Make Mine Marvel
Say goodbye to Marvel Comics boys and girls, we now have Marvel Entertainment, Inc. Just one of many announcements coming from the house that Lee and Kirby built. Seems they’ll be throwing comics on the backburner (judging from that Ultimate line might be the right decision) and moving on up to Hollywood and ten new movies to go into the works based off Marvel heroes.
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Say goodbye to Marvel Comics boys and girls, we now have Marvel Entertainment, Inc. Just one of many announcements coming from the house that Lee and Kirby built. Seems they’ll be throwing comics on the backburner (judging from that Ultimate line might be the right decision) and moving on up to Hollywood and ten new movies to go into the works based off Marvel heroes.
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Due to the success of Hollywood film enterprise, Marvel Comics Marvel Entertainment, Inc. announced the completion of a “$525 million non-recourse debt facility” which will finance ten theatrical films based off the Marvel characters in the next seven years. Paramount has agreed to distribute the lot including the first film tentatively scheduled for Summer 2008.
What makes the deal so interesting is Marvel retains complete creative control, final say, and a larger percentage of the profits than the films they have licensed to other studios (X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, Daredevil, Blade, The Punisher). Marvel contends they will still stay closely involved in those projects in productions with other studios such as Ghost Rider and X-Men 3. The move allows Marvel to cash in on the theater and DVD sales as well as a larger chunk of the merchandising done for each film, and allow the company to build its own film library.
Avi Arad, Chairman and CEO of Marvel Studios, commented: “The film slate financing enables us to evolve our entertainment operations into film production, an area where we have experienced past success with our partners and which offers significant profit potential for our company. The characters involved are some of the most valuable in the Marvel Universe, and we are excited to launch them as consumer brands via feature film releases under our direction.”
So what heroes are getting their own films? Glad you asked. Captain America, The Avengers, Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, Nick Fury, Hawkeye, Shang-Chi, Power Pack, and Cloak & Dagger are all being thrown up on the drawing board. Interesting choices to be sure (Ant-Man? Hawkeye? Power Pack?!) Each will get a budget of around $165 million (for Cloak and Dagger?!!) and will be either PG or PG-13, no R-rated films.
The Weather Man is an intriguing little piece of cinema. It has wondrous, hysterical, moving, and thought provoking moments and yet the film is somehow less than all the great pieces put together. It’s a hard movie for me to review, because so much of it I enjoyed, and yet not all of it fits together as well as I’d like. It’s definatly worth taking a look at, and it’s one of those movies that will become highly quotable, yet I left feeling like it was just slightly unfinished.
Way back in 1998 Zorro, the sword wielding, bullwhip snappin’, hero to the downtrodden of California, returned to the big screen in 
Capote is the latest biographical film that provides a wonderful juicy role for an actor, this time for Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film is well shot and pieced together, and cleverly cast with great performances. Yet….there is something missing. Although this is a very good film, almost completely overshadowed by Hoffman’s performance, it never becomes the great film it aspires to be.