Saturday, July 19, 2008

Mark Millar vs. Superman -- and Hannah Montana vs. Wolverine

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•Mark Millar (no relation to Smallville producer Miles Millar) claims he’s reinventing Superman for a 2011 film, if all goes according to plan, with the director yet to be named. Given that Millar is the man who gave us a communist Superman in the comic book Superman: Red Son and who gave us the dopey and ridiculous (albeit at times fun) Wanted, I should probably be nervous.

•But I have no big stake in the outcome, believe it or not. No matter how great Dark Knight proves to be, after 2009 I’m loyal (just barely) only to four film franchises, I’ve decided: Hobbit (two films, from the director of the Hellboy movies), Potter, Narnia, and Avengers, all climaxing around 2011. There’s only so much time in one’s moviegoing schedule, after all.

•The one major nerd movie I know of that’s already scheduled for 2012, oddly enough, is the final movie of the main Narnia arc, The Last Battle, which depicts the Narnian version of the Apocalypse. Since so many mystics and conspiracy theorists think December 22, 2012 is the day the world ends (and greens fret, knowing the Kyoto Protocol on global warming expires a week later), I think they should just go ahead and release the movie that weekend, filling the ads with apocalyptic language designed to appeal both to Mayan-prophecy believers and Christians, maximizing public interest: “In December 2012, in a world coming to an end…”

•Maybe after that, I’ll completely reshuffle my life and range of interests, to coincide with the purported end of the world. It may be all sportfishing and Japanese pottery collection for me after that, when I’m not honing my stand-up comedy routine or renting early French silent films to watch at my new home in Wyoming. We’ll see. (You can decide for yourself whether those things would be non-sequiturs with my life so far by rereading my Retro-Journal, the concluding entry of which was posted yesterday.)

•You’ll notice I said “after 2009″ above when talking about future films. What about during 2009? Well, next year, in addition to the greatly-anticipated Watchmen in early March, three franchises of interest to me will be relaunched in May, which I should at least watch exit the nest: Wolverine, Star Trek, and Terminator.

•And I notice the Wolverine movie is scheduled to come out the same day as the Hannah Montana movie. That sounds like a nasty fight, albeit brief. I nerdily ended the whole Retro-Journal with the word “Excelsior” yesterday, I guess I may as well end this entry with “Snikt.”

6 comments:

kayla said...

What???:(

Gerard said...

Wasn’t Superman originally conceived as a crusading, New Deal-loving socialist?

Todd Seavey said...

Well, as a loyal American, he took orders from FDR during the war, anyway.

Jacob T. Levy said...

He was leftier than that during the Depression.

If Star Trek successfully relaunches, I simply don’t believe you’ll only watch one movie of the new series.

Todd Seavey said...

Technically, there’s a Star Wars movie out next month I don’t plan to see — does that count for anything? I can grow weary, just like a mortal.

Marc S. said...

As a dual comic book/action movie non-fan, I will say a) I can’t believe you haven’t seen Dark Knight yet, and b) it turns out to be pret-ty friggin’ great, great enough that one would almost reconsider crossing it off a franchise “no see” list – yet so great it actually becomes the Platonic Batman movie, of which any others would appear to be mere shadows. The nuances and disturbing recesses of Batman’s psyche have been exposed, the moral dilemmas presented by terrorism thoughtfully and painfully dramatized, and society’s fears incarnated in Ledger’s Joker. We should all close the book on Batman.