As Ben Parker once almost said, with great power comes great possibility of a multi-picture franchise—as long as you've got the right costume, powers, and crossover appeal. The summer may be over, but all that really means is that planning for future summer blockbusters is the order of the day. Directors are being courted for new superhero movies. Release dates are being announced for projects we all assumed were long gone. And Star Wars is boldly taking the Batmobile where it's never gone before. (Yes, we know we're crossing the nerd streams. It's fine.) Here are the highlights of this week's superhero movie news.
To the surprise of very few, X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer has reportedly closed a deal to helm 2016's follow-up, X-Men: Apocalypse. With DOFP about to be released on DVD and Blu-ray, writer and executive producer Simon Kinberg took the opportunity to answer some fan questions about the franchise, and in doing so confirmed that Apocalypse would focus on the young Magneto, Mystique, Xavier, and Beast once again. In other words, it's a sequel to X-Men: First Class and the "past" parts of Days of Future Past.
Why this is super: It's tempting to call Days of Future Past a return to form for the X-Men movie franchise, but let's be honest: It was far better than any earlier X-movie. That the next one will have the same director, who appears to be the mover-and-shaker behind DOFP as well as the guy who started the franchise off in the first place, can only be a good thing.
The Deadpool movie is a project that's literally been in the works for years—seriously, this idea was first floated way back in 2009—and seemed to be permanently back-burnered until test footage shot by director Tim Miller mysteriously leaked online during Comic-Con International this summer. Suddenly, it went from a missed opportunity to one of the most buzzed-about projects out there, making it not entirely surprising when Fox announced a 2016 date for the movie late last week. It's still to be confirmed, of course, whether or not the movie will still have Ryan Reynolds on board to star, Miller lined up to direct, and a script by Zombieland writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, as was the case five years ago.
Why this is super: Deadpool is arguably the last truly successful Marvel character (he debuted in 1991). He's also a guy with a substantial fanbase that has been hoping for this flick to happen for a long, long time. This isn't just good news for them, however; if done properly, it'll expand Fox's X-Men film franchise past the main team (and occasional Wolverine spin-offs) and test the waters for doing X-Men movies that don't feature any X-Men at all.
Somewhat forgotten in all of the Marvel/DC/X-Men/Spider-Man superhero news of the last few months has been Kingsman: The Secret Service, adapted by Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class' Matthew Vaughan and Jane Goldman from Mark Millar's comic book. We can't swear to it, but this new, Colin Firth-starring trailer (below) might remind people that the movie exists.
Why this is super: As loath as we tend to be towards Millar's comic book work, there's no denying that this is a fun trailer that plays with spy genre tropes and class in a way that most comic book movies couldn't even dream about. It's hardly subtle, but that's not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to movie that deals with the potential destruction of mankind. In fact, it may even be a plus.
The ongoing online feud/one-upmanship exchange between Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice director Zack Snyder and Star Wars: Episode VII director J.J. Abrams went beyond Twitter last week when the latter's Bad Robot production company responded to Snyder's latest effort with a short video (below) revealing where the Batmobile really ended up.
Why this is super: Well, it might not be super—we can just imagine some amazingly obsessive continuity fan trying to come to terms with the fact that the Batmobile, which theoretically exists "today," can be found on a spaceship that existed "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"—but it's certainly very amusing. The bar has been raised, Zack Snyder. The next crossover between Star Wars and the DCU had better be a video that shows that the Death Star was destroyed by the explosion of Krypton or else we're going to call the whole thing off.
Another of the mystery DC Comics movies due for release between 2016 and 2020 was apparently revealed last week when David Ayer was named as a potential director of Suicide Squad in multiple reports. The series, which ran in the late 1980s/early 1990s before more recent revivals, centers around a group of supervillains carrying out secret missions for the US government in exchange for their prison sentences being commuted. Ayer hasn't officially signed on to the project, and Warner Bros. hasn't even officially announced that the project exists, of course, but given the concept's relative prominence outside of comics (it played a part in *Smallville'*s later years and the team recently stealth-headlined the animated movie Batman: Assault on Arkham), it's hardly surprising that this is something that DC and Warners would want to bring to the big screen.
Why this is super: Check out John Ostrander's work on the 1980s Suicide Squad. You'll see.
File this one under So Ridiculous It Can't Be True (Oh No, Wait, We Just Remembered: This Is Exactly the Level of Ridiculous to Be True). On the Meet the Movie Press podcast, journalist Jeff Sneider said that he'd been told by someone who'd worked on Man of Steel that the scene in that movie where Clark Kent fell into the ocean after saving people on the oil rig was, in fact, a set up for a later reveal that Aquaman had saved the comatose hero from drowning by telepathically commanding the whales in the shot to bring him ashore. Yes, really.
Why this is villainy: While we're all for this interconnected universe idea, this might be going a bit too far. What's next? Fox announcing that the Fantastic Four's Invisible Woman has been in all of the X-Men movies so far? The Flash having saved Batman in The Dark Knight, but so quickly no one had noticed? C'mon.
