There can only be two! A possible future where Disney and Warner Bros. dominate franchise tent-pole film making...

The news that has broken over the last couple days is not a little depressing.  While the Seven Samurai-esque Star Wars stand-alone film to be helmed by Zack Snyder was quickly denied, we have gotten word for Disney that there would indeed be stand-alone Star Wars films.  The bad news?  So far, they seem to be entirely centered around well-established characters from the original trilogy.  You want a stand-alone prequel involving Yoda?  Or how about films centered around a young Boba Fett or a young(er) Han Solo?  If so, you're going to be pretty happy over the next half-decade or so.  But if you thought that Disney was buying the Star Wars franchise to somewhat expand its universe rather than merely give us unneeded origins and/or backstories for the very characters we already know a good deal about, well this news won't make you happy.  In fact it reeks of the kind of lazy corporate thinking that gives entertainment corporations a bad name.  It's frankly the first bit of news that might make one thing that maybe Disney, which in general has been relatively good to the properties they have purchased over the years (Muppets, Marvel, etc.) might not be the perfect owner of Lucasfilm that we all thought.

Second time's the charm part 01: When X-Men, not Batman, spawned a golden age of comic book movies.

This is one of three pieces that delve into something that has frankly puzzled me over the years.  In brief, we've seen occasions where a massively, seemingly influential blockbuster that completely failed to spawn successful imitators.  Yet some years later, another somewhat similar film would end up unleashing a wave of proverbial copycats.  What is it about the second successful at-bat that spurred the studios (and of course paying audiences) in a way the first time did not?  The first of these three pieces will deal with the comic book film in the aftermath of Batman. Remember all of those smash-hit comic book adaptations brought on by the success of Tim Burton's Batman back in June of 1989?  Oh right, there weren't any.  Yes, I will always argue that Batman changed the movie industry and basically kick-started the whole idea of shaping various non-traditional properties for big-screen adaptations (something I'll touch upon yet again in a later essay), but it did not usher in a new golden age of comic book films.  

Why Warner Bros' Lego: The Piece of Resistance may end up being the greatest movie ever made by humans...

Much of this is speculation, so bare with me.  Jeff Snyder over at Variety reported today that Channing Tatum and Will Arnett have been cast as voices in Warner Bros' new Lego movie. The bad news is that yes there is a Lego movie coming, but the good news is that it's being directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, they of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street (so they are two for two so far).  The even better and more curious news is that the live-action/animation hybrid Lego: The Piece of Resistance is casting Tatum as Superman and Arnett as Batman.  Yup, Justice League may or may not ever happen and Wolfgang Peterson's Superman Vs. Batman project is a distant memory, but we will indeed be seeing an big-screen team-up of the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel in some form.  That's certainly amusing and perhaps noteworthy, but a little imagination leads to an even more insane possibility.  In short, what if Warner Bros. gets the rights to use all or most of the various properties that Lego currently has? 

Don't leave us hanging... If you want us to see a sequel, you might want to *finish* the first film.

Corey Atad wrote a great 'wish I had gotten around to writing it first' piece on Friday.  It's about well, it's called "Prometheus; or Stop Trying to Set Up Sequels!".  I've whined about this in brief or in the context of something else from time to time, but the whole 'everything's a trilogy' mindset has been quite harmful to any number of pictures over the last decade.  When you go back and look at the films that spawned successful franchises, they generally began with mostly close-ended installments.  Star Wars stands on its own, as does The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Batman Begins (heck, over the last four years I've come to admire how The Dark Knight begins and finishes its Harvey Dent business within its own 152 minute running time).  Even the first Back to the Future ended its specific narrative before offering a comedic cliffhanger that didn't necessarily need to be revolved (the producers always say they sure as hell wouldn't have had a flying car at the epilogue if they knew they were going to have to do expensive FX for a flying car all throughout a sequel).  Even Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had a relatively self-contained story that didn't necessarily require a sequel to complete its narrative.

In a pop-culture based on recycling, will our children have icons for their own?

My wife is currently excited because my 3.75 year old daughter has just discovered She-Ra: Princess of Power (otherwise known in our house as He-Man's incestuously-inclined sister).  We happened to play an episode on Netflix Instant and said daughter was relatively entertained.  It's never been a major sticking point, but pretty much from the time Allison was old enough to periodically watch television, it's been a constant debate of 'when will she be ready for (insert show or movie that my wife and/or I enjoyed as a kid)?'  Should we show her Star Wars when the Blu Rays come out in September, or should we wait and take her to see The Phantom Menace in 3D next February?  Or should we just wait a couple years until we know she can 'handle' them and merely allow her to like them or dislike them on their own merits?  We've mellowed out considerably in that regard, basically realizing that she can watch Star Wars or Harry Potter or The Muppets when she damn-well wants to.  I know we're not the only parents who do this.  For those who were raised in the 1980s and came of age in the 1990s, there seems to be an unwillingness to let go of our childhood entertainments.  Combined with a need to expose our children to the same things that we loved as soon as possible, this begs a question.  In an era when the biggest movie of the summer is a live-action variation on a 1980s cartoon and most of the major films are based on comic books that stretch back to the 1940s, in a time when studio executives are trying to 'bring back the Looney Tunes' and 'revive The Muppets', in a place where everything from the 1980s and 1990s seems to be being groomed for a remake or reboot (Teen Wolf? Another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie?  One more Thundercats cartoon?), will our children actually have entertainment icons of their very own?      

Random footnote as we head into the opening weekend for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

For what it's worth, the $114.7 million Fri-Sun opening for the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End still holds the record for the biggest Fri-Sun opening for a film with a long weekend. It did $25 million on Memorial Day Monday and $13 million worth of 8pm-12am Thursday sneaks.  It actually did $153 million in its first 4.25 days.  Out of eighteen the films that have pulled down $100m Fri-Sun weekends (seventeen if you don't count Iron Man, which had $3.5 million worth of advance-night Thursday screenings for its $102 million 3.25 day total), only eleven of them actually came from standalone Fri-Sun three day weekends.  Six of them (a third) pulled in $100 million despite having extra opened days to pull moviegoers away from the Fri-Sun prime real estate.  For the record, they are the above-mentioned Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ($114.7m Fri-Sun/$153m 4.25 day total), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($108.9m/$200m 5-day total), Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith ($108.4m/$158.4m 4-day total), Shrek 2 ($108m/$128.9 5-day total), X-Men: The Last Stand ($102.7m/$122.8m 4-day total), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($100.1m/$151.9m 5-day total).  I have no real wisdom to offer here, I just wanted to play around with the numbers.

Scott Mendelson

X-Men: First Class releases a teaser poster (plus several images). Look familiar?

Obviously Fox is again going the minimalist route, while also selling the idea that this new X-Men prequel will be less about science-fiction and more about the ideologies behind the respective characters who would shape the world we have come to know. There have been several stills released in the last few days, including that cast photo that was apparently leaked early, photo-shopped, etc (it's real, but no one wanted it out there yet for whatever reason). Anyway, the rest of the photos thus far, including two new ones released just today, are after the jump. Since we now know that Captain America has a trailer debuting during the Super Bowl, X-Men: First Class is the last major summer tentpole to not yet release a teaser. Expect one any day now, but who knows what it will be attached to (if they can wait, I'm betting the February 18th releases of Big Mama's House: Like Father, Like Son and I Am Number Four.

Scott Mendelson

First Looks: From X-Men to Green Lantern, ten years of comic book-film trailers.

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since the modern comic book movie revival kicked off with X-Men and (kinda-sorta) Unbreakable. With the lukewarm response to the trailers to Thor and Green Lantern, and the Nolan Batman franchise wrapping up, we may just be on the tail-end of this particular run. For the sake of my own amusement, let us take a quick trip down memory lane with the most memorable trailers in the current comic book explosion. After all, in many ways, getting that first glimpse was often more exciting than seeing the actual film. For the record, this list will only include originals; no sequels (with one exception that I'll point out). And away we go...