How many superhero movies are in the works? Enough that even Marvel Entertainment can't manage to keep track of when they're all supposed to come out, apparently. Despite that, it's been a relatively quiet week for news and rumors about the many, many comic book flicks being made over the next couple of years. Well, as long as you ignore the reveal of Captain America's next nemesis or the fact that someone might have leaked the plot of Fantastic Four online. Here are the highlights of this week's superhero movie news.
We're still an entire Avengers: Age of Ultron release away from Marvel's third Captain America movie—one that might feel more like an Avengers movie, given that it'll also star Robert Downey Jr.—but the cast list for Captain America: Civil War is already taking shape with the announcement that Daniel Bruhl will be playing a mysterious character in the movie who just might be a villain.
Why this is super: Bruhl was great in Inglourious Basterds, so his addition to any cast is a good thing, even if rumors of his character being a villain are somewhat surprising. (There isn't really a villain in the original Civil War comic book story, per se). The biggest question now is, who is he playing? (We're betting on Baron Zemo, because he's awesome.)
Take this with an entire salt shaker, but some mysterious person made the rounds of various sites including Reddit, 4chan, and SuperheroHype this weekend spreading what they claimed was the entire plot of next year's Fantastic Four reboot. You can read the whole thing here. Is it genuine? We won't know until next August, but it doesn't seem impossible to imagine it being a movie.
Why this is villainy: You can decide for yourself how moral it is to leak the entire plot of a movie almost a year before its release (personally, we think it's kind of lousy), but the proposed changes—if genuine—are certainly a sign that the movie isn't following the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby version of the characters in almost any way. As fans of the original versions, we're hoping that this is all some elaborate ruse.
Promoting the hell out of the upcoming DVD and Blu-ray release of Guardians of the Galaxy to Slashfilm, director James Gunn casually dropped an interesting hint of things to come. "There are a lot of different characters in [Guardians 2] that could go in a lot of different directions," he said, adding, "some of the characters I'm most interested in aren't necessarily Guardians of the Galaxy."
Why this is super: Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has often talked about Guardians opening up whole new worlds (literally) for the studio, but Gunn's comment is the first time that we've really had a suggestion that the series will seed potential new franchises in the same way Iron Man did. So, who's up next? A Nova movie? Adam Warlock? Or, perhaps most likely, a prelude to the already-scheduled Captain Marvel? It might be a while before we know for sure, but in the meantime you can watch this dance-off from the Guardians gag reel.
As if to spite Fox's Gotham, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice shot its own version of the Thomas and Martha Wayne murders this past week, ensuring that the one person seeing the movie who has never heard of Batman will be made aware that his parents got killed when he was a kid. You know what they say: With great power comes great responsibility to remind everyone about the possibility of becoming an orphan when you least expect it.
Why this is villainy: Look, filmmakers, we all know that Bruce Wayne watched his parents get murdered. It's not something you should feel compelled to show us over and over and over again. Doing so doesn't drive home the horror of Batman's origin. It's just the opposite: we become inured to the tragedy of the event, and start thinking "Oh, not that again..." Let's take a break from parent-slaughter for a while, please.
Last week Variety reported Jai Courtney is in talks to play Deadshot in 2016's Suicide Squad, but the more exciting piece of information came later in the outlet's story: "As for [Will] Smith, it's uncertain which character he will play, but sources say it's likely the Flash nemesis Digger Harkness aka Captain Boomerang." Yes, that's right: Will Smith might play an Australian supervillain named Captain Boomerang.
Why this is super: If the mental image of Smith playing a villain whose gimmick is throwing boomerangs isn't enough to convince you of the greatness of this idea, just concentrate and think about how much you really, really want to hear his Australian accent while he does so. If Suicide Squad comes out and Smith isn't playing an Australian called Digger, then it'll simply come as proof that the superhero bubble has finally, inescapably, burst.
