In a few days, Starz will premiere the second season of their original series, DaVINCI’S DEMONS. Stars Laura Haddock and Tom Riley give us a preview of what’s coming up on the show, plus bad news for the Big Two in the bookstore and some very cool TWILIGHT ZONE toys are headed to your shelf.
This July, blast off with the fuzziest Guardian of the Galaxy in Rocket Raccoon #1 – an all-new ongoing series from Eisner Award winning fan-favorite Skottie Young! And you’ve never seen Rocket like this before!
As defenders of the cosmos go, Rocket Raccoon has faced his fair share of galactic battles. He’s been a hero to the weak, a champion of the good, a protector to the innocent, and a heartthrob to many intergalactic species across the cosmos. But is he ready to be a raccoon on the run?!
Rocket’s high-flying life of adventure and heroism may soon be a thing of the past when he becomes framed for something he didn’t do! And the authorities aren’t the only ones hot on his TAIL! (Yeah, we went there.)
“I figure that a guy like Rocket, with his attitude, has swindled his way over many planets and charmed many ladies,” says writer/artist Skottie Young. “He’s racked up a malitia of ex-girlfriends I’m dubbing the Exterminators. They’re all fed up and they’ve decided it’s time they dish out some payback on his furry little tail.”
With his pal Groot at his side, Rocket will have to blast his way out of trouble (and blast his way into some) if he wants to clear his name. Along the way he’ll tussle with some of the fiercest creatures in the known galaxy! But they’re about to bite off more than they can chew if they think they can go toe-to-paw against the shortest Guardian with the biggest gun!
Don’t miss the start of the explosive new series as superstar creator Skottie Young kicks off an epic deep space adventure in Rocket Raccoon #1!
ROCKET RACCOON #1
Written by SKOTTIE YOUNG
Art & Cover by SKOTTIE YOUNG
Variant Cover by DAVID PETERSEN
In an electrifying return to his signature role, Vin Diesel heads up an internationally acclaimed cast that includes Karl Urban (Star Trek franchise), Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica), Jordi Mollà (Columbiana), WWE superstar Dave Bautista (upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy), Noah Danby (“Defiance”), Danny Blanco Hall (Immortals), Bokeem Woodbine (Total Recall), Matt Nable (Killer Elite), Raoul Trujillo (Apocalypto), Conrad Pla (Immortals), Neil Napier (White House Down), Nolan Gerard Funk (Aliens in America) and two-time Grammy Award nominee Keri Lynn Hilson.
Debuting an Unrated Director’s Cut with even more intense, heart-pounding sequences not shown in theaters and an alternate ending, the Blu-ray Combo Pack includes bonus features that reveal the behind-the-scenes secrets of the heart-stopping thriller’s incredible cast, uniquely talented crew and cutthroat characters.
The Riddick Unrated Director’s Cut Blu-ray Combo Pack also includes a Digital HD Copy of the film available on UltraViolet. UltraVioletis the revolutionary new way for consumers to collect movies and TV shows in the cloud to instantly stream and download to tablets, smartphones, computers, and TVs. Consumers can now truly enjoy Riddick anytime, anywhere.
We shine the spotlight on the Sci-Fi Queen of Riddick
For many sci-fi fans, Katee Sackhoff is a household name of this exciting genre, but you don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to know this woman is a force to watch.
The all-new thriller finds the title character trapped on a sun-scorched planet and pursued by ruthless bounty hunters eager to collect the reward for Riddick’s capture—dead or alive. Savage alien creatures, expansive desert landscapes, monster storms, jet hogs and an arsenal of futuristic weaponry make this the most exhilarating episode to date in writer and director David Twohy’s breathtaking series of futuristic blockbusters.
In celebration of the Blu-ray release of Riddick, we shine the spotlight on some of our favorite roles from Katee Sackhoff.
Dahl- Riddick
While her name might be pronounced ‘doll’, she’s anything but sweet in this role. Sackhoff has said Dahl is probably the strongest character she’s ever played.
1) Capt. Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace– Battlestar Galactica
Before playing the role of a sniper in Riddick, fans most enjoyed Katee’s work as Capt. Starbuck in the SyFy network series Battlestar Galactica. For four seasons, she played Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace, a pilot and warrior.
2) Herself- The Big Bang Theory
This may be her best role of all, a cameo in Howard’s fantasy. Katee guest stars on two episodes helping our nerdy hero muster up courage to propose to his girlfriend, Bernadette. Bernadette said no to the proposal but what better wingwoman is there for any sci-fi nerd than Katee.
3) Detective Sara Essen & Bo-Katana – Batman: Year One & Star Wars: The Clone Wars
As if there is more reason to note that she’s a standout, she also lends her voice to the live animation classics like Batman, and Star Wars, opposite the Breaking Bad mastermind, Bryan Cranston.
Our friends at Universal Home Entertainment have given us two copies of the Combo Pack. For your chance of winning a Riddick Unrated Director’s Cut Blu-ray Combo Pack, simply answer the following question:
The name of the first film in the Riddick franchise is _______.
The Chronicles of Riddick
Pitch Black
The Darkseekers
Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m., Tuesday, January 14. The judgment of ComicMix will be final. Open only to readers in the United States and Canada.
My regular readers have figured out by now that when I sit down to write this column every week, my tongue is usually so deeply planted in my cheek that my face scares homophobes.
Which is why I come to you today with a heavy heart. And an uncharacteristically downbeat-sounding bunch of words. I have nothing to joke about – at least, not “above the cut.”
Oh, I continue to monitor, and very discriminatingly partake, of the various expressions of Geek culture chronicled, dissected, and celebrated here and elsewhere. But I can’t seem to get as excited about any of it as do all the other too-numerous and overstimulated chatterers.
Something is missing.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be a big deal that John Romita, Jr. is maybe gonna draw Superman. And no one can figure out why Kick-Ass 2 was a box office disappointment. And people can’t wait to know what the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is gonna look like, or how Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who is gonna be different from Matt Smith’s. And on and on and on. But, for some reason that’s really starting to bug me, because I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, I can’t motivate myself to give a rat’s patoot about any of it.
From most of the comics and movies and video I sample, something is missing. For a long time I thought it was just that I was somehow managing to miss “the good stuff,” but now I’m not so sure.
It can’t possibly be Just Me. Not with the fistful of antidepressants I take every day. No, of course not. That can’t be it.
I suspect that what I’m really experiencing is a massive case of Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Get It. And what veterans of the comics biz like myself have always wished for was that comics – the genre, if you can call them that; the type of content, not the physical printed product – would became a mainstream entertainment phenomenon. And they have.
Thanks more to CGI and Hollywood than to their modest printed spawning-ground, comics and related pop culture are, of course Big Business now, and have been for so long that most readers of sites like this one can’t remember a time when they weren’t. Which means they can’t remember, either, a time when all this stuff wasn’t quite as mindlessly escapist, or – at the opposite end of a spectrum that seems not to have a mid-range – leadenly, pretentiously Serious Minded.
That condition obtains, perhaps, because mindlessness sells big-time, while Seriousness of Purpose wins Eisner Awards and fanboy cred (and the occasional crowdfunding bonanza), which freshly-minted capital is then expended by the mintee on being mindless for a much bigger payday.
But something, nevertheless, seems to me to be missing.
What first got me seriously wanting to write comics instead of just reading them were things like Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’s original Green Lantern / Green Arrow series and Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck. Titles that were a vibrant and perceptively critical commentary on the culture they arose from, but whose Creative always enveloped its core concerns with a sugar-coating of good, solid, old-fashioned fun. Fun as in slam-bang heroic-fantasy action or verbal jokes and sight gags – the stuff that allowed the less demanding readers to remain oblivious, if that was their wont, to the Big Ideas the writers of such comics were trying to explore. In so doing, these comics were hits among fans (as opposed to being successful by the casual-reader-at-newsstands-only distribution “metrics” of their day. But the industry learned, for a brief time in the ‘80s, that such content was solidly marketable in the direct-only environment.
The art of producing that kind of comic book entertainment seems to me almost lost. At least, I haven’t been able to find it – not for a few years now.
If that’s the something that’s missing, I want and need – need – to find it again. Or somehow become a force in reviving it, if not just making it more visible than it is now, if it’s even still out there. And that’s what seems to be preoccupying me this week, and will, I hope, be grist for this mill in weeks to come.
All this is why something else is missing this week: a column that tries to be itself entertaining, while “sugar-coating” with humor an observation or caution that I hope might prove thought-provoking or inspiring of debate.
Oh, well. Maybe next week.
At least I didn’t do what too many in the blogosphere are tempted to do, and write a column about how I couldn’t figure out what to write about.
There are certain films I’ve discovered just by channel surfing; likewise, there are films that I know and when I come across them (again, channel surfing), I may stay to watch a given scene and then find myself watching the film through to the end. Most of the OT Star Wars movies are like that; so is Casablanca. This morning my Mary and I came across another, Miss Pettgrew Lives For A Day. I found it first on TV, bought a copy, and today watched the movie through to the end anyway.
The 2008 film stars Amy Adams, Frances McDormand, Ciaran Hinds, Lee Pace, Mark Strong and Shirley Henderson, among others, and it was directed by Bharat Nalluri with a screenplay by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy adapting the 1937 novel by Winifred Watson.
I suspect you’ll already know Amy Adams’ and Frances McDormand’s work. Bharat Nalluri may be more known to ComicMix readers as the man who directed episodes of MI-5 and Torchwood: Miracle Day. Writer David Magee wrote Finding Neverland (another film I love) and Life of Pi. Simon Beaufoy won an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire and has also scripted the upcoming The Hunger Games: Catching Fire as well as The Full Monty.
Ciaran Hinds has a mixture of films to his credit. He played Dumbledore’s brother in the final Harry Potter film, was also in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as well as John Carter and Game of Thrones. I thought he was very hammy in Political Animals, the Sigourney Weaver TV miniseries but he’s wonderful and understated in Miss Pettigrew.
Mark Strong was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and John Carter as well and also played Sinestro in the Green Lantern film as well as Lord Blackwood in the Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey Jr. Lee Pace is in all three Hobbit movies and will be playing Ronan the Accuser in the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy film.
Why do I tell you all this? To drive home that Miss Pettigrew has a really good pedigree and it lives up to it.
The story is gossamer light for all that it’s set in London in 1938 on the eve of World War II. That gives the film an underlying shadow; we know what’s waiting in the wings. So do some of the characters and it adds a poignancy to the story.
The story? Imdb does a nice job of summarizing the story so I’ll quote it: “War threatens London as Miss Pettigrew, a destitute governess, filches a client’s card from her agency and presents herself at the door. A singer named Delysia Lafosse wants a social secretary as she seeks a West End role by sleeping with a feckless producer in the bed of Nick, a smarmy nightclub owner with whom she also dallies. She ignores Michael, her piano player, who loves her and has tickets for New York on the Queen Mary. Miss Pettigrew’s job is to make sure Delysia gets the part. Over 24 hours, Miss Pettigrew is also called upon to help an ambitious and unfaithful fashion editor patch things up with her older fiancé, a lingerie designer. Has Miss Pettigrew found her calling?”
Amy Adams is Delysia and she’s perfection. She has superb comedic timing and shows real heart in a character that could otherwise be described as flighty and manipulative. The character is a fake but there are reasons why and a past that comes up at key moments. There’s an innocence to her. And it’s a brave performance. At the emotional climax, when she sings “If I Didn’t Care”, there are notes where Amy Adams shows us that Delysia is a good singer but not a great one. She’s not as good a singer as Amy Adams proved in Enchanted. You can hear that song on YouTube.
Listen to how the real character breaks through as she sings the song and discovers where her heart truly lies.
Frances McDomand’s performance as Miss Pettigrew is a lesson in underacting. The character starts very cold and distant, with a very set idea of what is right, and it all gets turned upside down as she encounters Delysia. Her heart, her warmth, opens up as she deals and helps the chaos that is the younger woman.
All the actors are wonderful and the movie itself could have been made in the 30s – all the period details seem so right. It’s a beautiful film to look at and the costumes and the cars and the sets all establish a reality – one that you know is soon to vanish. I never escape the underlying threat of war that runs through the film.
Just wanted to share a film that has become one of my favorites. Will you like it? Beats me. But if you’re a tad tired of superheroes right now and explosions and all that, you might want to give it a try.
The notion is simple and appealing. The more the merrier. When DC launched “The Justice Society of America” back in 1940, the ideology was clear. Put more heroes into the book, and children would be more likely to buy it. And the children flocked to it for 57 issues. The rest, they say, is history. Lately, team books have been on my mind. What better way for a company to showcase many of their stars in a single place? And better than that? Where better to shove barely loved tertiary characters for the sake of filling a roster!
But with this notion comes obvious shortcomings, the biggest of which is what I plan on pissing and moaning about for a few paragraphs. Simply put? There’s too many teams, and too many shifts in the rosters for team books to be more than big distractions… and it’s starting to get under my skin.
So let’s start at the top. Too. Many. Teams. In a few months time, we’ll be privy to three Justice Leagues (and one alternate Earth Society), four (or more, it’s hard to say) Avengers teams, five X-Teams, Team Seven, Teen Titans, The Ravagers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and a new batch of Thunderbolts. How does a fan even begin? The problem is clear to me. While the appeal of jamming every available hero into a team is palpable for the sheer marketing of it all… all it’s doing is lowering the property values neighborhood wide.
One thing about team books is that they are truly hard to pull off well. Solo adventure books have a freedom to explore and expound. The plots can expand lengths of time, and space, or be confined to a single room and altercation. In team books, the ease with which one can be lazy is palpable. It’s simply par for the course to check in on all the pieces of your puzzle… advance the villains scheme a half step… rinse and repeat until the climax. Bring together the whole team. The McGuffin is found / the super-move is unleashed / the villain makes a crucial mistake. The day is won. Then end with some witty banter, make a few people kiss, and call it a day. I know I’m making sweeping and irrational generalizations here… but as I looked over the last batch of team-based books I’d read? This is exactly what they boiled down to. It’s also why the mainstay of my pull list are solo-outings, and indie books.
Let’s be clear, there have been (and will certainly continue to be) great assembling of teams. Joss Whedon, long before his box-office behemoth days, penned the single greatest X-Book I’ve ever been privy to. His Astonishing X-Men was layered, nuanced, and so beautifully written that it made me believe I could like the X-Men.
And I tried. One arc post-Whedon and I was back out. Why? Because of this modern mentality of the ever-changing team. It’s not enough that both the Big Boys churn out dozens of teams, but now each of those teams changes membership like I change ironic tee-shirts. I recall, in the late eighties, Marvel used to put the heads of the team members in the upper right corner… so you could tell the teams apart. Nowadays, they might as well link to the Wikipedia page of the comic on the inside front cover. Maybe they could text you mid-issue as the team roster changes.
What happens when you continually shift a team based on the needs of your arc, as a writer, I believe it shows your hand. Like the always-entertaining Justice League Unlimited cartoon where the League expanded to such depth that each episode could only follow a handful of heroes (something Jonathan Hickman is obviously turned on by), the team was obviously selected for very specific moments. It lessoned the impact when it came down to brass-tacks. And when a new writer picks up a team book and gets free reign to recruit, it’s becomes painfully obvious where the book will head. Whedon stuck to a core group of five muties, and only added one additional when it made complete sense to the narrative he was exploring. By limiting his team across four volumes of stories, he was able to truly explore the dynamics across the board, and present a total package. It was a time where in fact, the book was better because of the sum of its parts. This is in direct opposition today, where the Justice League, X-Men, and Avengers titles play Russian roulette with their ranks every six issues.
In essence, when you change the guard, you give away the ending. After the first arc of Astonishing, all the cards had been played, so-to-speak. By sticking to that roster? Whedon showed (like in the best ensemble sit-coms) the pudding is in the cracks. It’s not enough to use, abuse, and move on. When you’re stuck with one cast, you’re forced to explore relationships. When you can change stars on the fly? You’re telegraphing everything you plan on doing. And if you dare not use one of those shiny new toys from off the shelf? You’ve angered the fans who signed up in the first place. I can’t wait for my best friend to curse the heavens when Darkhawk is wasted in the upcoming Avengers: The Hunger Games in a few months. But I digress…
Is it too bold to ask for a great disbanding? Would sales truly plummet if Vibe doesn’t get to be in a book? And would Marvel simply cease to profit if Wolverine had only a solo title and a single X-Book? I tend to believe that in the world of team fiction… less is always more. Grant Morrison’s Justice League followed the Magnificent Seven ideology and lasted damn near four years. Try keeping the same smattering of supes for that long today and people might just get antsy. But then again, neither Marvel or DC will be happy to maintain a status quo for four months, let alone four years. Call me cranky, but the seams are starting to unravel a bit. It took five feeder movies to assemble a team worth two billion dollars.
Perhaps the powers-that-be should get the hint. A championship team takes time to build. Keeping them together is what makes a dynasty.
I suppose we could call this a follow-up or at least sister piece to last week’s column, in which I interviewed the fantastic Cleolinda Jones, author of Movies in Fifteen Minutes, about her experiences with comic book movies. Cleo noted that she tends to be more interested in Marvel characters because “Marvel has been so much more pro-active about getting movies made and characters out there;” which is true. Let’s look at some numbers for live action comic book movies, just for kicks.
Marvel Movies: 37 (33 + 4 from other Marvel imprints)
DC Movies: 33 (23 + 10 from other DC imprints)
Marvel Movies since 1998: 31 (28 + 3 from other Marvel imprints)
DC Movies since 1998: 18 (8 + 10 from other DC imprints)
Forthcoming Marvel Movies: 16 (8 announced – Iron Man 3; The Wolverine; Thor: The Dark World; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; The Amazing Spider-Man 2; X-Men: Days of Future Past; Avengers 2: Guardians of the Galaxy; Ant-man. 8 speculative – The Amazing Spider-man 3; Deadpool; Doctor Strange; Nick Fury; Runaways; The Hands of Shang-Chi; The Inhumans; Fantastic Four)
Forthcoming DC Movies: 9 (1 announced – Man of Steel. 8 speculative – Constantine 2; The Flash; Green Lantern 2; Justice League; Batman reboot (again); Wonder Woman (maybe?); Suicide Squad; Lobo)
Sources: Wikipedia’s Marvel and DC movie pages; IMDB; tooling around the Internets for all the announcement mentions I could find.
As we can see from the numbers, Marvel consistently beats DC overall in live action movies and soundly whups DC’s behind in live action movies (released and upcoming) from 1998 forward, which I think of as the current/modern comic book movie era (it started with Blade and gained momentum thanks to X-Men and Spider-Man in 2000 and 2002). In the upcoming movies department, not only does Marvel have almost twice as many movies as DC, but at least eight of them are pretty definitely moving forward; as opposed to the one DC has in the can and ready to go. Although DC has announced or sort-of announced several more, they have been much less forceful in confirming their future line-up, and most are not yet locked in.
The Dark Knight Rises (and Christopher Nolan’s trilogy in general) was a huge success; but The Avengers is currently ranked third overall in box office sales, and Marvel is pushing full steam ahead with a long list of upcoming movies to expand on that success. But is their current success making them go too far? With future movies pulling from somewhat second-string characters like Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and The Runaways, is Marvel stretching itself too thin and being too ambitious? Are they going to burn out moviegoers with a plethora of new movies about characters people might not know?
Actually, I’d say the answer is no; Marvel is doing exactly what it should to continue producing quality comics movies, and to continue beating the pants off of DC. There are two reasons Marvel’s exuberance in greenlighting all kinds of characters is going to pay off. The first is that Marvel’s attempt to interlock its movies and continue to build off of its shared movie universe, as it has built off of its shared comics universe, has been a resounding success; and if the quality of upcoming movies is consistent, there’s no reason why that should change. In fact, if the future movies are quality, things can only get better for Marvel. Everyone loves a good series, and Marvel’s movies promise to be an ongoing and expanding series like nothing we’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema. They will pull in, if they haven’t already (and dollars to donuts they have) those who don’t read comics but love sci-fi and fantasy series’ like Lord of the Rings, or even those who just like stories that keep on giving. As long as the overall weight of the expanding universe doesn’t drag down the individual movies, love for the whole series will increase exponentially.
The second is that making movies about possibly second-string-ish but still fully developed characters gives Marvel more creative freedom. Despite Ant-Man being a member of The Avengers, he doesn’t have the pull and wide recognition of Iron Man or Captain America. And while Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways was a great series, since it doesn’t often cross paths with a lot of the more enduring characters, even core Marvel readers may not have picked it up before. By greenlighting some less familiar faces, I’d say Marvel has the leeway to be a bit looser with the source material if it will result in a better movie. Similar to what DC has tried to do with the New 52 comics, Marvel can make these characters accessible to the modern audience, but in an easily digested format in which it’s already accepted that stories may be adapted to serve the medium. I see this as a strong benefit, because often being too enmeshed in the sometimes complex source material can drag a movie down. Thanks to the successful movie platform they’ve built, Marvel now has a great opportunity to introduce some less known characters, including to casual or even serious comics readers, for the very first time through the movies, as they continue to build a more and more of a “realistic” and layered movie world that viewers can lose themselves in.
So I predict that Marvel’s method of movie-making (say that three times fast!) is going to keep working for them. And with that in mind, even though Marvel’s got a super-awesome and full line-up in mind already, here are some other (slightly more minor) characters I’d love to see greenlit for movies:
Taskmaster – He’s a villain, he’s a hero, he’s a villain, he’s a…oh, who knows. Probably not him. All I know is that his backstory is already intertwined with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and Deadpool!) so he could be woven into the overall movie universe; and that he’s fun to read about. And that I’d like to see those photographic reflexes at work on the big screen.
BAD Girls, Inc. – A group with ambiguously good/bad members, Diamondback, Asp, and Black Mamba have crossed paths with Captain America, Iron Man, and more. They could eventually be folded into the wider universe, but given that there are three of them with great interplay and distinct personalities, and given their eventual status as reformed criminals, I could first envision a great mostly standalone strong female action/adventure/crime-related movie with solid and engaging character arcs and redemption. Unfortunately, one of the three, Asp, has been revealed to be a mutant, so I’m not sure if there would be rights issues; but then again, Marvel is doing Runaways, and in that group, Molly is a mutant; so maybe FOX only owns the rights to mutants who have been tied to the X-Men.
Hawkeye/Mockingbird/Black Widow – Marvel’s teamed these three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents up in the comics before, and Hawkeye and Black Widow have already been introduced in the movie universe. I definitely want to see a movie featuring those two, but I like the idea of bringing Mockingbird in as well. I’d love to see a movie that casually establishes that she was already a known entity with an established history with Hawkeye in The Avengers but was just not part of that particular fight; it adds to that “layered universe” feel to have characters who have been presumably going about their lives offscreen before being brought in to the event we’re watching. Plus there’d be some great interplay between those three, and I feel like a S.H.I.E.L.D.-focused movie would benefit from a small team of fairly equal major players.
Ms. Marvel – Okay, she’s not actually a minor character. She’s a major character, an Avenger, and a fucking badass powerhouse. Despite the horrifyingly fanservicey costume, she’s a super-strong (literally) female character, and we need to see her on the big screen. Like, yesterday.
Black Panther – He’s got an interesting backstory and eventually does a stint with The Avengers, but is also powerful and important in his own right. There’s a lot to choose from in his history, since he’s been around since 1966. Also, obviously, it’d be great to see a minority character getting first billing.
…And after Marvel does all of these movies, when we’re all eighty-five years old and hobbling to the movies on our walkers…then they can finally wrap it up by thumbing their noses at us with a Nextwave: Agents of HATE movie. And then maybe close out with X-Babies to make us feel better about everything. Because awwwwwwww, X-Babies.
After all this talk of Marvel, one obvious question is: what can DC do to be more successful in the movie arena? One answer is that they can build up an interlocking universe like Marvel; and it looks like that’s what they’re now planning to do. But as they’re developing that, there are a couple of other things I’d recommend for them. One is to put a lot of energy and love into making a Wonder Woman movie a staple part of that interlocking universe, and do it right. There have been several attempts to get a modern Wonder Woman something off the ground, but the proposed TV series never came to pass, and although the modern animated movie was fun, it didn’t reach a wide audience. Wonder Woman is a major and much-loved DC character, and perfect for the current climate of successful strong female character movies. For whatever reason, though, adaptations seem to struggle with what part of her giant backstory to tell. I’d advise DC to simplify things by deciding how Wonder Woman would be living today, and picking up only the threads of her long-running story that will play with modern audiences. Look first at what makes the best contemporary story that embodies who she is, and second at how faithful each individual bit is to the preceding comics.
Another thing DC can do is to stop rebooting Batman. There have been three versions of Batman to date, and now there’s talk that Christopher Nolan will eventually be helming another Batman reboot. Now, it could be that this rumored reboot is actually going to continue the story Nolan left us with at the end of The Dark Knight Rises and connect it to Man of Steel and other DC movies. If so, great. But if it is indeed a fourth iteration of a character that just wrapped a super-successful trilogy…well I don’t even know what to do with that. DC should be focusing on characters it hasn’t featured instead of relying too heavily on continuously reimagining its two staple stars, Batman and Superman. I hope it does.
Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to the movies that are in the works, and continue to cross my fingers and hope that they’ll all be amazing.
Until next week, Servo Lectio!
(And thanks to my friend @wmslawhorn for inspiring this topic while in a WSFAn’s kitchen eating brownies and drinking beer.)
