Tag: Spiderman

RIP Stan Lee

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TMZ – Stan Lee, the man who co-created Marvel Comics, has died … Stan’s daughter tells TMZ. We’re told an ambulance rushed to Lee’s Hollywood Hills home early Monday morning and he was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. We’re told that’s where he died. Lee had suffered several illnesses over the last year or so — he had a bout of pneumonia and vision issues.

Stan started Marvel with Jack Kirby in 1961 with The Fantastic Four. He went on to create Spider-Man, Black Panther, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Iron Man and The Avengers. Stan made cameo appearances in all of the Marvel movies.

Wow, what a sad and sobering headline to write. He was 95-years-old so he lived a long and incredibly successful life, but still a sad thing to see. Stan Lee made comic books cool. Fact, not opinion. Sure Kevin Feige deserves a ton of credit for nailing the formula for making a good superhero movie, but it was all based on Stan Lee’s work. Even before all the blockbusters, there were the 90s cartoons like Spider-Man the Animated Series.

But just think about the creative juices you need to have in your brain to create Spider-Man, the Hulk, Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and the freaking X-Men! The guy was a genius and a lot of his comics touched on some pretty sensitive subjects way ahead of their time. While the underlying message of X-Men has become abundantly clear over the past couple of films, at its core this was a story that tackled civil rights and how they were granted to some types of people, but not others. Whether that was mutants, gay people, transgender, African Americans etc. – it was a pretty radical thing to write about when the X-Men were first created in 1963.

So Stan Lee was a wildly successful guy who created some of the most iconic characters and intellectual property of all time. The only sad part is that Disney just bought FOX and all its Marvel character rights, which is why we’ve only recently started to see crossovers like Spider-Man finally joining the Avengers. So unfortunately Stan Lee won’t get to see all his kids playing on screen together. I’m not sure what Marvel will do to honor the godfather of comic books, but after having a cameo appearance in every single Marvel movie, I’m sure it’ll be something special.

Disney Confirms That Marvel Will Take Over X-Men

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OMG OMG OMG it’s happening and I am having a gigantic nerdgasm. So a few months back Disney acquired FOX, which I blogged about back in December, and after some anti-trust concerns, Disney finalized the deal. Now its been confirmed that Kevin Feige will oversee the X-Men, which is huge news as he is the president of Marvel Studios. Feige is basically the architect, the godfather, the puppet master of the $17 billion dollar industry that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He got people to see TWENTY movies over more than a decade and care about characters like Iron Man and Thor, who were absolute D-List superheroes back in 2007. Feige essentially created shared universes in cinema as we know it today. Very few, if any, movies were combining IPs to tie into one gigantic story across different franchises like Marvel.

Marvel’s success has only made the failures of company like DC and Sony loom even worse. Sony had a decent run with the first two Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies, but the third one was trash, and then they rebooted it with Andrew Garfield, which was trash, only to have it saved once they rebooted it yet again with the help of Marvel for the current iteration of Spidey.

Now X-Men has been much more of a mixed bag in terms of quality. There have been excellent movies like Logan, Deadpool, and X-Men 2 as well as some truly garbage ones like X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

Most recently they’ve run into trouble as two very publicly announced movies have been pushed back time and time again to the point where I don’t know if we’ll ever even see them. There was the Sophie Turner Dark Phoenix movie and the Maisie Williams X-Men movie, The New Mutants. Both seem to be stuck in purgatory, which says volumes about the overall quality of them both. I mean New Mutants already had a trailer drop a year ago for christ’s sake.

I think the biggest problem with X-Men though has always been seeing the bigger picture. The movies always jumped around without any bigger map of where it was all heading. They never really know where they’re going with anything aside from the one movie they’re currently in. Thats how you end up killing off one of the biggest X-Men ever in Cyclops in the first 20 minutes of X3 (spoiler alert) only to have Days of Future Past completely retcon the whole thing and fix it with some tricky time traveling.

See? Not confusing at all.

Now, enter the GOAT of universe building in Kevin Feige and we’re cooking with gas.
And thats BEFORE we even mention the inevitable crossover events. After Avengers 4 comes out next summer, a movie in which most expect to be the final film for guys like Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr, and Chris Hemsworth, Marvel will be banking on younger players like Black Panther and Spiderman to carry the studio. Just imagine the possibilites with all of the X-Men characters finally available on the roster? It’s going to be truly amazing to watch. Plus they might even be able to reboot Fantastic Four, which was an absolute disaster.

TWICE.

So this is awesome news for fans of comic books and blockbuster movies. Everybody wins. We can start imagining the movies we never thought possible due to bullshit exclusive contracts.

The only downside? It took too long. The greatest character in the 11 movie history of the X-Men universe is dead and retired in Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman. Unless….

The First Look at Tom Hardy’s Venom Leaked and I Am ALL IN

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It looks like the best Marvel villain not named Magneto is finally getting the treatment it deserves and I am all sorts of jacked up about it. I am declaring myself ALL IN, six months before it even comes out.

As a comic book nerd I am still angry about the absolute disaster Spider-Man 3 was with Eric Forman as Venom.

Don’t get me wrong, I love That 70s Show. Its a highly underrated sitcom, but holy hell who thought casting this guy:

to play the psychotic badass villain Venom was a good idea? The character that Wikipedia describes as:

“According to S.H.I.E.L.D., [Venom] is considered one of the greatest threats to humanity, alongside Magneto, Doctor Doom, and Red Skull…Venom was ranked as the 22nd Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time in IGN’s list of the top 100 comic villains.”

I could handle Tobey Maguire as Spidey, but Topher Grace as Venom was just a bad fit from Day 1. But I digress.

When Tom Hardy was announced as the star in Sony’s latest take on the symbiote my nerdgasm could be seen from space. You knew Hardy would nail the darker, grittier tone that Sony was going for, but then rumors started coming out that you might not even see the Venom suit in the movie. Coupled with an ambiguous and underwhelming teaser trailer and I was a little nervous. But then this shit leaked last night:

My goodness. This isn’t Captain America where you had Chris Evans pack on some muscle and put him in the right costume or even the Hulk, which you can just CGI the shit out of. This was going to take some serious work to get it right, as we saw in previous iterations just how wrong it can go.

And they absolutely NAILED it.

October 5th cannot come soon enough. Full trailer below.

Its Official: Disney Has Bought FOX for $52 BILLION. So What Does That Mean for the Avengers and X-Men?

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Yahoo – After weeks of rumors, the deal is done — Disney will buy up large chunks of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media empire for $52 billion. The list of what it won’t take is shorter: the Fox News cable channel, broadcast networks and Fox Sports, which are expected to spin off as their own business. The Disney conglomerate adds the Fox movie and TV studios (including big-name franchises like X-Men, Avatar,Alien and The Simpsons), it now has majority control of Hulu, cable channels like FX/FXX and more.

Thats Billion with a B. I’m always a little surprised when giant acquisitions like this actually go through with all the concerns around monopolies. Remember when DraftKings and FanDuel announced a merger last year? Well the United States government disagreed and basically nixed that entire deal. Whoops!

Now onto what everyone cares about from this gigantic deal; the X-Men are finally back under the Marvel umbrella via Disney. It remains to be seen what exactly Disney and Marvel will do with Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, but I am stoked for potential crossovers down the line (and maybe a Fantastic Four movie that doesn’t blow goats).

Its probably a little too late in the game to expect any current X-Men to show up in Avengers 3 or 4 as they bring Phase 1 to an end. Sure, maybe there’s some easter eggs or brief cameos thrown in, but X-Men has a ton of shit already going on they probably need to handle first. There’s the upcoming “Dark Phoenix” movie with my girl Sansa Stark seemingly taking the reigns of the franchise as X-Men does a second take on Jean Grey’s Phoenix character, which they royally fucked up in X-Men 3. *shutters*

Phoenix is slated for a November 2018 release. I haven’t seen much about that one yet, but I’m a huge fan of the X franchise so I’m always juiced for a new one. They’re not always critically acclaimed, but they always do their own thing and take some chances rather than rolling out the same old storylines. They did an entire movie around time travel for christ’s sake in “Days of Future Past.”

There’s also the incredibly intriguing spinoff/horror movie “The New Mutants” coming out in 2018, which the director has already hinted at being a trilogy.

The one thing that does worry me about this acquisition though is Marvel hitting the wrap it up box on the current X-Men universe before rebooting them AGAIN.

Disney/Marvel was not shy about rebooting Spiderman and introducing a third Peter Parker in less than 10 years.

Granted, the GOAT X-Men Wolverine played by Hugh Jackman is allegedly retired from the game so people probably wouldn’t cry too hard if Marvel went in another direction with a new flock of mutants.

Also, good luck fixing some of the inconsistencies that already exist now that both studios are under one roof; most notably the fact that there are two Quicksilvers. One, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson who (spoiler) got gatted in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Then there’s the FOX version of Quicksilver, Evan Peters, who is still alive and well.

So that character will either require some rickety duct tape explanation for being alive (and deciding which actor will actually play him) or he’ll most likely just get kicked to the curb, which is a shame.

I’m sure there are more of these inconsistencies as FOX owned the rights to X-Men, but not all of the individual X-Men characters, which is why garbage spin off shows with fringe mutants like The Gifted and Inhumans even existed in the first place.

All I ask is that the executives over at the Mouse don’t neuter Deadpool. It took years of Ryan Reynolds campaigning to get that movie made the way it was made and it was a goddamn mega-hit. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

Now give me a Magneto vs Iron Man battle ASAP.

X-Men Has a New Horror Movie Coming Out and I Am ALL IN

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What have we here? Aside from Deadpool, this is the first real X-Men spinoff/side movie, however you want to phrase it, to really go away from the core characters. Not to mention they seemingly have decided to go a completely new route with the horror movie feel this trailer’s giving off.

I am ALL IN. The X-Men movies in general have always been criminally underrated. X2 is really the only one I remember, and I guess Logan as well, that got any love from people.

The original legit started the whole comic book movie era that we’re still living in today. The first Spiderman with Tobey didn’t even come out for another 2 years after X-Men.

There is some hot garbage in there of course like the clusterfuck that was X-Men: The Last Stand, but this franchise has always been the one thats not afraid of trying new directions. I mean how many other films can take their core characters, and then make prequels about them in the 1960s using completely different actors and have it work? (X-Men: First Class)

And then take that already convoluted idea, and send them back in time? Because time travel always makes things easier to understand. (X-Men: Days of Future Past)

But hey it worked, which is why I’m down with X-Men dipping their toes into the horror genre. Plus you got miniature Arya Stark in there so sign me up.