Movies

Life was good for Jordan Peele — star of a massively successful sketch comedy show, a nice little recurring role on FX’s Fargo, and he’s married to Chelsea Peretti, one of the coolest, funniest women currently working. Then he sprung his directorial debut Get Out on an unsuspecting America and everything rocketed to the next level. The massive windfall he conjured with a paltry $4.5 million budget blew open the gates of Hollywood for him, and like all novice filmmakers, a high-profile sophomore feature can’t be far off. Today brings the news as to what that next step might be, and it appears that Warner Bros. has big plans for Peele.

Earlier this month, X-Men fans were treated to Logan, a Wolverine movie … without Wolverine. A sort of adaptation of the comic Old Man Logan (although more in tone than plot), the movie imagines a future where mutants are nearly all dead, and a barely hanging on Logan is low-key doing chauffeur work to take care of a decrepit Charles Xavier. When some bad guys go after a young girl named Laura suddenly in Logan’s care, the ex X-Man takes a road trip to get her to safety --- while killing a lot of people who get in their way.’ While some are comparing Logan to Deadpool, the other R-rated film starring a Marvel hero from the past year, we should be looking at its similarities to another superhero film from 2017 instead; The Lego Batman Movie.

When you sit down for a new Luc Besson space opera, what do you expect? Tons of glowing aliens? Flying cars racing through futuristic cityscapes? Heroes jumping between moving vehicles while being chased by monstrous creatures? If so, then make sure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is on your most anticipated list.

The deal between Marvel and Sony that allowed Peter Parker to join up with the Avengers is actually kind of extraordinary. More often than not — all the time, really — studios jealously hold tight to their superhero properties, often, as with Fantastic Four, making movies just so they can keep the rights. But Spider-Man allowed two studios to co-parent a character, allowing Spidey and other Avengers to ping-pong between movie universes, appearing in both. That deal seems like it may be up in the air after whatever follows Spider-Man: Homecoming.

With VR an up-and-coming storytelling medium, all the big studios want in on the action. Gone are the days of 4-D pirate adventures with seats that spit water into your face. The people don’t want to be in the movie anymore, they want to be the movie. The latest studio to get into the biz is Warner Bros., inking a deal with IMAX’s new VR component for virtual reality experiences based around the Justice League.

Because Marvel and DC seem to have gotten wind of the majority of our culture’s at best toleration of and at worst boredom with the current cookie-cutter state of superhero movies, both studios have been looking to bring in some new talent. Many of the upcoming films on Marvel’s slate will be directed by folks who only recently made their indie debuts. Now it looks like the studios are looking for fresh takes on the material in some more unexpected places. Like Aaron Sorkin, for instance.

Pretty much the the two things we definitely, absolutely know about Black Panther is that Black Panther will be in it, and it’ll feature a pretty grand-scale car chase scene in the middle of Busan, South Korea. They’ve been filming the car chase for the past week, which is why we’ve been hearing so much about it, and today Korea’s branch of the Walt Disney Company has released a first look image of the scene.

After the Avengers defeat the bad guys and the credits roll, who cleans up the mess? Who clears the debris, sweeps up the scraps, and collects all those bits and pieces of alien / mystical / foreign objects — you know, the stuff pedestrians probably shouldn’t get their hands on? Whether you’re a casual or more committed fan of the Marvel universe (or superheroes in general), you’ve likely pondered this very question. Spider-Man: Homecoming will finally give us an answer.

The suit makes the man, and that’s seldom more true than for the superhero set. Batman would be another joe-schmo billionaire industrialist without the arsenal of weaponry built into his armor, Iron Man would literally die without his hardware, and now we can add Peter Parker to the list of superheroes whose own clothes act as unofficial sidekick. In the latest trailer for upcoming threeboot Spider-Man: Homecoming, we get a glimpse of some nifty new modifications (courtesy of Stark Industries) to Spidey’s trademark red-and-blue spandex. A new generation’s Spider-Man needs some modern upgrades, and the latest iteration of the suit includes a detachable mini-drone and what I can only describe as “skintight suction technology.”

Who are the Justice League? The group is comprised of a bunch of different heroes in different combinations based on which comic arcs you’re reading at the time, but it always seems to have three core members: Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Warner Bros. new Justice League movie didn’t feature the red-caped Kryptonian in this weekend’s trailer, and seems to be acting like he won’t be in the movie. Even Zack Snyder has been cagey about it.