Why this concern?

It was further suggested that with the future Captain America movie being set during WW II, Marvel wants its fanbase to be open to this decision to go with a period piece instead of simply having the character only being depicted in modern day.  I don’t know if there is any real merit to this theory, but it does make me wonder just how concerned is Marvel about the success of the future Captain America film if it is in fact going to be mostly a period piece.  Time will tell, I guess.

The Avengers movie is scheduled for a July 15th, 2011 release date. Everything is leading to this one: Iron Man already got the ball rolling with the brief reference made to the “Avengers Initiative” at the end of the Iron Man movie.  Then at the end of the recent Hulk movie, Robert Downey Jr. made an obscure reference to “a group” that he was putting together.

Gee, I wonder what group that could be? 

As well, Downey Jr. is signed for two more Marvel films, with one of them being Iron Man II, so the other is expected to be as a costar in the Avengers.  In fact most of the major casting for the movie could already be decided by the time development has barely started on Avengers; this is because many of the major characters of the movie would be carried over from their earlier film projects: characters like Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and maybe even Ant Man would already have been casted by that time making the Avengers cast heavily predetermined. As well, with the rumour that the characters Hawkeye and the Black Widow are both in IM II, most of the Avengers team roster is already in play.  This could be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how well the earlier movies are received by Marvel fans.

when it comes down to it, I don’t think that Marvel really has alot to lose here; if the Avengers experiment is afailure at the box office then Marvel can go back to leasing its characters out to other studios for quick cash up front. If on the other hand the Avengers is the big success Marvel hopes it will be, then for Marvel’s character franchises, the sky is truly the limit…

That is the effect that successful recent brand marketing can have on a company; Spider Man and Wolverine have been in successful movies and on Saturday morning cartoons, both of which only help to raise their profile.  However, back in the Sixties, Marvel’s version of the previously existing Captain America character was right up there with spidey for popularity.  Marvel is hoping that with the rigfht film project this could maybe be the case again.

So far however, Marvel’s track record with the character on screen is nothing to brag about. the 1980’s and 1990’s saw a couple of Captain America movies released, one for television and one intended for theaters but ultimately released straight to video. These were nothing to write home about - in fact the TV movie had Cap riding around on a motorcycle while carrying a clear see-thru shield and wearing a motorcycle helmet in place of his familiar cowl. Ugh.  The second movie had the costume right but still came off as cheesy, complete with the Red Skull (a Nazi villain) having an Italian accent?!?

So there is some celluloid history with the character that Marvel would like to try and make the public forget by hitting them with an impressive new vision of Cap. Honestly, any new Captain America movie  would need to be visually exciting to engage the audiences’ interest. As well they have to figure out a way to make the character look well, how should i say this? Visually acceptable on screen with regards to his costume.  Getting this right would go a long way towards helping us forget the past lackluster efforts with the character.

So far we know a few things  about this upcoming version of the character. the release date is May 6th, 2011, and the director has been named. Joe Johnston was recently announced as the director for the C A movie. We also know that the foundations for this characters existence in the Marvel movie-verse have already started to appear; in Iron Man, we get a quick glimpse of the famous red, white and blue shield of Cap’s.  In the recent Hulk movie we got to see a fight sequence involving a character treated with the super soldier serum that was originally given to Captain America including a reference to its origins in World War II.  In addition, there was at least one scene deleted from the final cut of the same Hulk movie that supposedly included a brief glimpse of Captain America trapped in the ice! Wow, talk about obscure, huh? But that is cool when you consider that in the comicbook, Captain America was frozen in a block of ice for decades after WWII.  That could set up an interesting lead in for the new Cap movie - if they choose to run with this tidbit.  By the Cap movie’s release date, we can also assume that it is being developed as alead in to the upcoming Marvel Avengers movie as well; that could help or it could put more pressure on it to deliver. Time will tell…

Really,  this Marvel project is a lot like Marvel’s Thor project in that there isn’t a lot confirmed right now. whereas Thor has a potential Director named, Marvel’s Ant Man has a potential director and a screenwriter attached to it:  Edgar wright is set to direct and Joe Cornish is presently working on the screenplay.  Seriously, you know a movie is far off when the release date is only given as ’sometime in 2010′. that is the state of Ant Man right now.  Considering all of the other projects that Marvel has in development at the moment, I would expect that Ant Man’s future development could in part be influenced by Marvel’s confidence that A M will in some way enhance the group of Marvel movies that are in development as a whole - a sum of the parts kind of thing; it might also depend on how confident Marvel feels about the likely success of their other future projects and whether they are woried that a negative reaction to an ant Man movie could cause negative buzz for their other movies in the works.

One of these characters, Marvel’s resident Asgardian Thunder God, thor, is scheduled to be the star of a Marvel movie to be released on the 16th of July, 2010. This upcoming Marvel Thor movie is pretty much a question mark for me right now; I know that British Actor/Director, Kenneth Branagh is currently tied to the project, but that is about it as far as info goes on this one.  Well we could probably assume that the title character will be carrying a hammer with him, too.

I guess I am also at a loss as to having any solid idea on what the look or feel of this film would be; would it go for the cheese and camp slant or maybe more of a Lord of the Rings approach to the project? They would have to be careful however: with the look of the comicbook costumes they could end up instead looking more like Lord of the Dance, cringe…

I loved the first Iron Man movie and believe that the character is so rich in its history that the makers of the sequel should find it quite easy to come up with an equally successful sequel. Already there are runours afloat that characters from the comic, known as Hawkeye and the Black Widow, are pencilled in for the sequel. Let the anticipation begin…

as of this time, the release schedule looks something like this:

Iron Man 2 - 7th of May, 2010
Thor - 16th of July, 2010

Ant Man - sometime in 2010

The First Avenger: Captain America - 6th of May, 2011

The Avengers - 15th of July, 2011

If you look at all of the release dates, you will notice a couple of things; first off, these films are all far off in the future - none of them will be coming out any time soon. I purposely left out such films as the upcoming Wolverine movie and the Punisher Warzone movie because both of those are separate studio projects where Marvel geve up any creative control for the easy money upfront. the movies I am looking at are all being produced by Marvel and are all considered to be in continuity moviewise for all intents and purposes.

Next time, I will start looking at the individual movies that are coming down the road, starting with Iron Man 2.

The important thing here for fanboys like myself is that by doing things this way, Marvel retains creative control over their projects and can have a certain kind of synergy between their various film projects that lets them all work as part of some greater whole.  What I mean by this is simply that Marvel can now have all of their movies tie-in if they want to, and they want to! Anybody who saw last Summer’s mega successful Iron Man movie and stayed past the closing credits, was treated to a bonus scene that featured a character (played by one Samuel Jackson) called Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD.  This character made reference to the Avengers super hero team (called the Avengers Initiative here) - setting the stage for a future Avengers movie .  Soon afterwards, at the end of the Incredible Hulk movie
- also out this past Summer - Robert Downey Jr. re prised his Iron Man/Tony Stark role and made a reference to a group that he was putting together (a thinly veiled reference to the Avengers Initiative) .  By having such scenes in their movies, Marvel has started to get the ball rolling; they are laying the foundations for their future projects  - in such a way as to get the fans already buzzing about them.  As well, if you check out the deleted scenes from the recently released Hulk DVD, there was even a brief glimpse of the Captain America character trapped, frozen in the arctic ice.
That’s called very smart marketing, by the way.

So, with all of these films in pre-production by Marvel, I thought it would be appropriate to spend the next few posts  putting together a kind of Marvel Movie roadmap outlining what is already known about Marvel’s upcoming (self produced) movie releases.

Stay tuned, True Believer!

First was the rumor that the studio wanted a PG 13 cut of the movie ( a move influenced by the success of the PG13 Batman: The Dark Knight ) which had been shot as an intended rated R film, and that on top of that they wanted the director (Lexi Alexander) to be the one to butcher her own work! Second was the rumor that, in response to the studio wanting to re edit the film for a different rating, that the director, Alexander, had walked off the project and refused to be associated with it. Later it was confirmed that her distance from the project this past summer was due to her recent marriage. The damage seemed to have been done though.

Finally, there was the fact that the studio pushed back the release date of the movie a couple of times which tended to give some credence to the whole ‘editing-for-a-rating’ rumor. Even though it was given an R rating in the last few days, that doesn’t disprove the idea that the delays were initially due to the studio having second thoughts on the violent nature of the film and mulling over the possibility of toning it down.

All in all, I think that this is a case of a possibly decent December release comic book movie getting lost in a snow storm of controversy…

However, the more recent trailers are ‘meatier’ and have given me some hope that the film will be more original than I had previously thought. I guess that I won’t have too long to wait now to see if my suspicions are correct. At the least, it will give me a couple of hours of escape from all of the typical Christmas Day madness.

The other comic book movie, The Punisher: Warzone, i will mention next time, meanwhile here is a more recent Spirit movie trailer below: