Movies

So when the tale was written, SCOTT PILGRIM Vs THE WORLD ended up #5 at the box office with a disappointing $10.5 mil. This...

Two summers later, I am still quite taken with The Dark Knight. I have not encountered an American movie — much less an American movie, designed to be a gigantic blockbuster and based on a hugely popular comic book — that is structured as ingeniously and compellingly as this one. I’ve simply never seen anything like it, and after several viewings it still continues to flabbergast.

I’ve worked on a handful of these types of movies as a screenwriter, and let me tell you: they’re hard. They’re really hard. There are so many issues for the writer to address: the protagonist must be active, the villain’s plot must make sense, there must be a romantic interest, there must be due attention paid to the history of the character and the rules of the genre, they must be both fantastic and grounded at the same time. All these balls must be kept in the air and these concerns must mesh in a straightforward, compelling, swift, action-packed cinematic narrative, consistent in tone and true to its source material. I haven’t seen one — not one — that has managed to get everything in and do everything right. None of the Superman movies do it, none of the previous WB Batman movies do it, none of the Spider-Man movies do it, neither of the Fantastic Four movies do it, and, even after 22 tries, none of the Bond movies do it either. (The Iron Man movies come close — really close.) But The Dark Knight not only does a better job than any other movie based on its source material — and by that I mean "superhero comics" — it does it with a radically ambitious screenplay that challenges any number of conventions and brings a new, added weight to its subject.

It's looking like SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD will come in at a disappointing #4 at this weekend's box office, according to Nikki Finke,...

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Bruce Wayne, orphaned at eight, wants to overcome his fears and honor his father. This turns out to be rather more complicated than he suspects it will be. Batman Begins presents a radically new vision (for the movies, anyway — this stuff had been around the comics and the animated series for many years beforehand) of the Batman story, grounds it in a startling new sense of reality, presents not just a caped crusader and a wacky new villain but a whole wealth of good guys and bad guys, all following their stars in increasingly complex and interconnected ways, all of it bound together with the one fantastic conceit of a young billionaire who dresses up like a bat. It strongly reminds me of the Casino Royale re-boot, which brought the James Bond character to a new level of immediacy while retaining enough of the series’ fantastic hallmarks to still qualify as escapism. There is still enough silliness in Batman Begins to make it a recognizable "superhero movie" (grand, outsized villains with colorful personalities and an ambitious scheme to destroy an entire city, spectacular action sequences that teeter at the brink of believability, production design that borders upon science-fiction) but it’s presented with a sober, straightfaced earnestness that’s nothing less than shocking after the garish camp of Batman & Robin. The Dark Knight would successfully develop all of Begins‘s good ideas into an even more complex, startling vision of modern urban justice.

You could learn a lot from Mark Millar. Seriously. Not content to let his movie option deal announcement go live and get covered everywhere, he got a full three days of publicity out of it! And made such a big deal of it that Bleeding Cool literally wouldn't sleep until they scooped Deadline on the news -- which everyone we talked to seems to have known for days. So a big deal becomes a Bigger Deal. That is how you market it, Mark Millar, and we salute you.

The road to comic book Valhalla is lined with companies that have tried to do "celebrity comics" as a means of switching to the fast lane of movie money and licensing gold. Tekno, Virgin, CrossGen. There is hardly a company that does not have some kind of celebrity "vanity project" comic out there made mostly to show to producers as a bible for a film. And all of this is despite the fact that not a single movie has yet been made from a comic book that was published just to be turned into a movie. COWBOYS & ALIENS, which is certainly an A-list project with Jon Favreau, Daniel Craig, and Harrison Ford aboard is set to be the first comic of its genre to ever actually get turned into a big movie. But this is the first time it has ever happened and it took 10 years. And despite this, there are still no other Platinum, Tokyopop, Radical, or Liquid movies. No one can go to Netflix and order the MAYHEM movie or OCD movie or GAMEKEEPER movie.

• The fellow who produced WATCHMEN is now interested in developing MAGE, Matt Wagner's modern day Arthurian fantasy. Lloyd Levin, who professes to be a big fan of the material, has optioned the "Hero Discovered" portion of the tale of Kevin Matchstick and his wonder-bat. Originally published in the indie-comics-lovin' 80s, MAGE is one of those tried and true tales which remains a good read, and always in play for Hollywood -- Zack Snyder was attached to a previous deal.

Has all the Comic-Con hype actually TURNED OFF some moviegoers? That's what what a chart over at THR seems to show, Jay Fernandez reports:

Contrary to its reputation as a garish, headache-inducing day-glo nightmare, Batman &Robin is, in fact, a sensitive, heartfelt examination of power, frailty, family, humanity’s custody of the earth, the ties that bind and the mysterious ways of the human heart.

I kid, of course. Batman & Robin, as every schoolboy knows, is ridiculous. A ludicrous traffic-jam of a narrative, it makes no goddamn sense whatsoever from any conceivable point of view. However, that does not mean it is unworthy of study. To paraphrase Charlie Brown, if one learns more from one’s mistakes, that must the creators of Batman & Robin the smartest storytellers who ever lived.

No fewer than six main characters vault into the narrative of Batman & Robin, each with his or her own agenda. Some of these agendas cohere into a compelling, thematically- linked narrative. Others, well, not so much.

Boilerplate, the not-so-historical mechanical man dreamed up by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, has been optioned by J.J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot production company...

The THOR footage shown at Comic-Con has been leaking out all over the place, and far be it from us to link you to a place to see it, as it's being taken down quickly, but in case you can't find it, Splash Page has a blow-by-bow account.

Via pr: Legendary comic book master Will Eisner's groundbreaking graphic novel "A Contract with God" is being adapted into a live action feature film, it...