To the surprise of absolutely no one, the Fantastic Four films are getting a reboot.

After two films that met poor reviews, the Fantastic Four are set to get a new movie with a new cast.  Obviously a third entry in the last series wasn’t going to happen as neither of them did well, but 20th Century Fox wants to keep the rights from reverting to Marvel/Disney, so they have to get something into production.  So long as the studio keeps something based on the property coming out every few years they can hold on to the right indefinitely, making sure that the growing Marvel movie studio doesn’t get its hands on one of its longest running sets of characters.

Who wants to bet that no one ever makes a movie deal like this ever again?

All I can hope for is that the new film is not nearly disappointing as the last two, but I’m not holding my breath for that quite yet.

Spider-Man, famous for being a loner, will be joining with the Fantastic Four next month when they are renamed as “Future Foundation”.

For those who haven’t heard, Johnny Storm, also known as The Human Torch, has been killed off in The Fantastic Four comic series.  With the team in disarray, and looking to change its direction, they will recruit Spider-Man as their fourth member, change uniforms and rename themselves as “Future Foundation”.

Say what?

From the official release:

After the death of the Human Torch, the surviving members of the Fantastic Four-Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman & Thing-join with Spider-Man and some top secret members to form an unstoppable force: The Future Foundation. Their mission is simple: save the Marvel Universe from its greatest threats and prevent future dangers from arising. But even with knowledge of what’s to come and one of the most powerful teams ever assembled, just what villainous force could stand in their way?

This makes no sense to me. While Spider-Man has had brief stints with some teams, including the Fantastic Four, he has never known as a “team player” to say the least.  He has always been more of a loner, and that’s the way he works.

And don’t get me started on the new costume.  It’s just hideous.

This is Marvel at its worst, and when sales reflect what a bad idea it was, some how the Human Torch will come back to life and the team will go back to its old costumes and name.

What a monumental waste of time for all involved.

If you’ve seen the first Ghost Rider movie from 2007 starring Nicholas Cage, you probably never thought we’d be … um … “lucky”? … enough to see a sequel. Well, here it comes!

Yes, it’s true, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has begun filming in Bucharest, Romania for a Feb. 17, 2012 release, five years and one day since the original.  The first one had a budget of $110 million and ended up doing $228.7 million worldwide, meaning that it really made next to money, and possibly didn’t even break even.

The thing is, Sony has a reason for making this sequel to an unwatchable disaster, and that is to keep Marvel from getting the rights to the character back.

In the days before Marvel was its own film studio, it would license its characters out to various studios with a clause that if X number of years passed without anything new coming out for the character the rights would revert back to Marve to shop around.  Well, since the comic book company is now its own movie studio, those studios that have character rights don’t want them to revert back, and that’s why we’re seeing reboots of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, and the most unneeded sequel in history to Ghost Rider.

Basically these companies would rather pump out bad movie after bad movie instead of letting Marvel, who actually knows what to do with the characters, have a chance to make money with them.  It’s an unfortunate situation, but one we’re stuck with for the foreseeable future.

Too bad there isn’t a “your movies suck, we get the character back” clause.

Normally I would have been all over the casting news of Spider-Man, but then I realized something … I don’t care.

Relative newcomer Andrew Garfield was announced as the new Peter Parker/Spider-Man this week for the upcoming Spider-Man movie, and while normally I would have been discussing my thoughts on the casting, I just couldn’t bring myself to care this time around.  It isn’t that I no longer care about the character, because I actually do, but I am disgusted by the idea of “re-booting” the movie series so soon after the last three.

The first Sam Raimi film came out in 2002, the second in 2004 and the third was in 2007, but yet here we are preparing a “reboot”  to the series that will have us starting the whole story over again.  We’re taking Peter Parker back to high school (which makes perfect sense to cast someone who is 26 in that case), and totally erasing the three films we just watched.

A re-boot is something you do a couple decades after a film series ends, not just ten years (by the time it’s released).  Why bother getting invested in any story any more?  It’s just going to be rebooted in a few years.  Heck, there’s even discussion of re-booting the Fantastic Four movies already.

I was blown away by the first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, and even though I was less than pleased with Spider-Man 3, I was ready for the team to get back together for two more, learn from their mistakes, and right this ship.  With two more films we could have gotten deeper into what drives Peter Parker to constantly risk his life for a city that views him as a danger at times, we could have finally seen the Dr. Connors pay off (He’s the Lizard in case you didn’t know already) and we could have seen some of the lesser known, but still fun villains of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery such as Kraven the Hunter, Mysterio, Electro and so on.  But, no, we have to “reboot” the series, slog back to high school and go through the whole blasted process … again.

Here comes the spider bite … again.

Here comes figuring out his powers … again.

Here comes winning the heart of Mary Jane … again.

I’m worn out folks.  This reboot is just such a bad idea, and really is a slap in the face to those of us who supported the last three.  ”Thanks for spending money on those films … they no longer count!”  I think I will just continue to enjoy those films as their own little series, and probably ignore the new one.

Best of luck to Mr. Garfield, but for me, I just really can’t be bothered to invest any emotion into a series that will just get rebooted again in 2022.

One of the hottest roles in Hollywood as of late has been that of Captain America in the upcoming movie of the same name. He’s finally been cast, and the choice is … well, perhaps not wise.

Chris Evans, best known for playing Johnny Storm/Human Torch in the two horrifically bad Fantastic Four movies released a few years ago.  Now he’s going to be diving back into comic book characters on the big screen, and this time it’s the iconic Captain America he’ll be woodenly acting his way through.

Mr. Evans has signed for three films as Steve Rogers/Captain America, one of which will be the upcoming Avengers movie Marvel Entertainment is working its way towards.  The Hollywood Reporter says the deal is done, although both Marvel and CAA, Mr. Evans management company, would not comment.

The only saving grace at this point to this film in the actor category is Hugo Weaving, best known as Agent Smith in the Matrix films and the title character in V For Vendetta, has signed on to play Captain America’s arch-enemy, The Red Skull.

Mr. Weaving is a great actor, but I just have not been convinced of Mr. Evans’ talent as of yet.  Hopefully he’ll prove me wrong as this is a heavy role, but I’m not exactly holding my breat for anything spectacular happening here.