Marvelous plans…

I haven’t ‘reviewed’ Iron Man, because I don’t have anything else to say that hasn’t been said. It’s not perfect, but it’s extremely good, probably the best Marvel (and thus to me, the most important) superhero movie this side of Spider-Man II. Robert Downey Jr. was the dead solid perfect choice to play Tony Stark, to that extent that no one would have been better, and quite nearly any one would have been less.

Probably the film’s one exceedingly minor flaw is that that second half doesn’t build into something greater than the first half. Oddly, the origin part of the movie, usually a narrative stumbling block that needs to be gotten past, is here the best, most exciting part of the film. That’s a small beer complaint, though, and there’s no reason to think the second Iron Man won’t be even better than the first. Indeed, the canny groundwork they’ve already laid to update the Mandarin for modern consumption looks to be progressing nicely.

In fact, it’s those plans that have raised my interest to a profound new degree. Marvel’s plans for their franchise films are not only more ambitious than I would have thought, but farther along than I would have expected. Unlike DC, Marvel has tended in the past to rent out its characters to whatever film studio wanted them. (DC is owned by Warner’s, hence all the characters are kept in-house.) Even now, Sony has the rights to Spider-Man, Columbia (I think) to the Fantastic Four…although after the way they completely screwed the pooch on that, I expect they’ll eventually let the FF rights return to Marvel, at which point maybe we’ll see a good FF movie.

Still, as media started consolidating, and smarting at the peanuts they received from Sony’s billion dollar Spider-Man film franchise, Marvel decided to take a huge gamble and make their own films. They got themselves a five hundred million dollar line of credit, and are now going to finance (and thus keep a lion’s share of any profits) their own movies. Obviously, with Iron Man, they are off to a dynamite start, both critically and financially. Indeed, Iron Man has the highest aggregate positive score at Rottentomatoes.com of any studio film this year, superhero film or no.

However, the much winked at post-credit teaser at the end of Iron Man (which suggests, along with the last line of the film proper, that they will be borrowing heavily from Marvel’s revamped and updated “Ultimates” universe) suggests that the upcoming slate of films due over the next three years are going to basically be part of one larger whole. Frankly, this is the most ambitious superhero media project aside from Bruce Timm’s twenty year line of interconnected DC cartoon shows* that themselves formed a discrete version of the DC universe. One, I would argue, that is perhaps the most successful version of that universe ever.

Rumors are rife that Tony Stark will make a cameo in the upcoming Hulk movie, for instance. Then, next year, Marvel takes a breather. This is annoying but essential, since they didn’t know how Iron Man or the Hulk would be received. Of course, Iron Man is already a worldwide hit, which can only help the Hulk movie, so they should be in good shape.

So skipping 2009, we look at the summer of 2010. (Hard to believe that’s only two years off, isn’t it?) Marvel cannily stays with their now established franchise, kicking off their next double summer bill with Iron Man II. This will actually come out in late April, indicating that the ‘summer’ season continues to grow, as it did with the fairly recent addition of May to that ‘seasonal’ block. This will be followed by the June 4th release of Thor. Yet what really brought me to terms with the scope of Marvel’s plans was this: “In a conference call this morning, Marvel Studios’ David Maisel said that Iron Man 2 will be used to introduce Thor.” Even assuming Thor only gets a cameo there, it’s still mind-blowing to me to think of how much actually plan to connect these films.

No word on the plot of Thor, yet, although rumor has it the script is fantastic. The big question is whether Thor’s first adventure will mainly take place on Earth, or instead be a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy up in Asgard. We’ll see.

However, that’s just the beginning. One year later, in 2011, we get another summer double whammy. Captain America will come out on May 6th of that year, followed by a July release for The Avengers, a group movie that will bring all of the heroes together in one film.

Personally, my hope would be (although I’d be glad to be wrong, if the movies are good) that the Thor movie would introduce his evil godling brother Lokie; that Cap’s movie would take place pretty much entirely in World War II, and end with him getting frozen, and that the Avengers movie would basically follow the plot of the first issue of the comic book The Avengers, and include also the event of The Avengers #4, in which the frozen body of Captain America was found and he was revived in the modern era. (If they do this, expect groundwork to be laid, maybe flashes of a Captain America documentary on a TV in the background of one of the other movies, or something.)

However, the real reason to follow the plot of Avengers #1 is that it would mean an extended fight between Iron Man and Thor (and Ant Man and the Wasp, possibly; even Cap, if they decide to bring him in earlier in this timeline) and the Hulk, which would hands down be the coolest thing ever in movie history. (Until Marvel gets the FF back and we get a Hulk/Thing battle.)

By the way, Marvel, ironically you are totally dicking up on your line of original animated movies, to the point that production on them seems to have all but stopped. Drop me a line, I’ll be glad to give you some ideas on that. In the meantime, though, Make Mine Marvel. Excelsior!

Meanwhile, please allow me to invite my more inane nerd brethren brother to buy a big can of shut-up juice. Dweeby conversations are occurring all over the net, suggesting what megastar—Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe—should be cast as Captain America. (And the worrying has also begun that Cap might not be—gasp—blond.)

Uh, yeah, because Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Norton are mega-stars. Here’s the thing. The stars of these movies are the characters, not the actors. Paying $20 million to a guy to play Cap rather than putting that money up on the screen is a retarded notion. One, I should note, entirely motivated by the pathetic and utterly misplaced notion that wide success of superhero movies must mean that reading comics is thus retroactively proven to have been ‘cool’ and that thus nerds are vindicated as having been themselves triumphantly cool all along.* Ah, my nerdy brothers, when will you learn? Marvel’s not picking ‘names’, per se, for these movies. They are getting, first, really good actors, and second, really good actors who fit the parts to a T. Let them get about their business, they’re doing it right so far.