Many smart cinephiles and comic book geeks will avoid watching Watchmen this weekend. Not to avoid the crowds of opening weekend, and not to patiently await word of mouth from friends and reactions from critics. No, these bright few will ignore the out-of-season blockbuster event because there is absolutely no reason to see this movie. They recognize that any Watchmen adaptation (particularly this one that’s been made) is completely unnecessary. Well, for anyone not out to profit from it, anyway. Of course, even Warner Bros. might have been better off not producing the thing, since the studio won’t be making as much money as it had initially envisioned thanks to that profit-participation settlement with Fox.
The point of this post is not to call Watchmen watchers stupid. Rather, our list of five reasons the film is unnecessary is to help moviegoers get smart. After reading this, though, if any of you are still determined to waste your time sitting through almost 3 hours of redundant, rehashed, irrelevant, ridiculous and inescapably disappointing superhero cinema, we’ll be left with no choice but to consider you mindless sheep, the kind that deserve to be duped. And if Dr. Manhattan chooses to vaporize us (or fans choose to curse us out in the comments section) for exposing the truth about this enterprise of excess, then so be it. We believe we’ve served justice here. …Read more
Paramount will continue to distribute films produced by Marvel Studios, including 2010’s Thor, which Kenneth Branagh is now confirmed to be directing. The deal was expected, especially after Paramount’s handling of Iron Man. Also in the news: that film’s first sequel has been pushed back a week from April 30, 2010 to May 7, 2010. Iron Man 3 is also being planned, but hasn’t yet been given a planned release date.
Meanwhile, Paramount and Dell have teamed up to offer Iron Man preloaded into newly purchased computers. For $20, the Iron Man add-on will include exclusive bonus footage. I can’t wait to see if there’s an “I’m a Marvel, I’m a DC” video related to this.
Now that digital and 3-D projection systems are finally to receive an increase in numbers (see yesterday’s TR), short-attention Hollywood is already thinking about another moviegoing incentive: large-format projection. Thanks to the success of the Imax sequences in The Dark Knight, more and more filmmakers are shooting Imax segments for upcoming blockbusters, including Transformers 2, Iron Man 2 and Y: The Last Man. Hopefully this new trend will encourage someone to build a second Imax theatre for NYC. One screen per 20 million people is not cutting it.
Very appropriate casting: actress Danielle Panabaker (Sky High), who graduated from high school and was valedictorian at age 14, and who got her bachelor’s at 19, will be the female lead in Prodigy, a sci-fi film about a prep school that creates geniuses through questionable means.
Will Smith’s new superhero movie, Hancock, may be receiving terrible reviews, but it’s sure to make a lot of money. It is a Will Smith movie, after all. The fact that it’s an original superhero title (meaning not adapted from a comic book or other source material), however, means that if it is a success, it will be the rare movie of its kind to be such. Superhero movies may be huge right now, but really only the pre-sold properties, those with a build-in audience, make the big bucks.
A number of original superhero movies are just as worthy of your attention as the Spider-Mans, the Iron Mans, the Batmans and the X-Mens. Sure, much of the time, non-adapted superheroes are lame, as in the cases of Blankmanand My Super Ex-Girlfriend. But just check out any of the following ten titles and see why it sometimes pays off to put your trust in an unfamiliar hero.
The Incredibles- This one did it all: won an Oscar; received favorable reviews across the board; did blockbuster business in theaters and ancillaries (its the sole original superhero movie to break $100 million, domestically, a feat it far surpassed by actually grossing more than $260 million); and featured the single greatest superhero gag (above) ever seen. So there’s proof that a superhero movie can be good and do well without being based on another property. …Read more
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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