Kevin Feige Downplays BLACK WIDOW Movie, Teases CAPTAIN MARVEL

Still waiting for Black Widow to get a solo movie?  Keep waiting.

For those of you keeping track, it's been four years since Scarlett Johansson debuted as Marvel Comics' Black Widow in Iron Man 2 and we're apparently no closer to getting a Black Widow movie than we were in September 2010.  The character was important enough to be included in the first Avengers film in 2012 and this year's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, not to mention the Avengers sequel The Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015, but it seems even four high-profile movies can't get a spy film made these days.

Ahem.

At the end of last week, Devin Faraci's Badass Digest spoke with Kevin Feige, President of Production at Marvel Studios, during a press junket for Captain America: The Winter Soldier and asked him when other Marvel heroes besides white males would become leads themselves.  "I think [Black Widow] has a central leading role in this movie," replied Feige.  "What people are really saying is 'When are you doing a standalone female superhero movie?'  The answer is, I don’t know.  We only do two a year, we know more or less what’s coming up through ‘16/’17.  With Widow, what’s great is the interaction with all the team members, and the question is whether we want to pluck her out of that.  I’m very proud of the way the Marvel movies handle the female characters who are in all the movies we are making, as opposed to feeling the pressure of 'When are you doing a female movie?'  We’re exploring a lot of Widow, and that’s going to continue with Age of Ultron in a big way."

And let's remember that Guardians of the Galaxy, which includes a sentient tree creature and a talking raccoon, is coming to theaters later this year and that household name Ant-Man arrives after Age of Ultron in 2015.  You know, instead of a Black Widow movie.

But hey, according to Feige, there's already plenty of Black Widow as it is.  "Frankly if we do a Black Widow movie after Age of Ultron, when she’s been central in three or four movies I don’t think we’d get the quote unquote credit for it.  People would say 'She’s already a big giant superhero!'  But if we had a great idea, we’d do it."

The 24th official James Bond movie is currently in pre-production.  The 1st Natasha Romanova movie?  Not so much.

So, if there was going to be a female Marvel superhero movie, what would Feige like to see?  "I like the idea if we’re going to do a [female lead] do a new one," said Feige.  "Do a wholly new character, do an origin story."

Badass Digest suggested the current Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, and Feige replied, "We’ve talked a lot about [Captain Marvel].  I think that would be very cool."  Unfortunately, Black Widow has received those very same kind of noncommittal, "we've talked about it" remarks since 2010, so take that for what you will.

However, Faraci offers up a nugget of hope by stating that "my sources tell me that we will see an iteration of Captain Marvel onscreen by 2016 - either at the end of Phase Two or the beginning of Phase Three - in another Marvel movie."  Faraci suggests there could be a Captain Marvel solo movie sometime around 2017 or 2018.

Until then, all we can do is just wait and see what happens.  Maybe Black Widow can put in an Ant-Man appearance?

First CONSTANTINE Promo Pic of Matt Ryan as John Constantine

In the immortal words of former John Constantine Keanu Reeves...Whoa.

DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns has released the first official promotional pic from the NBC pilot Constantine on Twitter, showing star Matt Ryan full garbed as his character John Constantine.  The look is considerably more faithful to the character than Keanu Reeves' film version, right down to the matching trenchcoat and blond hair.

The release follows after a picture of the Constantine production crew, along with Ryan wearing his Constantine costume, hit the interwebz last night.  The crew and Ryan showed their support for "Slates for Sarah," a campaign paying tribute to Sarah Jones, who was killed by a train while on a film set.

Speaking with I Am Rogue last week, writer and executive producer David Goyer discussed the pilot.  When asked if Constantine's smoking habit would be allowed to air on NBC, he remarked, "That's a tricky one on network TV.  We're negotiating right now.  He will have his signature trench coat and skinny tie.  I would say that the show clings more closely to the source material than the film did, even though the film was interesting."

Goyer also said that the series will follow the Hellblazer comic book series more than the current Constantine series set in DC Comics' New 52 continuity.  However, if the pilot is picked up for a full series, there are plans for additional DC characters.  "Quite a few other characters from the comic books and possibly from the DC universe," said Goyer, "should we move forward, will be showing up.....I think we would try to bring in some of the other occult figures."

And here's the full version of the promotional picture...

The pilot, directed by Neil Marshall, is currently filming.

THE FLASH's Full Costume Revealed

The Scarlet Speedster.  At last.

Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter, we have our first look at the full costume Grant Gustin will be wearing in the pilot for the CW series The Flash.  At the end of February, a side profile of The Flash's cowl was released, revealing stylish lightning bolts instead of the traditional Mercury wings.

According to the article, the costume was designed by Colleen Atwood, the designer that also created the Arrow costume for Stephen Amell and won Academy Awards for Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha and the 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland.

Remarked Flash pilot director and executive producer David Nutter, "I hope the fans who treasure the character are as excited as we are by what costume designer Colleen Atwood has achieved with this latest version of The Flash’s iconic suit."

Although Gustin is crouched in a starting position, we can see the color is more wine-colored than traditional red, with considerably more detail than John Wesley Shipp's costume from the 1990-91 television series.  The suit also differs quite a bit from the current New 52 version of Barry Allen's Flash costume, including the lack of lightning bolt armbands decorating the gloves and red boots (again!) instead of gold.  Thankfully, the chest emblem is there, although missing a white background, and there appears to be a nod to original Flash Jay Garrick's costume with lightning bolts running down the sides of the legs.

The pilot will be an origin story, following up on events from Arrow, which introduced Gustin as Barry Allen and depicted the lightning strike in Barry's lab which gives him his powers of super-speed.  Filming is currently taking place in Vancouver.

The full costume as shown can be seen below...

 

*** UPDATE AS OF 3/12/14 ***

 

And here's a great shot of the entire costume from yesterday's filming...

 

 

 

GAME OF THRONES Creators Know Ending to Book Series

"When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.  There is no middle ground."
-- Cersei Lannister, Game of Thrones: "You Win or You Die"

As fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones may have already realized, the show is catching up to George R.R. Martin's incomplete book series A Song of Ice and Fire.  The TV series is just about to begin its fourth season, covering the last third of the third novel, A Storm of Swords, and the beginning of the fourth novel, A Feast for Crows. 

But thanks to Martin's notoriously slow progress on the novels, such as the six-year wait between books four and five, there's a strong possibility that the television series could end before Martin's seventh and final novel in the saga, A Dream of Spring, is released.  Martin is aware of this, commenting on the subject, "They are, yes.  It’s alarming."

Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss revealed in Vanity Fair's April issue that the game plan is to wrap the series up in seven or eight seasons.  "It doesn’t just keep on going because it can," said Weiss.  "I think the desire to milk more out of it is what would eventually kill it, if we gave in to that."

Remarked Benioff, "Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be.  If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it.  And so we want to know how everything ends.  We want to be able to set things up.  So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character."

"I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write," added Martin, "but the details aren’t there yet.  I’m hopeful that I cannot let them catch up with me."

Martin also realizes the problem of the show's child actors aging, which adds to the time pressure.  "This is a serious concern," said Martin.  "Maisie (Williams, who plays Arya Stark) was the same age as Arya when it started, but now Maisie is a young woman and Arya is still eleven.  Time is passing very slowly in the books and very fast in real life."

In addition, Vanity Fair speaks with Peter Dinklage, who plays Tyrion Lannister.  "It just seemed like something I had never come across before," remarked Dinklgae, "especially in the fantasy genre, which I still refuse to call this, even though we have dragons.  It's just something that I was so eager to embrace, because it turned the dwarf stereotype in the fantasy genre on its head.  And he’s a hero at the same time.  Even in The Lord of the Rings, which I really loved — I loved those books as a child and I adore Peter Jackson’s movies — but there’s just that thing with the dwarf stuff.  That’s complete fantasy.  I had done The Chronicles of Narnia, with the long beard and all of that, because I definitely wanted to explore that and have an opinion of it from the inside, but I just feel like this character, Tyrion, was a complete human being.  Shock!"

And lastly, Benioff and Weiss commented on rumors that President Obama receives advance screeners of the show before everyone else.  "One perk of being the most powerful man in the world -- Yes, you get to see episodes early."

Sylvester McCoy Knows The Next Master on DOCTOR WHO

Timing malfunction...The Master!  He's out there...

Rumors of The Master's return to Doctor Who after a four-year absence continue to grow, with a former Doctor apparently providing confirmation.  According to the Doctor Who news site Kasterborous, Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy provided some intriguing news about the Doctor's "best enemy" while appearing today at the Newcastle Film and Comic Con.

McCoy, it seems, has been told the name of the actor playing the next incarnation of The Master and according to him, the new Master will be "very, very scary."

This promising news follows earlier rumors that Game of Thrones actor Charles Dance, 67, who plays patriarch Tywin Lannister, has already been cast in the role of The Seventh Master.  In a completely unconfirmed list of episodes breaking down Peter Capaldi's first season in Series Eight, Dance's name appears as part of Episode 12, the Series Eight finale.  The episode is described in the breakdown as follows:

8.12  ‘Master and Commander (rumoured)’
The return of the Master and consequently the Time Lords. It's believed the Master is now the [Lord] President and will be played by esteemed British actor Charles Dance.

If this information turns out to be true, Dance would be the eighth actor to play the role on Doctor Who, after Roger Delgado, Peter Pratt & Geoffrey Beevers (playing the same incarnation), Anthony Ainley, Eric Roberts, Sir Derek Jacobi, and John Simm.  This will be The Master's first appearance since "The End of Time, Part Two" on January 1, 2010.

DAMN Good Comics -- MOON KNIGHT #1

"I've died before.  It was boring, so I stood up."

 

I know what you're thinking -- Another Moon Knight #1?  Really?  What is this, volume 7?  Yeah, it's another Moon Knight series, with another take on the Fist of Khonshu from another completely different angle.  But the thing is, unlike so many of the others, this approach actually works.

 

A couple of years back, writer Warren Ellis wrote an incredible six issues of Marvel's Secret Avengers series, giving us stories far better than a superfluous Avengers book deserved.  One of those stories, "Aniana" from Secret Avengers #19, featured Moon Knight wearing a tailored white suit and mask instead of his traditional superhero costume and coming off more insanely cool than ever before.

 

Well, Marvel and Ellis must've loved the idea, because Marc Spector is rocking the white suit once again (Does he shop at the same men's store as Planetary's Elijah Snow?) in a new ongoing series, with art by Declan Shalvey.  Instead of wiping the slate clean as you might expect, the book is a subtle continuation of previous Moon Knight incarnations, including previous runs by Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev, and Charlie Huston and David Finch.  And for old-school Moon Knight fans, Ellis even brings back characters like Joy Mercado and Detective Flint.

 

This first issue brings the character back home to New York (after Bendis' series set in Los Angeles), a location Ellis seems to know well after his recent novel Gun Machine.  Instead of flying around in moon-shaped helicopter, however, Marc now rides in the back of a white limousine, driven by a computer named Driver.  Oh, and he and Detective Flint now have an arrangement where "Mr. Knight, a concerned citizen," is able to assist the NYPD without them being forced to arrest a dangerous vigilante.  If you've ever wondered what a Batman series written by Warren Ellis would be like, Merry Christmas.

 

Shalvey's art feels a bit sketchy in places and may depend on your personal taste, but there are some incredible visuals here that add considerable impact to Ellis' script.  There's a particularly effective sequence where Moon Knight parks his limo over a sewer manhole and climbs down at least three levels of underground tunnels.  I'm not exactly sure how he manages to keep his suit so pristinely white in the process, but hey, it's comics and sometimes you just have to roll with that sort of thing.

 

Ellis caps off the issue with some intriguing revelations about Marc's presumed Dissociative Identity Disorder and how it may be something else entirely...unless, of course, Marc is actually hallucinating these revelations and it's just yet another example of his mental instability.  This book is going to be one hell of a ride that could take us practically anywhere, so here's hoping Ellis is in this for the long run.

 

CONSTANTINE Reveals Supporting Cast

John Constantine now has a possible love interest, an angel and his best mate Chas.

Deadline reports that three supporting roles have been cast for the NBC pilot Constantine, based on the supernatural DC Comics/VERTIGO character John Constantine.  Almost two weeks ago, Welsh actor Matt Ryan was announced in the lead role.

The proposed drama series is described as centering around "a working-class Londoner with deadpan humor who is a mysterious conman and occult detective
 haunted by the recent loss of a young girl's soul.  No stranger to the dark underworld that exists parallel to our own, Constantine has been studying the dark arts since he was a teenager.  He's taught himself spells, rituals, curses and conjuring, but the one person he most wishes to see -- his mother, who died giving birth to him -- remains out of reach, at least so far. When Liv, the daughter of a late friend, is targeted by demons, Constantine steps in to save her and the two form an alliance."

True Blood and Robin Hood actress Lucy Griffiths has been cast as Liv, described in the article as "an offbeat young woman tired of her ordinary life who comes to discover that she has the ability of seeing the supernatural world among us, which makes her a key player in the battle between good and evil. Liv teams up with Constantine to save lives, master her power, and learn more about her late father."

Meanwhile, Lost and Matrix trilogy actor Harold Perrineau will play Manny, described as "an authoritative angel assigned to watch over Constantine who has the power to step into other people’s bodies, and although he is meant only to observe, Manny will not hesitate to help out if he can save a life."

And lastly, True Detective and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actor Charles Halford is playing Chas, "Constantine’s oldest friend and staunch companion who possesses powerful survival skills that might possibly be supernatural."  Chas Chandler is one of the major recurring characters in the comic book series Hellblazer and a version called "Chas Kramer" appeared in the 2005 Constantine film, played by Shia LaBeouf.





Neil Marshall will direct the pilot from a script by Daniel Cerone and David S. Goyer.