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The Civil War has come and gone, but that doesn't mean that Marvel is no longer dominating superhero movie headlines. If anything, certain holy crap! events in Captain America's latest flick downright guaranteed people will be talking about the movie for quite some time. But the churn of the Marvel Machine is just the beginning. Here, as always, is your roundup of the best of the week's superhero movie news.
Not content with breaking records for both R-rated movies and Fox's entire X-Men movie franchise, Deadpool is going after even more coin with its promotional campaign for the movie's home-video release.
In fact, Ryan Reynolds is even showing up as Deadpool in other people's projects about his own film:
Few movies get theatrical-run marketing campaigns this smart, so the fact that these are just the gags the Deadpool team threw together to hawk Blu-rays is kind of amazing.
Why this is super: If promoting Deadpool movies just turns into a full-time gig for Reynolds, we won't be too upset, especially if it continues to be as funny and also seemingly random as it has been to date.
Aside from the fact that it will likely happen, we really don't know much about the next X-Men movie, New Mutants. But earlier this week franchise producer Simon Kinberg did let one thing slip: Charles Xavier will be involved. "Right now, as the movie exists, Professor X would be part of [the] movie," he told Collider, although whether he meant young James McAvoy's Professor X or Patrick Stewart's older, paternal Professor X is entirely unclear. (Kinberg also said that the movie should start production early next year. Given that X-Men: Apocalypse started production 13 months before release, expect an early 2018 date for New Mutants.)
Why this is super: Given the concept of New Mutants (young students in the Xavier school), it's not really a surprise that Xavier will appear. It's not really like the school has any other teachers of note, anyway. (Sorry, Cyclops.) Still. We have a teacher now. How long before we get some students confirmed?
Was the superhero smorgasbord in Captain America: Civil War not enough for you? Well, fear not. More capes are coming. "Civil War was a good warm up for us in terms of the storytelling for Infinity War, because we were dealing with such a large number of characters," Civil War co-director Anthony Russo told Sky Movies in a promotional video for the new release, and the 2018/2019 Avengers movies that follow. His brother and co-director Joe added, "The approach to the movies is that they are culmination films. They are going to culminate everything that has come before them, any Marvel movie up until this point. It's really banding together all of the characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to face this threat together." Anthony Mackie, aka the Falcon, added "No other comic book franchise has ever put this many comic book characters in a movie." Are you prepared to be flattened by a deluge of superheroes?
Why this is super: Having all of our favorite faces in one movie will be fun, but man, Infinity War is going to have to hustle to make screen time for each of them. No wonder there are going to be two installments.
Captain America: Civil War is already a huge slugfest, but in a previous iteration it had one more fight that never made it to theaters. According to screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely audiences almost got to watch Captain America vs. Black Widow, too. The scene was cut for time, and losing it made everyone nervous initially, according to McFeely, who said that the two heroes "clearly have a deep relationship even though they're clearly on opposite sides, and you never know how many times you need to hit that over the course of the movie. I think it works without this fight, but we certainly didn't know if it would." For those who are curious, Cap would have won the bout... kind of. "Let's just say he got away in the moment, how about that?" McFeely teased.
Why this is super: It's not a Black Widow solo movie, but it's something. Marvel, this is now on our Scenes We Hope Are On the Blu-ray list.
Things are changing over in the Warner Bros./DC Cinematic Universe, with Ben Affleck (Batman himself!) signing on as a newly-installed executive producer on the in-production Justice League. The the actor/director will apparently "fine-tune" the script and "inform the postproduction process," according to sources. This is in addition to his recently-announced role as co-writer and director of a standalone Batman movie. Who says this isn't the age of the Affleck Superhero Movie?!
Why this is super: If nothing else, this move suggests that those upset about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice have a little more reason to be optimistic about Justice League, because more oversight is being inserted into the process. Whether or not this will mean a significant shift in the direction of the franchise remains unclear, of course.
