In a not so surprising move, The CW announced today that it is taking Arrow to series.

It was announced back in January that The CW was ordering up a pilot entitled Arrow which would be based on the Green Arrow from DC Comics.  Not too long after that a casting sheet leaked out that pretty much convinced me that once again the network was going to mess this up just as it had with Smallville.

Well, never fear, it was announced today that The CW has ordered the pilot to series according to TV Line, so now we can all enjoy in the pain.  At the same time the network also picked up it’s re-imagining of Beauty and the Beast as well as the Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries, so apparently the network just wants to annoy as many fan bases as possible in one season.

Seeing as The CW canceled The Secret Circle and Ringer today, but renewed Nikita, it looks like you can expect these new shows to air sometime between Monday and Thursday as Friday is full and it doesn’t run original content on the weekends.

A lot of shows have been canceled and renwed in the past couple days, so you may want to take a look at the constantly updating Which TV Shows are Canceled and Renewed for 2012/2013 post again.

[via TV Line]

Universal looks set to announce it’s moving ahead on Kick-Ass 2, and filming may kick off as soon as August.

According to sources speaking with Deadline, Universal has picked up the rights to Kick-Ass from Lionsgate and plans to move full-speed ahead on a sequel to the cult hit.  New deals will need to be struck with the characters who played the three surviving characters: Aaron Johnson (Dave/Kick-Ass), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Chris/Red Mist) and Chloe Moretz (Mindy/Hit-Girl).  It will be Moretz that may pose the most issues as she has aged quite a bit since the original and has become quite the in-demand actress since the original film.  (Mainly because she stole the film.)

Matthew Vaughn who directed the original is committed to the X-Men: First Class sequel, so he would be unavailable when it came time to film.  He, however, has supposedly given his blessing to new director Jeff Wadlow who has also penned the script.

The original film was made for $30 million and grossed $48 million domestic and $48 million foreign for a $96 million worldwide gross.  While it didn’t make a huge return on its theatrical run, it has gone on to do well on home video and build up a cult following.  In a lot of cases such as this, the sequel will perform better than original as people who got acquainted with the original via home viewings wil go out to see the follow-up.  Will it be a giant hit?  Nope.  Will I be thrilled to get a sequel?  While I loved the original, it had its issues (I still can’t get over that jet pack), but I would gladly plopped down my money for another outing with Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl.

[via Deadline]

If you’ve seen The Avengers, you’ve seen the end credits scene with the purple guy. If you haven’t seen it yet, just move on to another post on this blog.

During the credits for The Avengers there is a scene that takes place between the leader of the alien army and a mysterious purple guy in armor.  If you aren’t a comic reader you have no clue who this is, but to those of us who have read Marvel comics for any length of time will immediately shout, “THANOS!”

First appearing in Iron Man #55 in 1973, Thanos has gone from an oddball villain to “The Mad Titan” who ended up killing off half the universe and pretty much every hero of Earth in the 1991 limited series, The Infinity Gauntlet.  Since that time he has been a bit more ambiguous as to what his motivations are, but suffice to say it appears he’s going to be a major pain-in-the-behind for the Marvel cinematic universe.

Born on Saturn’s moon of Titan, Thanos belongs to a race known as the Eternals.  While most of them appear human, Thanos was born with the Deviant gene which makes him look like the Eternals cousin race, you guessed it, the Deviants.  (Hey, Marvel wasn’t known for being overly original in the 1970′s and 80′s …)  Due to not looking like his race, he became secluded and fascinated by the darker things in life, eventually falling in love with Mistress Death, the embodiment of death in the Marvel Universe.  After going completely mad and slaughtering nearly all of the other Titans, he eventually launched on a crusade to impress Mistress Death so she would fall madly in love with him.

Thanos set out to collect the six Infinity Gems, also known as Soul Gems.  The six each represented a different aspect of reality: Time, Space, Soul, Mind, Reality and Power.  He combined the six gems on to what was dubbed the Infinity Gauntlet and with a wave of his hand wiped out half of the population of the universe.  Of course Earth’s heroes attempted to take him on, but they all met Mistress Death for their trouble.

When the true cosmic players of the universe finally got involved, they were able to get the gauntlet away from Thanos and undid all of the damage he had done, and the Mad Titan went to live on a farm on a desolate world.  He has shown up from time to time, but never in such a grandiose way.

So, what will the Marvel movies do with him?  Well, I think it’s fairly obvious this isn’t Farmer Thanos.  If they plan to introduce the Infinity Gauntlet, however is a different matter.  The glove was actually in the background of Thor in Odin’s armory.  Marvel even released an official photo of the prop that you can see at the bottom of this post. So the Gauntlet, while never mentioned, has been established as existing in the film continuity.

The question now is what Marvel plans to do with him.  As Thanos as obviously a big, huge bad, I can’t imagine him showing up in Iron Man 3 or Captain America 2.  As I suspect he will be picking up the gauntlet at some point, my suspicion is he will play a major part in Thor 2.   The only problem here is the release schedule actually goes Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Captain America 2 and then The Avengers 2.  So Marvel could mention the gauntlet has gone missing, then have Captain America talk to S.H.I.E.L.D. about it and … oh who knows, I’m sure there is a plan written down somewhere.

Any way you slice it, Thanos is here, and the Marvel cinematic universe is going to fell it down to its core.

People who have seen The Avengers are saying that the Hulk comes off as one of the best characters. With this in mind, Marvel is ready to roll him out once again as a headlining character.

… Can we please stop this before it gets started?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Hulk for the roll he’s played in the history of comics, and he makes a fabulous supporting character, but quite often he can go terribly off the rails when he is the lead.  Yes, the comic has gone on for hundreds of issues now, but the only time I truly enjoyed him was when Marvel handed him over to Peter David to write, and the only reason that decision was made was because the publisher felt he could do no harm working on a character no one cared about.  David took him in wild and fantastical directions – he became a mob enforcer in Las Vegas for a time known as Mr. Fixit as an example – but in general the character has just never been that engaging.

According to Deadline, the reaction to the Hulk in The Avengers is making them ponder what to do with the property next.  Paul Gitter, President of Consumer Products for Marvel, recently told Forbes, “[Marvel] will spin him off to a stand-alone program next year.”   Forbes went on to say that this will “presumably [be] supported by another big budget franchise movie in 2015. The entertainment studio is also exploring ways to promote Hulk as a ‘corporate icon’ similar to MetLife’s usage of Peanuts’ Snoopy, with Hulk’s image conveying a message about channeling strength to overcome workplace challenges.”

Yes, because using a character that turns in to a mindless machine of destruction is the perfect way to show strength in the workplace.

I have yet to see The Avengers, but I am already willing to bet there are three reasons the character worked: Mark Ruffalo’s performance, Joss Whedon’s writing and the fact that he is a supporting character.  If Marvel/Disney was smart, they would realize that two first two aspects of that could be recreated in a stand-alone film, but not the third.  There is also some talk of Guillermo del Toro working on producing a TV series over at ABC (which is also owned by Disney) that would bring the character back to the small screen.  This I could potentially get behind as you have to dig deeper into Bruce Banner to understand the Hulk and a serialized format allows that where a two-hour film doesn’t.

In one way or another the Hulk will be hanging around again, but lets just hope Marvel has learned its lessons from the first two films.  (side note, yes, I know Marvel didn’t do the first film by Ang Lee, but people still remember it and associated it with the property)

[via Deadline]

There is so much wrong with this new trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man that I don’t even know where to begin.

I have not been excited about The Amazing Spider-Man from day one, and I have to say with the more I see, the more justified I feel in that.  From Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) sounding like she knows Peter Parker’s (Andrew Garfield) secret, to hints in the trailer that his being bitten by the spider wasn’t an accident, this film is just hitting all the wrong notes for me.  Of course, not that any of this really matter as Sony has already announced a release date for The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

If this new trailer proved anything to me, it’s that Marvel has to find some way, any way, to regain the film rights to the characters it signed off on ages ago.  All of the contracts read that so long as the studios keep doing something new with the characters every so often, they can continue to hold on to them.

… Please, Marvel … get your legal team on this.

Who needs to wait for the home video release of a movie anymore to get a commentary track? Now you can just do it on clips as well!

While on the press junket leading up the U.S. release of The Avengers, Yahoo Movies got director and writer Joss Whedon to do a commentary track for a clip of the movie that had already been released.  The clip shows off the fight between Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), with Whedon letting you know he didn’t want it to just be a throw away fight and how it came about.

You know, I enjoy a good commentary track from time to time, but doing it to clips?  Seriously?  Are we going to do it to trailers next?  Promotional stills?

The latest trailer from the upcoming Dark Knight Rises promises a whole lot more than just action from the final installment of the Christopher Nolan Batman saga.

Beyond the confirmation that Selina Kyle/Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) is definitely teaming up with Batman (Christian Bale), we finally get a bit more of a look at John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). It’s obvious he’s a cop, but we see what appears to be him talking with Selina, and we see him drawing chalk bat symbols on wallas along with apparently lamenting the fact that Batman is gone. My suspicions that he is taken on as a protege by Batman are growing, but I still won’t go as far as to say that he becomes Robin.

Thankfully it also appears Bane (Tom Hardy) will be a bit easier to understand.  Yay!

Nolan has a lot to live up to following on the brilliance of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but the atmospheric nature of this trailer leads me to believe he will once again succeed.  It’s just sad knowing this is the end of this brilliant run of films.

The Dark Knight Rises opens in theaters on July 20.

It’s hard to believe, but it looks like Sin City: A Dame to Kill For really is going to happen.

Announced just last week, Robert Rodriguez is already starting to discuss the casting process for the follow-up to his 2005 Sin City.  Speaking with MTV, the director shared some details on who may return.

We still have to cast. I’m shooting Machete [Kills] next month, and we go right into Sin City [A Dame to Kill For].  It might overlap, but we haven’t done any casting yet, except for the people who we know are already in it and returning.   A Dame to Kill For, all those people come back. I just had lunch with Mickey [Rourke] this weekend. He’s all excited to come back, but he’s probably the first one. I saw Rosario [Dawson] too. I ran into her for something else, and she’s pumped. They’ve always been excited about doing another one, so that will be fun.

As I explained previously, the Sin City books are done out of order, so although we saw Marv (Mickey Rourke) die in the first film, there is nothing stopping him from showing up in the sequel.

Rodriguez had this to say about the long rumored possibility of Angelina Jolie’s involvement with this project..

It was immediately [known] that we were going to do it. I think it was 2007, and I was already meeting with Angelina Jolie and people to do it. The Weinsteins had just started a new company. They just didn’t have the money to do it at the time. It was like, “Go do another movie or two and come back. We’ll be ready.” I went off and did a couple movies. Frank went off and did some movies. Then it got harder and harder to come back and find the time to do it. We missed that moment when it was ready to go. Then it was so far afterwards that it might as well have been any time now, but people never lost their appetite for it. They still come up to us and say “When are you doing another ‘Sin City’?” We thought we had to do it at some point. Now we’re just making the time.

I haven’t even gotten to meet with her yet about it or discuss with Frank about who we would want to go with or talk to first. That’s a fun process, but that probably won’t happen in the next month.

The last interesting tidbit was that everyone really enjoyed the format of the first film being three stories, and while they plan to keep with that theme for this time, only one of them will be made up of previous material.

Dramatically, the three-act structure has lasted and is tried and true. I did an anthology before called “Four Rooms,” and if you look it up, anthologies are never successful. That’s the end of that, I thought. Then I said, “I bet I can do an anthology if it’s the same director, and not four, not five, not eight stories. That’s too many.” Three is a good number. I think two is just weird. Three feels like a dramatic structure, even if they’re separate stories. I feels like one, two, three acts and maybe a wrap around. It worked on “Sin City,” and that’s probably the first anthology that ever worked, that I can think of. So I’m going to stick with that template because, one, I invented it. I can claim it and go, “I’m going to do it again.” If it doesn’t work, then I’ll know that “Sin City” was just a fluke.

[...]

If we did just one story, the audience might feel cheated that they didn’t get a bigger glimpse of it, especially having waited so long.  So, lets go back to the three story structure.  We’ll take A Dame to Kill For, which already pre-exists, and have Frank [Miller] come up with two more new stories and a wrap-around so it feels similar in structure to the first one, but even more expanded than that.

With the news that we’ll get two brand new stories set in Basin City, I’m more excited than ever to see this film take shape.

[via MTV]

At long last it appears that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller are ready to film Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

The original Sin City was released in 2005 and was pretty much unlike any other film out there in the market at the time. A few have traveled down the same road (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), but none of them were quite as successful at it. While the film did okay at the box office ($40 million budget, $74 million domestic/$84.65 million foreign), it wasn’t a record breaker by any means. It did, however, make a profit, and Robert Rodriguez is known to be easy to work with and being able to keep his budgets under control. With that in mind, people have been begging for a sequel for seven years.

For those of you unfamiliar with how the Sin City books work, they are more vignettes of the lives of the characters and don’t follow a linear time line in publication.  Although Marv, played brilliantly by Mickey Rourke in the first film, went to the electric chair in the first film, he may appear in the second film.  The first film covered three of the stories – The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard as well as the short story, The Customer is Always Right – and it appears the second film will focus on A Dame to Kill For, but could very well include complete other stories or aspects of them.  Untouched stories so far include Booze, Broads, & Bullets, Hell and Back and the graphic novel Family Values.  In short, characters who died in the first one can very easily show up in a sequel.

Filming is due to begin this summer, and casting will begin next month.  The actors from the first film who are needed to reprise their roles are all expected to return.  No release date has been announced as of yet, but I’m very ready to return to Basin City.

You can see the full press release after the jump.

Continue Reading ->

Yet another clip from The Avengers has shown up online. At this pace is there going to be any scene left from this movie that we haven’t seen when it comes out May 4?

We do seem to be going through introductions to all of the characters with these clips.  The first one showed off Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow along with Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson.  The next one gave us Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark and Tom Hiddleston as Loki.  This newest one shows us Chris Evans as Captain America and Chris Hemsworth as Thor as they team up against Loki’s army.

These scenes clearly come from what we saw them filming last August.

Since we seem to be knocking two characters out per clip, I’m thinking we’re due for a Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye clip in the not too distant future.

With each clip from The Avengers that comes out, this movie just looks more and more awesome.

We got our first full clip last week, but this new one is thrilling because: 1) Robert Downey Jr. is, as always, awesome, and 2) it’s cool to hear “Avengers” said as the team name as well as hearing “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.”

If anyone had told me when I was a kid I’d someday see a film like this, I wouldn’t have believed them.  Even now it still doesn’t seem quite real, but I can’t wait to sit down and see it for myself come next month.

The sequel to the successful X-Men: First Class film is set to begin filming in January, but it’s not just because it’s finally ready.

20th Century Fox has been anxious to get the sequel to X-Men: First Class rolling, but it ran into a small problem when Jennifer Lawrence, who played Mystique, went on to sign for The Hunger Games film series.  She is now locked into at least three films, but she also agreed to three X-Men films.  What’s a young actress to do?

Well, it appears an agreement has been reached between the two studios that will see Lawrence film Catching Fire, the second book in the series, this summer and then go directly to filming her second go in the blue make-up.  The issue that arose was Lionsgate wanted to hold all the actors for seven months in case of reshoots, which would have made all of them unavailable for any other work.  While a nice dream to have, the contract for the X-Men films takes precedence as it is older.

No word yet on how many cast members of the first film will return, but I think it’s safe to say we’ll be seeing Mystique.

[via Dark Horizons]