Braced for singularity |
May Is Marvel Month SPIDER-MAN is 22 It was 2001! Hot Marvel movies like BLADE opened the door to Box office gold and X-MEN laid the foundation. It was no fluke! A BLADE sequel was in the works and a Horror director was signed on. An X-MEN sequel was in the works and it began with a Horror director! Columbia Pictures was ready to release their own Marvel superhero property and it too was directed by a Horror director! One who already proved himself in the Superhero realm with DARK MAN! Then on September 9, 2001, a day that changed the world for the worse put the brakes on Sam Raimi and Marvel Studios' ascent. It would be a new year before Columbia Picture's SPIDER-MAN would be released. And - IRON MAN 3 is 11 Years Old How to put this? By 2013 the MCU was off and running. CAPTAIN AMERICA was a hit. THE AVENGERS were a bigger hit. It was as if Paramount had found the secret formula (which they did) for making Superhero movies that were basically legal machines for printing money. And whatever box office the movie made in theaters, that would be doubled or more in home video. Then came the second sequel. In hindsight, some point to Disney buying out Paramount's Marvel properties of THE AVENGERS and IRON MAN in 2012, leaving Paramount with plenty of cash and nothing to lose if they poisoned Disney's new well. On the other hand, maybe it was to Disney's benefit if the property lost some value before all the monetary transactions were complete? When you rule out all possibilities then whatever is left, however improbable, has an ocean of its own possibilities. Sour grapes coming from unexpected corners are legendary in Hollywood, and who knows really when everybody wants credit for a hit and nobody takes credit for a miss? For whatever reason(s) which are none too clear, somewhere in the chain they threw away everything they learned that far in making hit, fan pleasing Marvel movies, and made a parody IRON MAN 3 so mediocre that it destroyed the franchise for the next ten years and damaged the MCU brand. Plus - HAPPY HORROR THRILLER BIRTHDAYS TO - By E.C. McMullen Jr.
THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS Turns 63 In 1961 it was the worst movie ever released in the U.S.A.! But that's a highly competitive field and it lost that emblem a long time ago. Never-the-less, this movie once occupied such a lowly perch and reviewer Kelly Parks forced himself to watch THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS out of sheer masochism. And - Like It Or Not, May Is Marvel Month So Let's Get To It: X-MEN 2 is Old Enough to Legally Drink A quarter Century ago, New Line Cinema's BLADE opened the door for Marvel movies. When it did, Columbia Pictures stopped sitting on their hands and finally committed to their SPIDER-MAN property. To top Sony's Columbia, 20th Century Fox finally roused from their moribund business model: their decade plus of fence sitting on their X-MEN property, and tried to shove as many X-Men through that doorway as possible. Columbia has one Marvel Superhero, we've got a whole school of them! The first X-MEN, in 2000, led by a cast of TV show and character actors, was a surprising smash hit. Let's make that sequel! Holy shit! Columbia Picture's much delayed SPIDER-MAN (2002) is a smash! Sony is rushing forward on the sequel! Will director and co-writer Bryan Singer make lightning strike twice with X-MEN 2? Plus - SPIDER-MAN 2 is 20 Hollywood Press: OMG! Despite the troubled production BIG TIME troubled production of THE CROW (1994), its a smash box office hit! THE MASK (1994), too! 20th Century Fox: OMG! Marvel's BLADE (1998) is a smash box office hit! Could this be the dawning of the age of the Super-Hero movie? We're sitting on a Marvel property, aren't we? Let's rush it into production! Sony Pictures: OMG! 20th Century Fox's Marvel property, X-MEN is a monster box office hit! This will gin up anticipation for our SPIDER-MAN! Hollywood Press: OMG! BLADE II (2002) is a hit! Hollywood Press: "OMG! After 9/11 delayed the release of Marvel's SPIDER-MAN over at Columbia, it's now a monster box office hit! We thought for sure that 9/11 would have killed the Super-hero movie! Hollywood Press: OMG! X-MEN 2 is a hit! Yes, the new millennium ushered in the era of Super Hero box office mania and everybody who had a Marvel property was rushing their originals and sequels into production. Warner Bros., which had their DC properties, stayed out of the fray thanks largely to their own super hot franchises of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER. Meanwhile, Stan Lee was hitting all of the Comic Conventions on his "I Told You So!" Tour! By 2004, Marvel was ascending and Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN 2 hit the screens. Also - IRON MAN Turns 16 By many accounts, Universal Pictures and the producers who owned Marvel's HULK franchise, didn't stand by Marvel icon Stan Lee and his Marvel Comics Universe. He's an old man. His concepts are obsolete and outdated. Today's cosmopolitan movie goer wants to see superheroes through the eyes of a director who really knows his way around 19th century romance and Jane Austin period pieces! Besides, ignoring - for the sake of argument - recent box office smash hits like BLADE, X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN, and X-MEN 2, there's just not enough comic book fans to bring boffo box office to a Superhero movie: Especially one where a scientists turns himself into a monstrous green ogre! It's 2003! Audiences are getting burned out on Superheroes, yo! No, a movie about a scientist that Jekyll and Hydes into an unstoppably violent gargantua called HULK, calls for a light, nuanced touch and tender emotional subtlety. So when Universal's misbegotten HULK crashed and burned at the box office, UP threw in the towel and declared it would be at least 10 years before they could try a successful reboot. Stan Lee, Ari Arad, and Kevin Fiege brought the Production Development together almost immediately, went from Development to Pre-Production the following year, finished shooting by year 4, and released it in year 5 with the box office hit, THE INCREDIBLE HULK. All of this was the launch pad that took the nascent Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) from Universal to Paramount Pictures. Because before the release of the far more successful THE INCREDIBLE HULK in June, 2008, Stan and company began their Marvel One-Two punch in May with the release of IRON MAN. Finale - HAPPY HORROR THRILLER BIRTHDAYS TO -
By E.C. McMullen Jr.
May 28: 4DM will Release Psychological Thriller
And - FRIDAY THE 13th Part 2 Turns 43 It was meant to be nothing more than an "also ran". Producer Sean S. Cunningham had the poster before he had the script. In fact before he was sure what the story was going to be. All he knew is that he wanted to copy John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN, which meant a mysterious maniac hacking barely legal kids. Except John Carpenter's movie was practically a sequel of Bob Clark's BLACK CHRISTMAS. Would a copy of a copy work? It's not as sharp as... well... the original.* Though Cunningham had the low budget of Clark and Carpenter's indie slashers, he also had something the other two directors didn't have: the big studio clout of Paramount Pictures. And that, kiddies, is part of the reason that we still have FRIDAY THE 13th Part 2, today. *Michael Keaton in Multiplicity. Plus - X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE To the suits at 20th Century Fox's utter surprise, the first X-MEN was a far bigger hit than they anticipated. Then X2 was a bigger hit than that. Well if there was one thing 20th Century Fox despised in the 1990s and early 2000s it was producers, writers, and directors increasing their value (and so their paycheck) in the world with Fox properties. Fox soon made things unbearable for their hit director so he left, leaving a hole that Fox suits at that time didn't know how to fill and didn't care. We saw this contemptable lack of care throughout the young millennium's Golden Age of Marvel movies. Everyone from Disney to Columbia Pictures figured out how to make a winning Marvel movie. Only 20th Century Fox threw themselves off of a cliff, nearly every single time they made one. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE was no exception. Also - HAPPY HORROR THRILLER BIRTHDAYS TO - By E.C. McMullen Jr.
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Some people think I'm more important than you (I don't, but they do. You know how they are) and this is their (HA!) evidence. INTERVIEWS Matt Jarbo's interview with Feo Amante at The Zurvivalist. James Cheetham's Q&A with Feo Amante at Unconventional Interviews *. Megan Scudellari interviews Feo Amante and Kelly Parks (of THE SCIENCE MOMENT) in The Scientist Magazine. Check out our interview at The-Scientist.com. REFERENCES Researcher David Waldron, references my review of UNDERWORLD in the Spring 2005, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture entry, Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic (downloadable pdf). E.C. McMullen Jr.
*Linked to archive.org |
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