but he is not that different from his “insane” counterpart.

There is probably no character in comics I am more passionate about than the Joker simply because I don’t think the vast majority of people grasp the true depths of his insanity. There is a beauty to his insanity, a poetry to it, IF he is handled correctly, and not every writer is up to the task, nor is every actor.

Cesar Romero, whom most people associate with the character due to the 1960′s TV series couldn’t have been further away from the real Joker if he tried. Not his fault mind you, he’s a fine actor, it was just the nature of the television series. As for Jack Nicholson in the 1989 film… ugh. So wrong, so very, very wrong. His “insanity” was brought on by his vanity… whee. What a horrible concept, but it was so much better than the TV series, we took it. Silly us.

Will we take Ledger’s performance with the same idea? Will we, the fans, call it brilliant only because it isn’t Nicholson’s? I honestly don’t think so. Look to your left, click the image to see a super-sized version (thanks to this blog for the amazing screen captures from the trailer), and tell me if this man doesn’t just look plain nuts for real? No, this isn’t some back-handed slap at his real life, I am purely talking his performance, and he does look completely certifiable. Watch the trailer, pay attention to the way he licks his lips… hanging out the car window… he is reveling in his insanity, embracing it, and not making any apologies for it.

I am over-estimating? I certainly hope not. When I see the movie, I will turn my usually over-critical eye towards Ledger in particular as he will be playing a character I care so deeply for, but thus far… consider me blown away.

Well, the party is over.

Microsoft had finally upped their offer to $33 a share from the $31 they initially offered, but it seems Yahoo wanted $37 a share.  Steve Ballmer finally decided it wasn’t worth the games, not the protracted fight it was going to be, so he has opted to move on, leaving Yahoo to their own devices.

Where does either company go from here?  Who knows, probably plodding along on the same paths they already were.  I still can’t quite grasp why Microsoft wanted this deal so bad, but that si for them to know and the rest of us to never learn.  I for one am just glad this is over so it won’t be in the news every five minutes.

Remember when Toshiba killed off HD DVD, everyone thought Blu-ray would take off now since there was no confusing format war any more? It would appear someone forgot to tell the consumers that they were supposed to be snapping it up.

According to a report issued by the NPD Group, Blu-ray player sales dropped 40% between January and February and then only recovered 2% between February and March. The researchers are actually choosing not to release firm sales figures because you might be able to identify the retailers due to the numbers being so low.

I don’t think this is quite as disastrous as other various tech pundits seem to be thinking: sales will always drop in the post-Christmas season, and we are also seeing a slow down in economic growth, meaning people are less likely to purchase luxury items. I do think one key factor has to be taken into account is the enormous collections of DVDs people have built up during the life-span format.

True, many people have said this would be Blu-ray’s next fight, but I think even they may have underestimated it. Upconverting DVD players are now dirt cheap, well under $100, while Blu-ray players, with their still unfinalized format, are sitting north of $300. So for less than a $100 your DVD collection gets a breath of new life as your able to enjoy them in new clarity on your HDTV, and no need to buy all of the same movies and television shows again in what is essentially the same format.

Meanwhile, the other elephant in the room is digital downloads, and Apple is now going to be delivering those day-and-date with the DVD/Blu-ray releases. The format is not perfected yet, and the resolution is less than that of a DVD, but if you prefer the idea of a lot less clutter in your life, freeing yourself of all that physical media, then you’re probably going to be willing to put up with slightly less resolution. (never mind being able to take your purchase mobile with you on your iPod/iPhone).

So, perhaps instead of HD DVD adopters being the “losers” in this format war, it may end up being all of us thatwent  with a high definition format disc to begin with.  Gee… wouldn’t that be fun?  Thanks, movie studios!

I warned you all this was coming, and here we are: RSS Awareness Day. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is gaining more and more acceptance, but it is still used by such a small percentage of people who read blogs on the Web, and I honestly can’t figure out why.

Today, Adam Ostrow over at Mashable, one of my many bosses there, I think summed up RSS in the simplest terms I have ever seen: I like to make the analogy to old-fashioned newspapers, which are often a round-up of stories from the wire services like AP and Reuters, blended in with content produced by the paper’s own reporters.

If you think about it, he is 100% right, it certainly is like you are creating your own newspaper. When you want to read the news, do you go to the AP site, then the Reuters site followed up by your choice of news network? No, typically you like it all in one place, so it’s easy to access, and read quickly, saving you time.  This is just what RSS does for you, except it does it with blogs and other news streams.  Check out this video if you have no knowledge of how it works.

I was a late bloomer, as I said in RSS – Is it for me?, but later recanted in RSS Revisted. My life would be impossible without this tool. I almost don’t want to read any site now that doesn’t support RSS!  So what are you waiting for?  Why aren’t you starting a reader yet?  And you can always add my feed as your first… you know, just saying.

A big thank you to Daniel of DailyBlogTips.com for this wonderful idea of spreading the love for RSS around.