This Week’s Movie & TV News Roundup
This has been quite a week for nerdy movies and TV. Tons of big news broke, so I’ve tried to round up anything you may have missed, along with some personal takes on these future projects.
Hank Pym, Michael Douglas and Ant-Man
Michael Douglas, a pretty big name star of Wall Street, The American President and Traffic has been confirmed as Hank Pym in Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, also starring Paul Rudd. Pym is a polarizing character who’s had some pretty messy storylines over the years, including the most infamous, a story from the ’80s that dealt with his domestic abuse of Janet Pym (The Wasp). In the Ultimate Marvel universe, he was a pretty terrible person as that plotline was retooled to a pretty disturbing fashion. A good deal of the MCU stems from Ultimate, so I’m really curious just how they’re going to handle Hank Pym – is he simply the creator of the Pym Particles, passing them to a younger, more heroic Scott Lang, Rudd’s character? Or is he going to be a hero in his own right? Still, with another huge actor involved in the MCU, Marvel is showing they really aren’t messing around with the quality of the films they want to make.
Magic the Gathering…the movie
This week Fox acquired the rights to a movie version of collectible card game juggernaut, Magic the Gathering. There’s not much more to say on this news, since after all, acquisition of rights definitely doesn’t mean a movie is going to be made, only that it might be made. Lots of popular fiction have had rights acquired and were never made into films or, with something like the Warcraft movie, take many years to get to the screen. If this does happen, I’m guessing the story will probably focus on the Neo-Planeswalkers such as Jace Beleren and Chandra Nalaar, as they’re the flagship icons of MtG at this point. That being said…it’d be pretty awesome to see a Weatherlight and Urza movie. Fox has said they intend for MtG to be a film series on the same epic scale as The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, so who knows – there were 8 Harry Potter movies, I think you could probably span from Yawgmoth to Nicol Bolas in that amount of time!
John Constantine, TV Star
There’s been some talk of a television show based on John Constantine, from Vertigo’s Hellblazer and of late DC’s Constantine and Justice League: Dark comics. This week it was announced that NBC has ordered a pilot of the show, written by David Goyer (The Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel) and Daniel Cerone (The Mentalist). I’m personally pretty hyped about this – I’d love to see an hour long Constantine TV show, dark and adult, with all the twists and turns of a good Hellblazer trade paperback. The fact that Constantine may be an NBC show does worry me, though, NBC doesn’t have a very good history of treating their shows well, being well known for scheduling and creative fuckery. Here’s hoping!
Gotham TV
This week saw the confirmation that Fox’s direct-to-series order for Gotham is going to be a Smallville-like Batman origin story. Bruce Wayne will be about 13 at the start of the series and the Fox Chairman of Entertainment, Kevin Reilly, envisions a show where the character and actor grow up together. The idea is that, very similar to Smallville, Bruce will become Batman at the end of the series, not donning a costume until then. The series will also feature other iconic Batman characters like Commissioner Gordon, the Joker and Catwoman, and will have the same realistic, gritty tone as Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
This could potentially be a really awesome series. I love the idea of a pre-Year One Bruce Wayne – the character had a lot of adventures before he put on the cape and cowl, as he trained to become the World’s Greatest Detective. Hopefully this series will not be so similar to Smallville that it functions by monster-of-the-week style storytelling like the early Smallville seasons. The fact that it is being described as ‘operatic’ and ‘larger than life’ is really promising, though. It’s also worth nothing that this series won’t have any canon ties to the DC movies, and that Fox has licensed, essentially, the rights to the entire Batman franchise for this show.
The Flash, An Arrow Spinoff
Somewhat unsurprisingly, with Barry Allen as a supporting character on The CW’s Arrow, plans for a spinoff series featuring The Flash were announced this week as well. Writing will be done by two of the three Arrow creators, as well as Geoff Johns, DC’s Chief Creative Office and prolific comics writer.
Personally I really love The Flash and am not particularly fond of what little Arrow I’I’ve watched, so I’m nervous about this series for sure. Not to mention that with The Flash’s power is going to look incredibly goofy with any type of low TV budget; for example, as much as I really like Agents of SHIELD, some of the effects have been super cheesey, especially when you try to compare the tone of a huge, epic universe like The Avengers with the events of a TV show set in the same canon. On the other hand, The Flash’s mainstay villains could translate very well to TV…I’m almost looking forward to The Rogues on screen, now!
Other items of note this week include Bill Paxton appearing on Agents of SHIELD, rumors of Johnny Depp in talks to play Dr. Strange, and the cancellation of Amazon, which was to be a Wonder Woman origin TV series.
