It's been a relatively slow week for superhero movie news, and one that's been dominated by Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron, which finally spilled some secrets about what we can expect from the movie that will inevitably be the biggest flick of 2015. Elsewhere, the new Batmobile was feared missing (don't worry, Gotham's finest were on the case), and Sony has found a way to make its Spider-Man franchise even gloomier. Here are the highlights of this week's superhero movie news.
Disney finally released an official synopsis for next year's second Avengers movie (yay!). However, it was pretty—if unsurprisingly—low on actual plot details for the Joss Whedon-directed summer slugfest (boo!). It goes a little something like this:
Why this is super: There's a lot unpack here. First, of course it's all Tony Stark's doing. Second, after the reveal that S.H.I.E.L.D. was, in fact, a front of the terrorist organization Hydra in the last Captain America movie, this marks the second time that an attempt at peacekeeping ends up revealed as a force for evil in the Marvel movies. (Who knew that Marvel was apparently all about the isolationist politics?) Finally, Ultron is described as a "technological villain" instead of a robot. Is it possible that the movie version of the character isn't actually a robot?
May 1, 2015, you can't arrive soon enough.
James McAvoy doesn't know much about what 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse involves, but he did share one important fact about the feature. "I think I'm losing my hair finally," he told the Huffington Post. "That's kind of all I know." He did add that writer Simon Kinberg had emailed to say that he was "getting dead excited about stuff," but sadly Kinberg didn't share just what stuff was worth getting worked up about.
Why this is super: Obviously, both Days of Future Past and First Class were, in theory, prequels to the X-Men as we know them today, but there was just something off-putting about seeing an Xavier who had a flowing head of hair. Now, finally, we'll get a Xavier who doesn't have any hair getting tangled up in his thought powers—as well as the chance to see McAvoy with a shaved head. If we're lucky, maybe we'll get McAvoy with a comb-over at some point in the movie before he goes full-on bald.
Alex Kurtzman, who'll be directing the Amazing Spider-Man spin-off featuring the black-costumed symbiotic version of Marvel's wall-crawler, told MTV News that the idea behind the movie was that "you can do things with Venom that you can't do with Spider-Man," and that Venom "is the representation of every line that will get crossed."
Why this is villainy: While it was never really in the cards that Venom was going to be all happiness and sunshine, considering the character veers between anti-hero and outright villain in the comic books, the very idea that the Venom movie is going to somehow be darker than the already-emo Amazing Spider-Man series is almost exhausting by itself. Didn't Spider-Man used to be all about the jokes and the comedy?
Late last week, a rumor started popping up across the internet that one of the new Batmobiles had been stolen from the set of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Unsurprisingly, that turned out to be untrue—spoiler: no one would want to steal such a ridiculous looking monstrosity—but that didn't stop director Zack Snyder from having some fun with it on Twitter in the third of his stream of images mashing up the DC super-movie with Disney's Star Wars franchise:
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Why this is villainy: Where to start? Firstly, as anyone who watches Batman movies already knows, thievery is bad, OK? More importantly, though: Anything that gives Snyder an excuse for another Star Wars-referencing photo is even worse. Come on, people. You're better than that. We're all better than that.
