Well, if true, this is unexpected:

Now, per The Daily SuperHero’s Hollywood source Renner is done as Hawkeye mainly due to his negative comments after The Avengers… Even though nothing official has been said about Hawkeye’s involvement in The Avengers 2, Whedon has said he will introduce a new brother/sister duo to the superhero ensemble team. More reasoning that Renner’s days are over because the hero depth chart is filling up fast and there might not be any room for the archer.

The source hints that there’s the tiniest chance Renner will reprise his role in The Avengers Sequel but the source also said there is a greater chance Hawkeye will be recast (like War Machine and the Hulk have been recast before). Finally, the source said if Hawkeye is to be recast there is a solid chance he could be incorporated into the new television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a primary character.

This is, of course, just a rumor with only an anonymous source to back it up – In other words, hardly the most credible of reports. However, coming after the Deadline Hollywood story about Avengers actors reportedly falling out with Marvel over the sequel, it’s becoming oddly believable that, whenever Avengers 2 comes out, at least one actor won’t return…

The Deadline report on the current state of the Marvel Studios makes for fascinating, if somewhat confusing, reading:

But The Avengers cast are ready to rumble with Marvel for the Avengers sequel slated for a May 2015 release. “Some received only $200,000 for Avengers and Downey got paid $50M. On what planet is that OK?” an insider tells me. CAA represents an overwhelming majority of the Marvel stars and is trying hard to keep the negotiations out of the public limelight and media headlines. But that may not be possible with some reps blaming the studio for ’scorched earth’ tactics past and present. ”Marvel has created so much animosity by strong-arming and bullying on sequels already. It’s counterproductive,” one source tells me. Says another, “I’m sick of Kevin Feige telling me again and again how Marvel is ‘reinventing the movie business’. It doesn’t work like this. They’re reinventing business, period.” I’ve learned Marvel already has threatened to sue or recast when contracts and/or options are challenged. That prompted a few cast members to respond, “Go ahead.” I hear Hemsworth especially wasn’t anxious to go back into that arduous diet and training regimen and subsist primarily on egg whites for Thor: Dark World which hits theaters November 8th.

On the one hand, given the various rumors and behind-the-scenes stories that have emerged from Marvel Studios in the past, in regards to the studio’s ability to work cheap, this isn’t the biggest surprise. But on the other, I really can’t see Marvel getting away with recasting any of the main characters in Avengers without risking a significant backlash; cutting costs is one thing, but managing to dump lead actors to save money when you’re arguably the most successful movie studio in the business right now…? That’s not going to play so well, surely.

The great Judge Minty fan film – inspired by 2000AD‘s long-running Judge Dredd strip, unsurprisingly – is now online in its entirety, and it’s well worth watching:

You can find out more about the movie here, but it’s worth pointing out that not only was the movie made with the permission of 2000AD owners Rebellion, but it was also co-written by Michael Carroll, who’s one of the team of Dredd writers on the weekly strip these days. Which is to say, this is a pretty authentic “fan film,” all told.

Next year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier adds Steve Rogers’ long-time partner The Falcon to the mix, as played by Anthony Mackie. On-set photos of Mackie in uniform surfaced today courtesy of Lainey Gossip via WENN, showing a much more basic military look for Sam Wilson than his usual superhero attire. While it seems unlikely that we’ll see Falcon in the full red-and-white feathered attire in the movie, it’s also distinctly possible that what he’s sporting in the pictures here isn’t necessarily his “final” look. Though it could be. Hey, it’s still early!

A fuller look at Mackie, who co-stars in current Michael Bay release Pain & Gain, follows after the jump. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, directed by sitcom vets Joe and Anthony Russo and starring Chris Evans as Captain America and Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier, is scheduled for release on April 4, 2014.

(more…)

Iron Man 3 has been getting all the Marvel movie attention lately, but Fox’s The Wolverine is less than three months away, with a release date of July 26. On Wednesday, a minute-long sizzle reel of footage (some new, some seen in previous trailers) surfaced online, first seen at last month’s CinemaCon. Here it is:

And in further Hugh Jackman-as-Wolverine news, X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer tweeted a picture of Jackman in character — his back, at least — on the set of the 2014 film, great news for fans of Logan in brown leather jackets.

The Hollywood Reporter has Greg Rucka considering the rating given to June’s Man of Steel:

Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best. I haven’t seen Man of Steel, haven’t read the script, and I’ve assiduously avoided spoilers. I genuinely don’t know if this “reality” will be present or not. I want it to be brilliant. I want it to be glorious. I want it to be inspiring. I am keeping the faith.

But that PG-13 on Man of Steel is making me nervous. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it’s a warning that there’s another k-shiv coming for the kidneys, or if it’s just the cost-of-doing-business, or even if it’s an MPAA-bias against all superhero violence. I don’t know if this is a genuine caution to parents, or a marketing decision aimed at a demographic too-cool for Superman’s brand of hope and idealism, yet embracing of Batman’s self-loathing rough justice, to assure them their ticket will be money well-spent. I don’t know if that PG-13 is there out of sincerity or cynicism or politics.

Over at his Tumblr, someone asks whether or not this desire for an all-ages Superman movie is inconsistent with his own comic book work on the character, and Rucka responds:

I’m just nervous, as I said. The last time they made a Superman movie, my son was 8. I couldn’t take him to it, it was too dark for him. He wanted to see it desperately, because it was Superman. Superman means a lot to a lot of people. A lot of those people are children.

No, it’s not Warner Brothers’ job to parent my child. But I do think that, especially in the case of an icon as powerful as Superman, there is a responsibility to remember how diverse his audience is. The more of that audience you try to reach – and they’re trying to reach EVERYONE with the MoS campaign – the more, I think, that needs to be considered.

I hadn’t, I admit, given a lot of thought to the rating of the Man of Steel movie, although I agree with Rucka, when I think about it, that a Superman movie should be as available and suitable to young audiences as possible. I was thinking more about the tone of the film every time I saw the trailers or the photos or the whatever from it, and worrying that the movie will be try to be something other than… I don’t know, than “fun,” for want of a better way to put it. I mean, I want drama and I even want beauty, but shouldn’t Superman, of all superheroes, have a movie that’s also just fun?

(Related/unrelated: I loved Rucka’s Adventures of Superman run, as weirdly truncated as it seemed at the time. Very few people in recent memory have written a scene that “gets” the character as much as the one where Superman returns a lost child to her mother and then, calmly, happily explains that, no, there’s really not anything more important than that that he should be up to. I’d love to see Rucka do some more Superman; I’d really love to see Rucka do some more Lois Lane. Maybe one day.)

Brett White suggests some things comic fans may want to keep in mind while enjoying this summer’s comic book-based movies, including this nugget of solid truth:

Not only is Electro going to be blue, he’s going to be Jamie Foxx. And Perry White will be played by Laurence Fishburne. Jimmy Olsen is possibly going to be Jenny Olsen. Idris Elba still controls the Bifrost as Heimdall. I don’t really know what to say to people that have a problem with this. Comic books have a race/gender/sexual identity/literally-everything problem encoded into their very DNA, since they were all created at a time before anyone other than straight white men had a say in things. And every one of those characters I just mentioned were white men. And if they weren’t being played by diverse actors, the majority of this summer and next summer’s films would be nearly 100% white. The comic book characters created in the 1960s do not reflect the world of 2013. They have to change.

Of course, it’d be nice if the comics changed to more accurately reflect the world of 2013 as well…

Given the initial positive reviews, it looks like the only people not looking forward to the release of Iron Man 3 are American musicians:

[American Federation of Musicians] members were outside the midtown Manhattan offices of Marvel on Tuesday handing out leaflets angry with the studio not using their members for Iron Man 3. The union was also on site at a Captain America: The Winter Soldier shoot in downtown LA on Olympic Blvd today and outside of the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood where the IM3 premiere is scheduled for Wednesday evening.

The problem is that Marvel uses European musicians to score its movies while also receiving tax breaks to make its movies in the U.S., according to the organization’s John Acosta: “Marvel is unfair to musicians because they take tax breaks from states but when it comes to doing a score for their movies, they outsource the work overseas,” he said. This isn’t the first time the AFM have managed to draw attention on this issue; they picketed Marvel and Disney last year in the light of the phenomenal success of Marvel’s The Avengers, as well.

If you’ve seen the recut trailers that reconceptualize The Shining as a romantic comedy or Mrs. Doubtfire as a horror movie, then you might think the following video is along those lines. But, no — it’s an actual promotional spot that evidently aired on ABC Family this past weekend, offering a very different interpretation of the first entry in Christopher Nolan’s Bat-trilogy, Batman Begins:

So, Iron Man 3 will have exclusive footage when it’s released in China, it was announced last week. That news led to this somewhat staggering animation from the people at Next Media Animation:

That American audition scene in particular is a little brutal, isn’t it…?

You know, the more I think about it, the less happy I am that Batroc the Leaper is going to appear in the next Captain America movie. It’s not that I’m not a Batroc fan; just the opposite, in fact. I think he’s a great character, and I’m always glad to see him, but I worry that a great deal of what I like about him – Mostly, that he’s a ridiculous, comedy character with an over-the-top accent – is likely to be lost in translation to the movie, which will in turn lead to an overly-serious “re-interpretation” of the character in the comics.

I may be worrying about nothing; Rick Remender is the writer in charge of Cap’s comic book fate these days, after all, and if there’s one thing he has shown in his career so far, it’s that a lack of subtlety is hardly something he has a problem with. But Marvel always strikes me as somewhat conservative with the characters that turn up in movies, in the sense of “those versions gradually – or less than gradually, in the case of Nick Fury – end up becoming similar to the movie incarnations for synergistic purposes” (Hey, remember the new Whiplash created to mirror the one in Iron Man 2?) In that we’re unlikely to see a comedy Batroc in The Winter Soldier, how long before we end up with a depressingly serious take on Batroc in the comic books?

We live in a world where the porn version of Wonder Woman exists before any “official” live-action version of the character (Well, outside of the 1970s Lynda Carter version, of course), as well as a world where, let’s be honest: This actually looks more “Wonder Woman”-y than David E. Kelley’s NBC pilot from a couple years ago.

In the email accompanying this pic of Kimberly Kane that went to Ain’t It Cool News, Wonder Woman XXX: An Axel Braun Parody director Braun reportedly wrote “David E Kelley can Kiss My Ass ” Maybe the CW should ask Braun to help out on their in-development Wonder Woman pilot…

Just a funny bit that’s making the rounds on facebook (hat tip to Walt Simonson and Phil Jimenez), here fan page Comic Book Movies takes a look at Superman’s costume from Man of Steel and gives a suggestion of what a good sponsored cleaning could do for it.

The image originally comes from Deviant Art user “thedreaded1″.

What do you think, does the costume need a scrubbing to go from A to B?

If there is one thing out of the many that can be said about Jack Kirby, it could be that he was ahead of his time.

Earlier today, Buzzfeed showed off the lost Kirby art that was going to be “used” for the fake movie “Argo”, and is it intense and obviously Kirby. The heavy inks and broad lines that are distinctive to the Kirby style, but the intricacies of just everything is astounding. You can tell some of his comic work snuck in with the Celestials and Galactus lookalikes.

With this found art, it just shows  that even thirty-something years later, Kirby is still upping the game for artists and creators today.

For those who like to imagine a world in which Warner Bros. just can’t do anything right with the DC Comics properties… This might just reinforce your worldview:

I’ve now heard from multiple sources that the Will Beall script for Justice League has been scrapped. The story from each source is the same: it’s terrible. Some sources seem to think the whole movie is going to fall apart and never happen, while some believe that Warner Bros will keep moving forward, unwilling to lose the superhero arms race.

With no script, no stars and no director, I can’t see any way that this movie could be ready for a 2015 release date at this point and still be good. Is it time that Warners threw in the towel on this particular dream, at least for now?

Mark Millar has strong feelings about the mooted Justice League movie:

I actually think the big problem for them is the characters are just too out of date. The characters were created 75 years ago, even the newest major character was created 68 years ago, so they’re in a really weird time… You can get away with stuff in comics that in live action’s just a bit sucky – the best one is definitely Aquaman. Aquaman can’t even talk under water. If you think about it in comics it’s fine, you just have a speech balloon, but how do you have Atlantis and people talking under water? Are they gonna talking telepathically? Is it going to be body forms? The actual logistics of each member of the Justice League is disastrous, and you put them all together and I think you get an excellent way of losing $200 million.

I’m unsure about how much I agree about this, to be honest; certainly, there’s an argument to be made that DC’s characters are the product of a specific time that is now long-gone, but I find the idea that the DCU characters are inherently more flawed or cinematically-unsuitable than the successful-in-celluloid Marvel heroes somewhat more ridiculous. Is “World’s Most Powerful Telepath” really more suited to movies than “World’s Fastest Man”?

This feels like it could be important, or be nothing at all, depending on how it all works out:

The Valiant Entertainment Group has taken back the movie rights to a film based on its Harbinger character and plans to develop the film in-house.  It appears that Valiant, at the urging of Chairman Peter Cuneo, who was a former CEO of Marvel, is attempting to follow the Marvel Studios’ method of developing its own properties for the big screen.

Apparently, Paramount – which had been developing the movie – got cold feet at the prospect of potential legal action over ownership and credit for the characters a la Watchmen, considering creator Jim Shooter’s estranged relationship with Valiant as a whole. Part of me wonders whether there’s a there there; I’d always just assumed that Valiant owned the characters outright, but I haven’t seen any of the contracts, obviously…

Nonetheless, taking control of its own movies has worked out well for Marvel, so there’s every possibility that it could also do so for Valiant, especially considering the former Marvel staff working there (If nothing else, the current Valiant line of comics is far more exciting/interesting than I suspected it would be, and I speak as one who has no nostalgic attachment to the original comics at all). It all depends on who they get to develop the movies, and whether the audience will still be willing to entertain another superhero universe by the time their features get released.

In the midst of all the news about JJ Abrams and Star Wars, this piece of movie news may have passed you by:

‘Doctor Strange,’ which I’ve been talking about for years, is definitely one of [the Phase Two movies]. He’s a great, original character, and he checks the box off this criteria that I have: he’s totally different from anything else we have, just like ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ He’s totally different from anything we’ve done before, as is ‘Ant-Man,’ which keeps us excited.

That’s Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige confirming to MTV Splash Page that Doctor Strange will be part of the next cycle of Marvel movies, along with Ant-Man. So, that makes Phase Two Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of The Galaxy, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Avengers 2… That we know of, anyway.

If the report at Latino Review is true, we’ll be seeing a somewhat pared-down Justice League in Warner Bros’ 2015 movie:

As of this morning, they are STILL looking for a director. In the meantime, according to sources, the final cinematic Justice League roster will consist of five core members featuring:

1) Superman
2) Batman
3) Green Lantern
4) Wonder Woman
5) The Flash

Apparently, there’s the possibility of a cameo appearance by two other members (Reportedly Martian Manhunter and perhaps Aquaman), but the movie centers around these five. That makes a lot of sense – Marvel’s The Avengers also had a significantly pared-down team, and even then, we knew all of them already with the exception of Hawkeye. For Justice League, both Wonder Woman and the Flash will have to be introduced to movie audiences, in addition to whoever the villain turns out to be. And yet, I admit… Part of me wishes there could have been just one more woman in that line-up…

So, who is going to play Star-Lord in the movie version of Guardians of The Galaxy? Rumors so far put both Zachary Levi and Jim Sturgess in the frame, but director James Gunn took to Twitter to deny those rumors – and then, very quickly, deleted those tweets. SpinOff Online has the story:

“Almost everything in the Variety article on the Guardians of the Galaxy casting (and the following articles based on it) was/is inaccurate,” Gunn tweeted first.

That annoyed Variety writer Jeff Sneider, who tweeted in response, “Also weird how Sturgess and Levi never denied it, and neither did Marvel. Maybe James isn’t on the same page as everyone else…”

When Gunn deleted his tweet, Sneider added, “Ah yes, the old ‘a posting he later removed.’ Believe me, if there was something grossly inaccurate, some1 would have called to bitch & moan”

After Gunn sent out his first tweet, IGN ran a story called “Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn denies report that Zachary Levi is in the running to play lead role.” Gunn then responded to that by saying, “I didn’t deny (or confirm) specifics. I just said the majority of the Variety article was inaccurate. So your headline is off.” He later deleted that tweet as well, but IGN has updated its story.

Is Marvel stepping in to tell Gunn to keep his Tweetmouth shut? After all, it seems to be Marvel Studios policy to not respond to Internet rumors based on past events, and instead enjoy the free publicity. Or are things going on in terms of casting that even Gunn isn’t privy to?