While we were still recovering from the holidays and trying to pretend that January isn't the worst month of the year (it's so dark and so cold, especially after spending a month surrounded by brightly-colored lights watching videos of logs burning!), the machine that is the superhero movie business kept chugging along. This week, Marvel took advantage of the winter lull to get us excited about Ant-Man, while Fox decided that it was time to see how many X-Men movies an audience is prepared to pay money for in a 12-month window. Just as we did in 2014, may we present the highlights of the week's superhero movie news.
Proving that it was (surprisingly) serious about spinning the X-Men's comedy Cajun mutant thief character into his own solo movie Fox revealed earlier this week that Gambit, starring Channing Tatum as the roguishly charming—not to mention Rogue-charming—hero, will be released in October next year.
Why this is super: For those who feel Gambit is one of the more fun members of Marvel's mutant franchise (or merely those who like Tatum as an actor), this seems like a good idea ... until you realize it'll be the third X-Men movie Fox releases next year (following Deadpool, which we'll return to in a second, and X-Men: Apocalypse). Is Fox trying to drown its fledgling franchise in one fell swoop?
Given its troubled creation—which included the loss of original writer/director Edgar Wright and last-minute addition of replacement director Peyton Reed—there were times when it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever get a chance to watch Marvel's Ant-Man. Imagine the joy of all true Ant-Fans this week, then, when Marvel not only released the first poster for the Paul Rudd vehicle, but also the first official trailer for the movie. This is only part of Marvel Studios' latest wave of promotion. In addition to this trailer, which debuted alongside the studio's TV show, Agent Carter, Marvel will also release a second trailer for Avengers: Age of Ultron next week.
Why this is super: Well, first of all, it's proof that we're actually going to get an Ant-Man movie in the first place. Secondly, as with all the Marvel movies to date, it looks fun—even if there's also a feeling of sameness about Marvel projects beginning to seep in. What's that saying about familiarity breeding contempt...?
Even if we're feeling somewhat cynical about the Marvel brand, everyone's favorite anagrammatical actor Benedict Cumberbatch isn't. In an interview to promote The Imitation Game last week, he revealed that it was the Marvel name alone that convinced him to sign on to become Stephen Strange in next year's movie version of the Steve Ditko/Stan Lee character. "I don't think it's a risk because of Marvel," he said of the role. "Marvel is a stable bringing out ordinary comic characters and turning them into screen-like gods."
Ethan Hawke, meanwhile, has been talking about how close he came to getting the role (very close, apparently), and why he's glad that he ultimately didn't. "There's a tremendous amount of salesmanship that's now really important to a studio like [Marvel]," he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast, calling it "a tremendous amount of time in your life where you're working, and you’re not acting."
Why this is villainy: Hawke's not wrong about the importance of promotion when it comes to Marvel movies, but that is presumably something that won't be entirely new to Hobbit and Star Trek Into Darkness veteran Cumberbatch. But Benedict's seemingly blind faith in the Marvel brand feels both cynical and maybe just a little worrying. After all, at some point Marvel's winning streak is going to end. (Right?)
The long-awaited solo movie for Marvel's Merc-With-a-Mouth is just over a year away, which means that it's probably good that Fox is working on actually getting people to appear in it. According to reports, T.J. Miller will be voicing a fourth-wall-breaking additional voice to accompany Ryan Reynolds' antihero on his madcap adventures, while Ed Skrein is likely to play the movie's bad guy, whose identity is being kept under wraps for now.
Why this is super: Sure, it feels somewhat surprising that we're just getting to the casting stage for a movie that's been under discussion in various forms for the last five years, but it was only officially announced last month. That said: Miller as a snarky inner voice that talks directly to the audience and makes fun of the rest of the movie? This is what the X-Men movies have all needed up until this point.
In an interview with SFX magazine, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn came out and said what a lot of people have been thinking. "I think [Christopher] Nolan kick-started a very dark, bleak style of superhero escapism, and I think people have had enough of it," he said when talking about the current spate of comic book movies. "People want fun and escapism at the moment. Look at the success of Guardians of the Galaxy." As chance would have it, Vaughn was promoting his new fun, escapist comic book movie Kingsman: The Secret Service when he made these comments. Coincidence, or something more?!?
Why this is villainy: The proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes. Have audiences had enough of dark, bleak escapism? While it's tempting to say "yes," purely because our own tastes run more towards fun than gloom, it's unrealistic to think that it'd take more than one successful bleak superhero movie (coughBatmanvSupermancough) to have people suggesting that *that'*s the new trend (again). Let's wait and see how the supposedly "realistic," "gritty" Fantastic Four reboot does before we start jumping to any conclusions at least, OK?
