Okay, Marvel, good for you, a little.
Marvel’s releasing character posters (Cap, Black Widow, Nick Fury) from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
So here’s this cool character poster featuring Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, AKA the Falcon, Cap’s partner.
But it’s only in Spanish-speaking territories so far, apparently.
Come on, Marvel. Let this one loose on U.S. soil.
I want kids to be able to see a poster featuring the first African-American superhero in comics. (Black Panther was African.)
The Hollywood Reporter is going with the story – and a million websites are echoing – the news that Paul Bettany is reportedly going to play the Vision in “The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” the “Avengers” sequel director Joss Whedon is making for 2015 release.
If that’s true, it’s perfect and makes perfect sense.
In the comics, the Vision was, in a way, the indirect creation of Hank Pym, the super-scientist whose secret identity was the shape-changing Ant-Man.
But Marvel put comic book fans on notice at Comic Con last year when it showed a preview for “Age of Ultron” that – by depicting Iron Man’s mask hammered into the fearsome visage of Ultron – indicated Tony Stark was Ultron’s father.
In the comics, Pym’s creation, Ultron, the megalomaniacal android, created the Vision to help him destroy the Avengers after Pym, his father figure, rejected him and proved flawed.
Making Ultron a creation of Tony Stark streamlines events for the Marvel cinematic universe. Not to mention that Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” – with Michael Douglas as Pym and Paul Rudd as Ant-Man successor Scott Lang – hasn’t even made its way into the movie universe continuity yet.
So if you’re going to make Ultron – and Vision – part of the Tony Stark lineage, what makes more sense than having Bettany, who has been doing the voice of Jarvis, Stark’s artificial intelligence “butler” since 2008’s “Iron Man,” portray the in-the-flesh-more-or-less personification of Vision.
It all makes sense, and Bettany has the kind of cool that would be perfect for playing the android.
Last night’s Super Bowl had at least one highlight: A new trailer for “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
I’m hoping that, when the movie opens in April, we’ll all get just what we’re expecting: A smart and action-filled political thriller that pits Cap against dark forces that want to control super-spy agency SHIELD.
Not to mention his one-on-one bouts with the Winter Soldier, who comic book fans will know is the reincarnated and improved – into a killing machine – version of his old sidekick Bucky Barnes.
The images in the trailer continue to be among my favorite from any Marvel movie. It just feels like directors Anthony and Joe Russo have totally hit their marks.
There’s a lot of focus in the trailer on Cap’s former, current and future partners: Bucky/the Winter Soldier, Black Widow and Sam Wilson, aka the Falcon.
Bucky Barnes realizing he’s been turned into the Winter Soldier, a Russian assassin.
The Winter Soldier process, apparently.
Not the face of an ally. Yet.
Nick Fury after the Winter Soldier tries to kill him.
Who’s the body on the table? Who would Natasha be mourning? Surely it can’t be fury. SHIELD agent Hill is out in the hallway. Who’s dead?
Not a good day to be in the SHIELD helicarrier. Or in SHIELD headquarters.
Sam Wilson gets in on the action.
Cap and the Falcon, reporting for duty.
We even get a look – in the UK trailer, at least – of whom we suspect to be Sharon Carter, SHIELD agent and (likely) granddaughter of Agent Carter, Cap’s old flame.
I can’t wait for this movie.
Apparently someone at Fox believes the old saying that any publicity is good publicity.
That must be the idea behind the 25 different covers released by Empire magazine featuring 25 different characters (including a non-character, director Bryan Singer) for “X-Men Days of Future Past.”
Some of them aren’t bad, like the ones above featuring Magneto, Professor X and Wolverine.
Some are just inexplicable, including the one showcasing the movie’s version of Quicksilver.
In the comics, if you’re not familiar with the character, Quicksilver (along with his sister, Scarlet Witch) was part of the second wave of Avengers recruits back in the 1960s, serving under Captain America and replacing Iron Man, Hulk and Thor.
It was a plot point that the new Avengers, including Hawkeye, were drastically less powerful than the original team.
And I’m wondering if when Joss Whedon has Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch join the Avengers in the 2015 sequel, there won’t be some similar storylines playing out.
But in “Days of Future Past,” it appears that Quicksilver is … what, would you say, a punk kid with really bad hair and an outfit that’s even worse?
Here he is, side by side with the comic-book version.
The X-Men Quicksilver is a look that was certain to – and did – inspire derision.
Then there’s the latest marketing from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” due out in April.
There’s this great poster featuring Cap and the main cast, including Robert Redford as SHIELD honcho Alexander Pierce. It’s right out of the Marvel marketing playbook and is reminiscent of posters for “The Avengers” and others in the Marvel cinematic universe.
And then there are the character posters, including those for Nick Fury and Black Widow (photoshopping aside).
That’s how you market characters. And I’m looking forward to one featuring Falcon. Please.
Let’s play a game. We’ll call it “Superhero Casting: Yes or No.”
It’s inspired by the many, many casting rumors circulating online. Denzel Washington as Green Lantern John Stewart. “Girls'” Adam Driver as Nightwing. You get the picture.
So Marvel recently announced that Michael Douglas would be playing the original Ant-Man, Henry Pym, in Edgar Wright’s upcoming “Ant-Man” movie. Paul Rudd had already been announced, and it turns out he’s playing Scott Lang, the second-generation Ant-Man.
I’m kind of intrigued by the idea of a senior citizen superhero. If the speculation is correct and Pym – an important figure in the Marvel Comics universe and one of the founders of the Avengers – was a below-the-radar adventurer or SHIELD agent sometime between the time of Captain America and … reborn Captain America, that’s kind of interesting.
So I’m okay with a pivotal comic book figure being the subject of offbeat casting.
But then there’s the reboot of “Fantastic Four,” in which Fox seems to be going for a 20-something cast.
A few young actors, including Kit Harrington, are said to be in the running for Reed Richards, one of the brainiest men in the Marvel Universe and the father figure of the FF.
Sorry. This isn’t Reed Richards.
This is Reed Richards.
The website Guard the Galaxy – I guess you can kind of tell their orientation, huh? – has just published some new art of “Guardians of the Galaxy” tie-in merchandise.
Cups and stuff, coming to a store near you, this summer. So you can enjoy sipping from a plastic cup depicting a gun-toting cosmic raccoon and a sentient, walking tree.
Above find a close-up of the cup art.
The big-screen Marvel movie comes to theaters on Aug. 1.
Here are things that make me smile.
Like that picture, above, of Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie as Captain America and the Falcon from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
And this, Jaimie Alexander as Sif from “Thor: The Dark World.” She’s going to appear in a February episode of “Agents of SHIELD.”
And here, Hayley Atwell, in her role of “Agent Carter” from “Captain America,” starring in a pilot for ABC for a possible series about the early days of SHIELD.
It’ll be really interesting to see how we feel about “Agents of SHIELD” in May.
The Disney/ABC series, about halfway through its first season, debuted in September to good ratings and impossible expectations. The street-level spin-off of Marvel’s cinematic universe and follow-up to “The Avengers,” the show looked at the non-superhero agents – like Phil Coulson, played in the Marvel movies and here by Clark Gregg – who are left dealing with the aftermath of the Battle of New York.
But while ratings are still … fine … disappointment set in as each successive episode not only failed to hand over the candy – Marvel characters we’ve wanted to see and fantastic events, even on a TV budget – but seemed like a routine supernatural procedural, an “X-Files” knockoff.
The showrunners have promised that “Agents of SHIELD” was in the middle of a slow burn, with the mismatched agents who are the series’ central characters still learning to trust each other and the mystery behind the resurrection of Coulson – who was ostensibly killed by Loki in “The Avengers” – slowly playing out. Sooo slowly. And obviously.
Last night’s first episode of 2014, “A Magical Place,” followed up on the kidnapping of Coulson by agents of Centipede, the organization that has been trying to turn people into superbeings. Centipede wants to know Coulson’s secret – SHIELD’s secret, really – of how you bring someone back from the dead.
Most of the rest of the episode really doesn’t matter and already has mostly disappeared from my memory. Vivid in my mind is the scene in which, through a Centipede experiment, Coulson recalls his resurrection at the hands of SHIELD director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson. There’s Coulson, strapped to a table, his brain exposed and being probed – seemingly being kntted back together – by a high-tech device.
And the entire time, Coulson is begging to be allowed to die.
It was an unsettling scene and Coulson’s unsettled reaction to the memory makes me wonder if the series isn’t going the way I speculated a few weeks ago in making SHIELD itself a bad guy – or at least an organization that needs reigning in.
That would also appear to be setting us up for the plot of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which debuts in theaters in April and appears to pit the Sentinel of Liberty against at least some elements of SHIELD.
Considering the showrunners of “Agents of SHIELD” – created by “Avengers” mastermind Joss Whedon – would certainly never be able to tip the hand of the Cap movie, it’s possible this is where “Agents of SHIELD” has been heading all along.
We’ll know within a few weeks, certainly by the time the movie comes out in April and the first season of the series winds down in May.
It’s asking a lot of today’s short-attention span, general audience viewers to wait an entire season to get a bead on a show’s characters, tone and plot.
But maybe, come spring, it’ll all make sense to us, and we’ll see if the show’s slow burn has been worth burning some early viewers.
I’m excited about and worried about this movie at the same time. That has to be a good thing, right?
Marvel today released a new photo from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” next August’s big-screen release featuring the comic company’s kinda obscure but cultish space-faring superhero group.
The photo above captures a moment from that trailer that played at Comic-Con, with the main Guardians members in a line-up.
From left, they are Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Rocket Racoon (voice of Bradley Cooper), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) and Groot (voice of Vin Diesel).
Here’s the official Marvel statement today:
An action-packed, epic space adventure, Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the entire universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits — Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon, Groot, a tree-like humanoid, the deadly and enigmatic Gamora and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Peter discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand — with the galaxy’s fate in the balance.
As I’ve said before, I think the Guardians are after another of the cosmic Infinity Stones mentioned at the end of “Thor: The Dark World.” (The Cosmic Cube, or Tesseract, from “Captain America” and “The Avengers” is another one.)
The Infinity Stones are sought by Thanos, the bad guy revealed in the end credits of “The Avengers.” It’s all building to a huge showdown in the third “Avengers” movie, perhaps set for 2018.
Meanwhile, “Guardians of the Galaxy” opens Aug. 1, 2014.
Tonight’s “The Well,” the eighth episode of “Agents of SHIELD,” tried and mostly accomplished its latest delicate task: Tying into the big-screen Marvel universe.
“The Well” was billed as a follow-up to “Thor: The Dark World,” but really the plot that drove the episode wasn’t so much a continuation of the current “Thor” sequel but a variation on the idea of humans coming into contact with Asgardian (alien) technology we’ve seen before.
That’s not to say “The Well” wasn’t entertaining – most episodes of the series are; they’re just … underwhelming – but its most interesting element was a little more exploration of the show’s least appealing character, the gruff and ultra-competent Agent Grant Ward.
In the episode, the team is in England, picking up the pieces (literally) left over from Thor’s battle in the current movie. Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) consults with a Norse legends expert in Spain (played by Peter MacNicol) and unwittingly sets off a chase to recover portions of an Asgardian staff.
The staff – the weapon of an Asgardian berserker that’s been on Earth for centuries; so the Thor aftermath stuff is really only a way to get the expert involved – has been broken into three pieces. Each piece has the power to tap into the rage of the person holding it, increasing their strength.
A group of Nordic hate mongers (just go with it) gets first one, then two pieces and the race is on to stop them from getting the third and completing the berserker staff.
In the process, Ward (Brett Dalton) gets “infected” by touching the staff. Normally a slightly edgy, even standoffish guy, touching the piece of staff lets Ward’s rage turn him into a hostile bully. One important point, though: Ward recognizes the change and offers to bench himself. And Coulson – much like he’s given hacker Skye more than a few chances – keeps Ward in play.
The episode ends with a surprising encounter between Ward and Agent May (Ming Na Wen) and a Tahiti flashback for Coulson.
A couple of thoughts:
The show still isn’t as engaging as “Sleepy Hollow” or “The Blacklist,” but I’m enjoying it a bit more each week.
I’m ready for some real developments with Coulson’s resurrection.
I’m wondering how SHIELD itself will be portrayed by the end of this first season. By the time “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” comes out next spring, I’m wondering if SHIELD won’t be the bad guy in the whole Marvel universe picture and the agents we’ve (hopefully by then) come to care about will be like the “Angel” gang in Joss Whedon’s series of the same name, who were working for good in the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart.
keithroysdon 