Movies

Jaws dropped around the comics movies-o-sphere yesterday when Variety boldly announced that Ben Affleck might direct a Justice League movie. The story made a bit of sense—although the less said about his acting career the better, Affleck is growing in stature as a director, even if a three-ring circus like a JL movie would tax anyone but D.W. Griffith or Michael Bay.

Well, despite what you're thinking Affleck's directing career—THE TOWN and GONE BABY GONE—is much admired within the halls of Warners. So much so that they are thinking of giving over the proposed Justice League film to Affleck. After all, he played a superhero once. He also knows Kevin Smith personally.

On the scale of "Oh thank God," this ranks pretty high.Joss Whedon will be back to write and direct AVENGERS 2, as Disney CEO Bob Iger told an investors call. Immediately after the announcement, people started throwing money directly at Iger, just pelting him with dollars and quarters. "Take our money!" they cried. "Just take it! THE AVENGERS has already made $1.5 billion worldwide and the sequel will make even more."

In an interesting move, it looks like Marvel might extend 20th Century's 'Daredevil' contract... on the condition that Fox return certain Fantastic Four characters back to them.

Some set pics of Hugh Jackman from WOLVERINE II, currently known as THE WOLVERINE, which is set in Japan. From these photos, we can assume that in the story, Jackman's Wolverine character will have a period of extreme self doubt, which evolves into self neglect, from which he will be rescued by a period of intense study of Zen Buddhist philosophy and Japanese fighting techniques.

In another relatively quiet weekend at the Box Office, we find Batman continuing to lord over the competition in a similar fashion to Avengers, we also see a genre film launch and hear a "thud" as it hits a wall, just like Battleship didn't bouncing off the Avengers.

Thor has found a villain and he's the king of the elves! What is this mysterious Avengers spin-off that Disney is kicking around? And what's this about a Prometheus SEQUEL?

The latest Skyfall trailer trailer has dropped. Have a quick view and let's discuss:

Oh MAN! Director Peter Jackson has confirmed that he's going to use extra footage and the Appendices and make THREE WHOLE MOVIES OF WHITE COUNCIL GOODNESS instead of two:

Marvel's best characters (minus Ursa Major) have been assembled into a team for a series of bizarre webisodes online, for poorly-defined reasons which seem to amount to WELL WHY NOT?

Already Oscar-nominated for the PERSEPOLIS film she co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi is mostly sticking to the film medium for now. The trailer and poster for a film based on her graphic novel CHICKEN WITH PLUMS is now out. Once again co-directed by Satrapi and Paronnaud (aka Winschluss), this time, instead of animation, the duo are using live action to tell the story of a violinist in 1958 Tehran:

To say this was an unusual week at the box office is putting it mildly. The shooting at the Dark Knight Rises opening in Colorado cast a pall over the entire film industry. The studios agreed to delay the box office data until Monday, a highly unusual instance of the studios cooperating. Other than Dark Knight Rises, everything was down and down a lot. Most of it over 50%. I suspect this is a combination of the massive anticipation for Dark Knight Rises (including tons of advance ticket sales) and some people not going to the movies in the wake of the shooting. Either way, Dark Knight opened with $160,887,295, which is good for the #3 opening all-time, behind Avengers and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2. There's some noise about it being the highest non-3-D movie, but I'm not sure to what extent the IMAX version does or doesn't mitigate that angle, since Nolan was emphasizing the IMAX aspects during filming.