Our weekly round up of the latest stories from the world of screen superheroes, including Batman vs. Superman, Thor: The Dark World, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Agent Carter, Iron Man 4, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Arrow, Justice League: War, Beware the Batman, Teen Titans Go!, Ultimate Spider-Man, Avengers Assemble, Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. and more....
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Over the past few weeks we've heard just about everyone in Hollywood giving their opinion on the controversial casting of Ben Affleck as The Dark Knight in Batman vs. Superman, but this week it was the turn of the man himself, with Affleck speaking to Jimmy Fallon about his upcoming role alongside Henry Cavill's Superman in Warner Bros.' Man of Steel sequel: "It's so awesome, I'm so excited. They called me up and said 'Do you want to do this?', and I'm like, 'I'm not 25 man are you sure?'. So they said to come down and we'll show you what we're doing, and it was incredible. Zack Snyder has this incredible take on it. Obviously we can't do what Christian Bale did, those movies are amazing, so he wants to do something different but still in keeping with that. So I thought this is a brilliant way to do this and I really know how to hook into this. And I said, 'Okay I want to do it', and the people from the studio were like 'we're thrilled, we're so excited, but listen, we want to talk to you because people go through this process and it can be trying, so we want to show you some of the reactions that past cast members have got'. And these were people who were in these movies who did a great job, and these dudes were like 'kill him!'. I mean, you can't say that before the movie comes out, you know. It doesn't matter what people think before then, it matters when you see the movie. I was like, 'I'm a big boy, I can handle anything, I'm tough' and they said 'just don't use the internet for a couple of days' and I thought 'this is not... I handle sh*t' so I saw the announcement, I looked on this thing, I looked on the first comment, 'Ben Affleck is going to be Batman' - the first one goes 'Noooooo'. Enough! Thank you very much..."
...Sticking with Batman vs. Superman for a moment and composer Hans Zimmer has given another non-committal response when asked by The Huffington Post if he's likely to return to compose the score for the 2015 sequel: "I think it's really important for everybody to always take a deep breath and have a think about it. 'Do we really want to embark on this journey?' Because the question really is: Do I have anything new to say? Is there anything I could add that I haven't done already? When we did Batman Begins, we saw that as an autonomous movie. We never knew we were going to do two and three. Everybody thinks, 'Oh, of course you did!' If you think about it, though, we never knew. Like, in Lord of the Rings, everyone knew that the little guy was going to throw the ring in the volcano. We never had that. At the same time, of course, my mandate was treat each one as an autonomous movie, but you can't shift stylistically quite that much. The fun thing is if you can shift stylistically, that's what you want to do. For better or for worse, you want to reinvent yourself every time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't..."
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...We come now to 2013's final big superhero movie Thor: The Dark World, which is said to be tracking a $95 million domestic opening when it arrives in the States on November 8th (even if it does seem a little early to be making such predictions). Naturally Marvel Studios has been stepping up the marketing for Chris Hemsworth's second solo outing, releasing a pair of character posters for Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander) [see here], in addition to an extended trailer which features snippets of new footage from the second Phase Two offering [see here]. Meanwhile, director Alan Taylor (Game of Thrones) has revealed that Joss Whedon was called in for some script surgery on the sequel, fixing a number of problematic scenes: "Joss came in to save our lives a couple of times. We had a major scene that was not working on the page at all in London, and he basically got airlifted in, like a SWAT team or something. He came down, rewrote the scene, and before he got back to his plane I sort of grabbed him and said, ‘And this scene and this scene?’ And he rewrote two other scenes that I thought had problems. Then finally we let go of him, he took off again, and we shot the scenes; and they were just much better and much lighter on their feet. Much more fun, much more surprising than what we had been trying to do. I can relate to guys who come out of the TV world, since that’s where I come from. And being able to land and work and solve a problem quickly... I really was grateful..."
...During a promotional interview for his latest film Rush, Chris Hemsworth has stoked the fire on the "rivalry" between Marvel Studios and DC / Warner Bros. by stating "We're just winning aren't we? That's not really a rivalry." Of course, given that Marvel has Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy set for release between now and the end of 2014 (not to mention Fox's X-Men: Days of Future Past and Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2) while DC has nothing, it's safe to say that Marvel is in pole position for the time being, although 2015 could be a different story...
...A few weeks back, Marvel's Louis D'Esposito revealed that the studio is keen to bring a female-led superhero movie to the screen, and that has now been confirmed by Natalie Portman, who told SciFiNow that she's heard plans are afoot: "There are definitely many strong women, but it will be exciting when there is a central female character which I think is coming – I have heard is coming – and, of course, also a central non-white character will also be exciting. Title characters. But [the films] do definitely have strong female characters in them and I think it’s a testament to the people who run Marvel, their respect, their just normal human respect for women, the way they want to characterise them; you can tell when men talk to you, as just a person or as a ‘woman'..."
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...Speaking of Marvel's female characters, and it appears that Hayley Atwell's World War II heroine Peggy Carter could be set to get her own TV series, with reports emerging this week that ABC and Marvel are working on a concept for a new show inspired by Agent Carter, the Iron Man 3 Marvel One-Shot. It's said that development "is in the very early stages, one of several in the works at Marvel, and is in the process of locking in a writer..."
...And while we're on the subject of Marvel One-Shots, Louis D'Esposito has also spoken to Screen Crush about potential future instalments in the short film series, as well as some "crazy ideas" that have previously been thrown around: "We’ve developed a lot of shorts because Eric Pearson, the writer on all them, he was part of our writer’s program and now he’s a great friend of the family. We developed a lot of shorts with him over the years, so we have some crazy ideas that happen in Asgard, and some characters done in their youth. We were developing a story about young Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) going with Dum Dum Dugan (Neal McDonough) to Wakanda, and they’re sitting on a plane and Dum Dum is sitting next to Nick Fury eating an orange, and the orange squirts him in the eye, and maybe that’s the reason he has an eye patch. Maybe that’s the start. It really burns, so maybe he put some tape on it. The story he doesn't want to tell is that it happened because of Dum Dum's orange [laughs]. Obviously we shelved that..."
...One female Marvel character whose Cinematic Universe future looks uncertain is that of Pepper Potts, with Gwyneth Paltow revealing to HitFix that she's yet to be contacted about a possible appearance in 2015's The Avengers: Age of Ultron; meanwhile, with Robert Downey Jr. signed up for a two-picture deal in The Avengers 2 and The Avengers 3, it's unclear whether Iron Man 4 will ever become a reality (with the same cast, at least), although the actress is holding out hope that we might not have seen the last instalment in the series: "I don't know if there is an Iron Man 4," said Paltrow during an appearance on Chelsea Lately. "I hope there is an Iron Man 4. I hope I'm in it..."
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...In other Marvel Studios sequel news, the official site for next year's Captain America: The Winter Soldier has launched, offering up the previously released concept art, poster and synopsis for Chris Evans' second solo outing, as well as a 90-second preview of composer Henry Jackman's score; check the site out here...
...We're just a few days away from the premiere of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which stars Tuesday on ABC in the States and Friday on E4 in the UK), and this week has brought us a new batch of promotional stills featuring Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), Agent Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), Agent Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) and Skye (Chloe Bennet), along with some set photos from the fourth episode of the series showing a group of masked men marching through Stockholm. It's also been revealed that Ian Hart (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Luck) set to portray Dr. Franklin Hall (better known as the supervillain Graviton) in the third episode, 'The Asset' [read the official episode synopsis here], while Ruth Negga (World War Z, 12 Years a Slave) has also joined the cast in an as-yet-unrevealed recurring role...
...Moving on to Fox's Marvel universe and Hugh Jackman has been speaking more about his role as Wolverine in next year's X-Men: Days of Future Past, praising the story for Bryan Singer's mutant ensemble: "I think some people are saying, 'Ah, this just sounds like an excuse to get all these actors together and make an Avengers-style movie, but the truth is that it’s a great script and Bryan [Singer] is very ambitious to make the best movie of them all. He’s got the biggest cast, the biggest budget, and he started it all, so it’s his legacy. He’s a fan of time-travel movies, and the detail that’s gone into it is incredible. I’m quietly confident that it will be the biggest and the best of them all. When I sat there on that panel at Comic Con, and looked down at all the actors, you think, 'This might be one of the best ensembles ever assembled'… Apart from Movie 43 [Laughs]." Jackman then went on to discuss the relationship between Logan and the younger Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender: "It’s fair to say we don’t get on that well. I get sent back to the past and he has no idea who I am, but you can imagine Wolverine has a bit of fun with that..."
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...With Fox looking to expand its X-Men output, White House Down star Channing Tatum has thrown his hat into the ring for the role of Gambit, who was of course previously portrayed by Taylor Kitsch in the forgetable X-Men Origins: Wolverine: "I would like to play Gambit. Gambit’s my favorite. I’m from New Orleans, around that area. My dad’s from New Orleans, and I like to do a Cajun accent. I could do it for real. No knock on Taylor Kitsch, though, ’cause I actually like his Gambit, but I’ve always lived around Cajun people... Gambit was always like the woman-loving, cigarette-smoking, drinking [guy]. He was the punk rock of all the superheroes. He’s a thief. He kind of rode the line." If Gambit returns to the X-Men movie universe, would you like to see Tatum taking on the role, or should they stick with Taylor Kitsch..?
...During an interview with I Am Rogue, Star Trek Into Darkness co-writer Alex Kurtzman spoke about his work on Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which he's penned alongside regular writing partner Roberto Orci: "Well, it’s interesting because the first movie asks all these questions and what I loved about it in so many ways is that it didn’t answer them. So part of what we were drawn to and intrigued by was wanting to know the answers to a lot of those questions. So the villains emerge from the a lot of unanswered questions at the end of that movie and none of them are random at all, they are all tied together by a theme, an idea, and I think they come from our curiosity about what was going on in the life of Peter Parker and his parents..."
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...Arrow is set to return to The CW next month, and this week brought us a batch of topless (sans Emily Bett Rickards and Katie Cassidy) character posters featuring Stephen Amell (Oliver Queen), David Ramsey (John Diggle), Manu Bennett (Slade Wilson) and Colton Haynes (Roy Harper) as well as our first look at Michael Jai White (Spawn, The Dark Knight) as Bronze Tiger [see here], while the synopsis for the season two opener 'City of Heroes' has also arrived online: "Diggle (David Ramsey) and Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) travel to Lian Yu in search of Oliver (Stephen Amell) who left Starling City after The Undertaking. Convinced to return home, Oliver finds that things are in worse shape than he thought – Isabel Rochev (guest star Summer Glau) is preparing a hostile takeover of Queen Consolidated, Thea (Willa Holland) refuses to visit Moira (Susanna Thompson) in jail, Roy (Colton Haynes) is trying to fill the void left by the Arrow’s absence, and Laurel (Katie Cassidy) is working with the District Attorney’s office to take down the vigilante. Meanwhile, flashbacks to the island show Slade (Manu Bennett), Shado (guest star Celina Jade) and Oliver in a desperate situation..."
...Shifting to DC's upcoming animated output and we've already seen first-look images of Wonder Woman, Batman, Darkseid and Shazam from next year's Justice League: War, and now we can also add Green Lantern to that list; meanwhile, ComicBookMovie has posted a selection of clips and images from DC Nation's next round of of Beware the Batman, which sees The Dark Knight going up against the assassin Cypher...
...Disney and Marvel Animation has revealed that Ultimate Spider-Man is set to make its Disney Channel debut on October 5th with a one-hour Halloween primetime special which will see the web-slinger teaming up with the supernatural heroes Blade, Werewolf by Night, The Living Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster and Man-Thing as they do battle with the Prince of Darkness, Count Dracula; check out a promo image here...
...And finally, before Spidey's Halloween special comes the next episodes of Avengers Assemble and Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. on Disney XD's Marvel Universe programming block, and we've got clips of this weekend's episodes which you can view right here.
Holy Franchise, Batman! Bringing the Caped Crusader to the Screen - Available now via Amazon.co.uk![]()
and Amazon.com![]()
.
Gary Collinson
Over the past few weeks we've heard just about everyone in Hollywood giving their opinion on the controversial casting of Ben Affleck as The Dark Knight in Batman vs. Superman, but this week it was the turn of the man himself, with Affleck speaking to Jimmy Fallon about his upcoming role alongside Henry Cavill's Superman in Warner Bros.' Man of Steel sequel: "It's so awesome, I'm so excited. They called me up and said 'Do you want to do this?', and I'm like, 'I'm not 25 man are you sure?'. So they said to come down and we'll show you what we're doing, and it was incredible. Zack Snyder has this incredible take on it. Obviously we can't do what Christian Bale did, those movies are amazing, so he wants to do something different but still in keeping with that. So I thought this is a brilliant way to do this and I really know how to hook into this. And I said, 'Okay I want to do it', and the people from the studio were like 'we're thrilled, we're so excited, but listen, we want to talk to you because people go through this process and it can be trying, so we want to show you some of the reactions that past cast members have got'. And these were people who were in these movies who did a great job, and these dudes were like 'kill him!'. I mean, you can't say that before the movie comes out, you know. It doesn't matter what people think before then, it matters when you see the movie. I was like, 'I'm a big boy, I can handle anything, I'm tough' and they said 'just don't use the internet for a couple of days' and I thought 'this is not... I handle sh*t' so I saw the announcement, I looked on this thing, I looked on the first comment, 'Ben Affleck is going to be Batman' - the first one goes 'Noooooo'. Enough! Thank you very much..."...Sticking with Batman vs. Superman for a moment and composer Hans Zimmer has given another non-committal response when asked by The Huffington Post if he's likely to return to compose the score for the 2015 sequel: "I think it's really important for everybody to always take a deep breath and have a think about it. 'Do we really want to embark on this journey?' Because the question really is: Do I have anything new to say? Is there anything I could add that I haven't done already? When we did Batman Begins, we saw that as an autonomous movie. We never knew we were going to do two and three. Everybody thinks, 'Oh, of course you did!' If you think about it, though, we never knew. Like, in Lord of the Rings, everyone knew that the little guy was going to throw the ring in the volcano. We never had that. At the same time, of course, my mandate was treat each one as an autonomous movie, but you can't shift stylistically quite that much. The fun thing is if you can shift stylistically, that's what you want to do. For better or for worse, you want to reinvent yourself every time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't..."
...During a promotional interview for his latest film Rush, Chris Hemsworth has stoked the fire on the "rivalry" between Marvel Studios and DC / Warner Bros. by stating "We're just winning aren't we? That's not really a rivalry." Of course, given that Marvel has Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy set for release between now and the end of 2014 (not to mention Fox's X-Men: Days of Future Past and Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2) while DC has nothing, it's safe to say that Marvel is in pole position for the time being, although 2015 could be a different story...
...A few weeks back, Marvel's Louis D'Esposito revealed that the studio is keen to bring a female-led superhero movie to the screen, and that has now been confirmed by Natalie Portman, who told SciFiNow that she's heard plans are afoot: "There are definitely many strong women, but it will be exciting when there is a central female character which I think is coming – I have heard is coming – and, of course, also a central non-white character will also be exciting. Title characters. But [the films] do definitely have strong female characters in them and I think it’s a testament to the people who run Marvel, their respect, their just normal human respect for women, the way they want to characterise them; you can tell when men talk to you, as just a person or as a ‘woman'..."
...And while we're on the subject of Marvel One-Shots, Louis D'Esposito has also spoken to Screen Crush about potential future instalments in the short film series, as well as some "crazy ideas" that have previously been thrown around: "We’ve developed a lot of shorts because Eric Pearson, the writer on all them, he was part of our writer’s program and now he’s a great friend of the family. We developed a lot of shorts with him over the years, so we have some crazy ideas that happen in Asgard, and some characters done in their youth. We were developing a story about young Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) going with Dum Dum Dugan (Neal McDonough) to Wakanda, and they’re sitting on a plane and Dum Dum is sitting next to Nick Fury eating an orange, and the orange squirts him in the eye, and maybe that’s the reason he has an eye patch. Maybe that’s the start. It really burns, so maybe he put some tape on it. The story he doesn't want to tell is that it happened because of Dum Dum's orange [laughs]. Obviously we shelved that..."
...One female Marvel character whose Cinematic Universe future looks uncertain is that of Pepper Potts, with Gwyneth Paltow revealing to HitFix that she's yet to be contacted about a possible appearance in 2015's The Avengers: Age of Ultron; meanwhile, with Robert Downey Jr. signed up for a two-picture deal in The Avengers 2 and The Avengers 3, it's unclear whether Iron Man 4 will ever become a reality (with the same cast, at least), although the actress is holding out hope that we might not have seen the last instalment in the series: "I don't know if there is an Iron Man 4," said Paltrow during an appearance on Chelsea Lately. "I hope there is an Iron Man 4. I hope I'm in it..."
...We're just a few days away from the premiere of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which stars Tuesday on ABC in the States and Friday on E4 in the UK), and this week has brought us a new batch of promotional stills featuring Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), Agent Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), Agent Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) and Skye (Chloe Bennet), along with some set photos from the fourth episode of the series showing a group of masked men marching through Stockholm. It's also been revealed that Ian Hart (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Luck) set to portray Dr. Franklin Hall (better known as the supervillain Graviton) in the third episode, 'The Asset' [read the official episode synopsis here], while Ruth Negga (World War Z, 12 Years a Slave) has also joined the cast in an as-yet-unrevealed recurring role...
...Moving on to Fox's Marvel universe and Hugh Jackman has been speaking more about his role as Wolverine in next year's X-Men: Days of Future Past, praising the story for Bryan Singer's mutant ensemble: "I think some people are saying, 'Ah, this just sounds like an excuse to get all these actors together and make an Avengers-style movie, but the truth is that it’s a great script and Bryan [Singer] is very ambitious to make the best movie of them all. He’s got the biggest cast, the biggest budget, and he started it all, so it’s his legacy. He’s a fan of time-travel movies, and the detail that’s gone into it is incredible. I’m quietly confident that it will be the biggest and the best of them all. When I sat there on that panel at Comic Con, and looked down at all the actors, you think, 'This might be one of the best ensembles ever assembled'… Apart from Movie 43 [Laughs]." Jackman then went on to discuss the relationship between Logan and the younger Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender: "It’s fair to say we don’t get on that well. I get sent back to the past and he has no idea who I am, but you can imagine Wolverine has a bit of fun with that..."
...During an interview with I Am Rogue, Star Trek Into Darkness co-writer Alex Kurtzman spoke about his work on Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which he's penned alongside regular writing partner Roberto Orci: "Well, it’s interesting because the first movie asks all these questions and what I loved about it in so many ways is that it didn’t answer them. So part of what we were drawn to and intrigued by was wanting to know the answers to a lot of those questions. So the villains emerge from the a lot of unanswered questions at the end of that movie and none of them are random at all, they are all tied together by a theme, an idea, and I think they come from our curiosity about what was going on in the life of Peter Parker and his parents..."
...Shifting to DC's upcoming animated output and we've already seen first-look images of Wonder Woman, Batman, Darkseid and Shazam from next year's Justice League: War, and now we can also add Green Lantern to that list; meanwhile, ComicBookMovie has posted a selection of clips and images from DC Nation's next round of of Beware the Batman, which sees The Dark Knight going up against the assassin Cypher...
...Disney and Marvel Animation has revealed that Ultimate Spider-Man is set to make its Disney Channel debut on October 5th with a one-hour Halloween primetime special which will see the web-slinger teaming up with the supernatural heroes Blade, Werewolf by Night, The Living Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster and Man-Thing as they do battle with the Prince of Darkness, Count Dracula; check out a promo image here...
...And finally, before Spidey's Halloween special comes the next episodes of Avengers Assemble and Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. on Disney XD's Marvel Universe programming block, and we've got clips of this weekend's episodes which you can view right here.
Holy Franchise, Batman! Bringing the Caped Crusader to the Screen - Available now via Amazon.co.uk
and Amazon.com
.Gary Collinson