Accidental ground-breaker: Batman & Robin (1997) catches the bad guy at the half-way point...

I've made several jokes about this over the last few months, but by now when that moment comes in Star Trek Into Darkness, we'll all be quietly snickering.  You know the moment: Benedict Cumberbatch  has been captured about halfway through the movie, and he stands isolated in his glass prison.  As he stands tall, full of arrogant confidence, he'll surely taunt our heroes with some kind of allegedly profound monologue about how A) He and Kirk/Spock aren't that different, B) Starfleet is not as wonderful an institution as they think it is, and/or C) Once Kirk and/or Spock have outlived their usefulness they will be tossed away or scape-goated for the good of the Federation.  And then, right on cue, Not-Kahn will totally bust his ass out of that glass prison, kill several random guards and possibly one major character (Pike?).  Because, holy shit, he totally planned on getting caught the whole time!  Yeah, the whole 'villain gets caught halfway through but escapes and escalates his evil' was old back when it started in... Batman and Robin?

23 years of Batman trailers, all in one spot...

Purely for fun, here is pretty much every single theatrical trailer for every single modern-day live-action Batman film, from Tim Burton's Batman way back in 1989 to the one I'm seeing tonight.  Do enjoy, and feel free to add your own qualitative rankings.

Scott Mendelson

5 comic adaptations that bucked the mold, and still failed.

Actor Tom Hiddleston wrote an eloquent essay yesterday for The Guardian basically praising and defending the sub-genre known as the superhero picture.  Plenty of disdain for the genre comes from the very notion that it's big-budget entertainment based on literature that was technically intended for children that gobbles up production dollars and screen space that otherwise might be allotted for more explicitly grown-up fare.  But at least some of the alleged weariness of this specific type of film (the superhero comic book adaptation) comes from a feeling that all-too many of them are basically telling the same story.  You've generally got the standard origin story which (let's be honest) basically takes Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie and pours it into a different color bottle (I say that as a big fan of Spider-Man and Captain America).  Then you have the sequels, which are quite often merely a case of escalation and/or the hero dealing with self-doubt often while in combat with a 'bigger/badder' version of himself (again, thank you Superman II) or a multiple villains who represent that which he might become if corrupted (Batman Returns).  But over the last twenty years or so, there have been a handful of high-profile comic book films that have attempted to play around with the formula but have artistically failed anyway.  As a rebuttal to the idea that 'all superhero movies are the same' as well as a reaffirmation of the idea that 'it's not what it's about, but how it's about it', let's take a look at five comic book adaptations that didn't play it safe, but didn't come out on top either.

As Film District gets sued over a 'misleading' Drive trailer, here are five more classic previews that mastered the art of the false-sell.

I'm sure you've heard by now (first spread by The Hot Blog and Movies.com) about the woman in Detroit, Michigan who is suing Film District over what she felt was a misleading trailer for the Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive (review). Basically, she feels that the film was sold as an action-packed variation on The Fast and the Furious but instead delivering a well, I'm guessing most of you reading this have seen the movie or at least know enough about it to fill in the blanks (my additional thoughts).  The lawsuit has the added spice of accusing the film of anti-semitism, I suppose because both of the villains were Jewish (as a Jewish film fan, I'm all for more Jewish bad guys).  While we may agree that the trailer was a little misleading, it is just a part of a longtime pattern of selling somewhat artier films as if they were just normal mainstream genre entries.  But you already knew that.  Actually, the trailer's biggest sin was blatantly revealing the entire movie (including nearly every action moment) in nearly chronological order, but that's another story.  So in honor of this relatively absurd lawsuit (long-story short - there were no real damages behind the movie ticket and no real pain/suffering to merit additional monetary reward), let's take a stroll down memory lane at some classic examples of film-marketing misdirection.