A week after the release of Marvel's Ant-Man teaser, it was time for the second Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer to underscore that 2015 really does feel like Marvel's year. Don't worry, though, because this week had an update on one Batman movie, a seemingly debunked rumor about another, and a reminder that Fox has its own superhero movies in the pipeline for 2016 as well. Here are the highlights of the superhero movie news from the past seven days.
Not content with stealing the show in last year's The Lego Movie, it looks like the Awesome Dark Knight is preparing to answer an important question at the center of Batman mythology with his 2018 solo movie.
"I think the movie is really exciting, because it's about, 'Can Batman be happy?'" co-writer Phil Lord told MTV last week when talking about the currently in-development animated spin-off from The Lego Movie. Batman, he went on to explain, "is the ultimate in white people problems. He's like, 'Oh, I'm so rich and handsome, women like me and I've got a Maclaren! Something about my parents!'" Someone should tell the young Bruce Wayne from Gotham this, he'd probably be thrilled. Especially at that part about women liking him.
Why this is super: As fans of the idea that Batman occasionally cracks a smile (not to mention, a joke), we think it's about time a happy Bruce Wayne made it to the big screen. Sure, we're not going to get a blockheaded version of this anytime soon, but still. It'd be a start.
Marvel debuted a second trailer for Avengers: Age of Ultron this week, which offered both more scenes of the Hulk and Iron Man fighting and an even more slowed-down version of "I've Got No Strings" from Pinocchio. If this is all some subtle way of foreshadowing the appearance of a space whale in the third act, we are all for it.
Why this is super: Aside from the fact that the humorous tone that was so winning in the first Avengers is entirely absent, replaced by in-fighting, who could fail to be won over by melodramatic dialogue and lots of slow fades? It's the What the Kids Want: 2015 Edition, it appears. Especially if there's a space whale that'll swallow up the bad guy at the end.
At the end of last week, an image appeared online that purported to be a leaked screen capture from the still-to-be-released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer, suggesting the follow-up to Man of Steel would be split into two movies to be released in October 2015 and March 2016, respectively. As you might expect, the Internet was initially suspicious of the image before deciding that, even if it was fake, it was still an opportunity to complain about Warners' DC plans nonetheless.
Luckily, Henry Cavill was around to refute the rumor and reassure everyone there will be just one Batman v Superman movie for everyone to condemn after all.
Why this is super: We joke about the amount of hate that Batman v Superman gets, but given the amount of eye rolling that greeted the very possibility that BvS could've been split in two, we were hardly exaggerating. Good news for all but Warners' accountants, then, that it's staying as one movie ... although it will be amusing if the trailer is released and announces the split after all, with it turning out Cavill was mistaken. Hey, Zack Snyder, how easily do you think you could put a "To Be Continued" at the one hour mark of the movie, just to screw with people?
Some new names have appeared as possible young X-Men in next year's X-Men: Apocalypse, with Latino Review reporting that Sophie Turner and Saoirse Ronan were in contention as Jean Grey, while Jamie Blackley, Tye Sheridan, and Kingsman: The Secret Service's Taron Egerton were in the running to play Scott Summers, aka Cyclops. When asked about the report, Egerton said that he "really can't comment on the Cyclops thing," although he did add that he was "not really sure what's going on there or where that came from." Sounds like he's hiding something...
Why this is super: Putting aside any personal opinions we may have for the roles (Ronan could be great, though, right?), merely the fact that we're going to get Scott and Jean back in the X-Men franchise should be a good thing, especially if they're being introduced as relatively young characters. Does this mean Fox is planning to shift focus of the series back towards the original members of the comic book team? We can but hope.
Put aside your cynical preconceptions, fanboys (and fangirls)! A mysterious poster called "MrBlueFox" took to Reddit this week to talk up Fox's big screen reboot of Fantastic Four, telling fellow Redditors that the movie "feels like Chronicle 2" (it is directed by Chronicle's Josh Trank) even though it stays true to the original comic book and, specifically, "the original love story between two of the characters"—presumably Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. More importantly, said poster wanted to tell everyone that the movie "isn't a complete trainwreck ... it's a genuinely good movie."
The posts have since been deleted (but ComicBookMovie.com managed to snag quotes before they disappeared), and the "leaked title card" has apparently been debunked, but still—there's almost no way that this wasn't part of a strange marketing campaign for the movie, right? Is there really such a thing as a troll attempting to fool everyone and raise hope for an upcoming project?
Why this is super: Whether or not this is genuine, let's just take a moment to be grateful for the idea that there's someone out there trying to make people feel better about a movie that so many have already written off without even one scene being released publicly. We almost hope that it is a weird, good-vibes anti-troll doing the rounds, at this point.
