The Screengrab : fantastic four

Fox Takes Marvel's Dare

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Adaptations of Marvel Comics have been doing great business at the box office for almost ten years now, from X-Men to Spider-Man to Iron Man. And, just like in the comics, when one creative team doesn't find an audience, the big bosses at Marvel Films have been more than willing to try again with new writers, directors, and stars; Fantastic Four wasn't a critical success, but it made enough money to spawn a sequel; Ang Lee's Hulk was an ambitious letdown, but Marvel handed the property over to Edward Norton for a second chance; and The Punisher is being given another go-round despite two dismal adaptations so far. The one Marvel superhero franchise that hasn't been talked up for a reboot so far has been Daredevil (and its even worse spin-off, Elektra). That's probably because the original -- helmed by a hapless Mark Steven Johnson and starring an out-of-it Ben Affleck -- was such a piece of junk that no one wanted a second try at it.

That may be about to change. 20th Century Fox's co-chair, Tim Rothman, insists that the studio will be pairing with Marvel Films to produce another installment of the adventures of everyone's favorite blind lawyer/costumed vigilante; he's just not saying when. Or who. Or where, how, or perhaps most importantly, why. In a cagey interview with IESB, Rothman says the deed will get done, but fails to name names, and cites a curious precedent: "I think that the thing The Hulk showed...is that it is possible, that if you really do it right the audience will give you a second chance." Exactly what was done right about Norton's Hulk reboot and exactly who gave it a second chance is unclear: the movie was tepidly reviewed, and made almost exactly as much money as Ang Lee's famouse 'failure'. But hey, the spirit is willing even if the facts are weak.

While Rothman goes on to namecheck Christopher Nolan and his approach to the Distinguished Competition's Batman franchise as a possible peek at what the tone of the next Daredevil film might be, it's clearly too early to start talking about personnel. Which, in a way, is too bad: if Daredevil's worth doing, it's worth doing right. As we reported in this space a while back, Frank Miller and Jason Statham have both expressed some interest in a Daredevil movie, and one of the hottest action stars of today combined with the man who wrote some of the best Daredevil stories in comic book history could make for an intriguing film. On the other hand, if all Fox intends to do is find the next Mark Steven Johnson -- well, wake us when X-Men 4 is ready.

Related Posts:

Jason Statham: I Dare You

Don't Mess With The Norton

When Good Directors Go Bad: Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent years, as “sequel” and “remake” have become dirty words in the minds of moviegoers, Hollywood studios have scrambled to come up with new, less offensive alternatives. How many blockbusters based on previously-adapted properties have been tagged with descriptions like “re-invention”? Yet even by these standards, the efforts made by Universal and Marvel Studios to distance their new, more “crowd-pleasing” version of The Incredible Hulk (“You’re going to like him when he’s angry!”) from Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk have been particularly aggressive. And for good reason, as Lee’s take on the classic comic left most viewers disappointed or even pissed off. Does Hulk deserve its reputation? Not really. But just because it’s not that bad doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.

In the early part of his career, Ang Lee was known primarily for his modestly-budgeted films which deftly mixed domestic drama with light comedy. Titles like Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet helped to make the NYU grad’s reputation in the States even before he began making movies here, and Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm only served to further this reputation. But while 1999’s Ride With the Devil was widely considered Lee’s first disappointment, he quickly recovered by returning to the Far East to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the critically-acclaimed martial arts epic that brought Lee the best reviews of his career to date and his first Oscar, as well as record-breaking U.S. box-office for an Asian film. It was Crouching Tiger that caught the attention of Universal Studios, who were looking for a fresh voice to bring Hulk to the screen.

But while Lee was an inspired choice for a comic book movie, I really don’t think he was the right one for Hulk. Lee is a gifted filmmaker, but he’s never had a strong, easily recognizable visual style, instead preferring to let his story determine the look of his films. But although other Lee films have benefited from this versatility- the chilly, sterile images of The Ice Storm bear little resemblance to the sweeping vistas of Crouching Tiger, but both are ideal for their respective films- Lee never finds the right look for Hulk. Although it’s not for lack of trying- attempting to accentuate the story’s comic book origins, Lee subjects the audience to a barrage of split-screens and snazzy wipes. Unfortunately, instead of creating any sort of kinetic excitement, the tricked-up style is merely distracting and, in the end, tiresome.

As for the individual shots themselves, Lee’s framing is rarely dynamic enough to make the images pop the way they should. All too often, shots are murky when they should be crisp. This is especially true of the film’s night scenes, which look dank and under-lit. Even worse, Lee insisted on shooting many of the film’s big action sequences at night. But whether this was an artistic decision on Lee’s part or a trick by the effects team to cover for some occasionally dodgy CGI, these sequences are often incomprehensible. This is especially true of the final battle between Hulk and his father- in a scene that serves not only as the action climax of the film but also the resolution of the lifelong conflict between father and son, the last thing you want is for the audience to wonder what the hell is going on.

In addition to the film’s stylistic shortcomings, the storytelling in Hulk leaves something to be desired. Part of the problem is that as far as comic book heroes go, Hulk is a strange case. Rather than being a hero who uses his powers for positive ends, Hulk is unleashed aggression personified- a man who has been cursed by fate and the sins of his father to expand and beat the crap out of anything in his way whenever he gets angry. The premise plays closer to tragedy than traditional comic book action, and to his credit, Lee takes the dramatic stuff seriously, rather than treating it simply as exposition and padding between the action scenes. However, the film’s broad-strokes-only storytelling and one-dimensional characters are less than compelling. Too much time and energy are expended on unlocking the mysteries of Bruce Banner’s past, a torturous bit of “dollar-book Freud” (thank you, Orson Welles) that stops the film dead in its tracks and makes the film less tragic than dour. Not helping matters is Eric Bana’s colorless performance as Banner. Bana came to the attention of Hollywood with his live-wire performance in Chopper, but he displays none of that volatility here. Shouldn’t someone as deeply troubled as Bruce Banner show some evidence of inner life?

Hulk is a strange creature, a film that attempted to be a stylish, kickass summer movie with a solid dramatic foundation but ended up satisfying almost no one. I admire certain aspects of the movie, like the way Lee counterpoints the restrained work by his leads with the unhinged mugshot-era performance by Nick Nolte, or Lee’s occasional use of quietness (a rare quality among most comic-book movies). But at the end of the day, the movie just doesn’t work. Yet I appreciate Lee’s efforts to make an honest-to-goodness art film out of a superhero movie. Hulk isn’t a success, but it’s more thought-provoking than most of the forgettable fare that has characterized the genre for years. It’s no Spider-Man, but I’ll take it over the likes of Fantastic Four- or The Incredible Hulk, for that matter.

Marvel Brings The Multiverse To Movies

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Recently, our own Phil Nugent took a look at the debut of Marvel Studios, the big-screen production arm of the comics company behind Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. While Marvel's been taking a critical beating lately with its flagship comics, losing retail ground to longtime rival DC, the opposite has been the case in the multiplex: Marvel's aggressive approach and multifaceted marketing has proven to be a success at the box office, and as a rule, Marvel's properties have outperformed DC's and brought in piles of cash for the company.

One of the reasons that Marvel became such a hit amongst comics fans in the 1960s was its 'multiverse' approach; unlike DC, which at the time told all their stories in a disconnected, separate manner, Marvel ran with the pretense that all their stories were taking place in the same world, at the same time, and pushed the idea that any one of their characters could show up in any of their titles. Fans took to the idea that all the stories were connected, that all the pieces mattered, and that what happened in one book made a difference in other books. The idea that the world of the Marvel Universe was unified and that the storytellers were actually creating pieces of a whole was so appealing that DC was forced to adopt it as an editorial policy for their own characters.

Now, as the Hollywood Reporter notes, Marvel is taking the same multiversal approach to their films. The much-discussed post-credits cameo by S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury, to be reprised in the new Hulk film, hints at the cohesion that the studio hopes will make the upcoming Avengers movie a box office draw (and, incidentally, beat DC to the punch once again as Warner Brothers scrambles to figure out how to get a Justice League movie in the can). The driving force behind Marvel's unified approach in the comics was editor/writer/mastermind Stan Lee; with Marvel Studios, president Kevin Feige is stepping into that role and keeping the film franchises tied together. Warner Brothers has the money to make something similar happen, but will they give DC's editors a freer hand in film production -- and insist on an easing of the auteur approach that they've used in the recent past?

Marvel Comics Is Ready for Its Close-Up

Phil Nugent — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

A long time ago when the world made sense, there were two kinds of comic books: DC comics and Marvel comics. And while Marvel reigned supreme at the comics shop, the company dearly wanted to break into the lucrative and ego-stroking business of licensing it characters for major motion pictures, and it was there that DC pantsed Marvel and took its lunch money. While DC was the home of Superman and Batman, Marvel was the home base of Howard the Duck. For years, Marvel's role in the Hollywood fod chain was epitomized by the 1994 Fantastic Four movie, a cheesy, cheap-looking affair that Marvel put into production without bothering to inform the people who worked on it that they had no intention of releasing it to theaters or even home video but were contractually obliged to make something if they wanted to hang onto the film rights to their own characters. All that started to change in 2000 with Bryan Singer's X-Men, whose success the director was unable to duplicate with his later stab at rebooting Superman. A couple of years later, Sam Raimi's take on the Marvel flagship hero Spider-Man launched a major franchise and proved that Marvel could sire a blockbuster movie without Singer or Hugh Jackman modeling a haircut that could open bottles and cans. Since then, Marvel has had varying degrees of commercial success with a for-real Fantastic Four movie and its sequel, as well as Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and Elektra, a bust in theaters but more of an earner as a DVD release that allowed film connoisseurs to conduct a close study of Jennifer Garner's moist eyes and washboard abs in the tranquil setting of their own fortress of solitude. Even The Punisher managed to make it into theaters with John Travolta on the poster, which helps to set it apart from the 1989 straight-to-video version, with Dolph Lundgren grunting his lines as if his tight skull-face T-shirt were cutting off his circulation.

Stage two in Marvel's renewed campaign to take over the film industry goes into effect on May 2 when Iron Man, the first official production of Marvel Studios, is released to theaters. As reporter Geoff Boucher puts it, this marks "the first step in the company's quest to go from intellectual-property fount to a stand-alone Hollywood player that can greenlight big-time popcorn movies." Studio chairman David Maisel crows that "We're the first since DreamWorks started 14 years ago that can greenlight its own $100 million movies. It doesn't happen very often." In some ways, Marvel might still look pretty small to the big guys: the "studio" is modestly staffed and will rely mostly on Paramount to distribute their finished films. What they do have is the backlist of established characters, many of them created back in the golden days when the legendary Stan Lee and the uber-legendary Jack Kirby were striking sparks together, despite Marvel founder-publisher Martin Goodman's attempts to rein in his brainstorming boys by reminding them that their reading base consisted of "children and a few illiterate adults." (Boy, the more things change, the more things stay the same, huh?) As Maisel puts it, "We're not in the movie business, we're in the Iron Man business right now. Marvel owns the intellectual property. We have an Iron Man video game coming, the toys, the comics, we have an animated television show coming, a direct-to-DVD animated Iron Man movie last year. We're going to have an Iron Man ride at an amusement park in Dubai in a few years." They're also in the Ant-Man business--Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is said to be ready to direct a film about the wee fellow--and of course, they're still in the Spider-Man business, with plans by Julie Taymor (Across the Universe) to launch a Spider-Man musical on Broadway. What may be most impressive is that they're in the Hulk business, too. Ang Lee's 2003 The Hulk movie was perhaps the highest-profile misstep of the new Marvel movie era, an ambitious, poker-faced effort that confused critics and disappointed audiences, though it did have the dignity of being a flop of the misguided-art-house variety instead of the underfunded direct-to-video sort. Now, just five years later, Marvel is going to reboot The Hulk with Ed Norton in the lead. The fact that Marvel is taking a second crack at the "property" so soon after the release of a film whose reception might have encouraged lesser mortals to sweep the Hulk under the rug for a generation or three shows an impressive degree of faith in their own product. Can another run at Howard the Duck be far behind? Has anybody run any tests to see how Hugh Jackman would look with an orange beak?

Funny Book Funny Business

John Constantine — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:55:00 GMT

The Screengrab’s very own Leonard Pierce wasn’t joking in his post earlier today. We are going to drown you in comic book movie related news and you are going to like it! It’s true that nigh on every superhero that’s seen print in the past seventy years has been optioned by a studio. While the solo heroes are all tied up though, Hollywood has been slow to approach the legal quagmire of producing adaptations of one of comics’ most celebrated traditions: the team-up. No, X-Men and Fantastic Four don’t count. They’re individual properties in their own right.

In the past six months, it’s been looking like Warner Bros. was set to make the first big budget superhero team-up with a George Miller (Babe, Happy Feet, Mad Max) helmed Justice League adaptation. But, according to Entertainment Weekly via AICN, today is the day that determines whether or not the flick happens. An anonymous source indicated that January 15th is the greenlight deadline for Miller’s Justice League and while the WB is pushing to have it in theaters within eighteen months, Miller is still pushing for a re-write. It’s not clear whether or not Warner Bros will bring in another director or if they’ll allow Miller to pursue a non-WGA approved rewrite.

I’m right there with Mr. Pierce in the belief that the most promising comic book material for screen adaptation waits in indie comics. That said though, if the popcorn superhero movie is going to continue to be profitable and entertaining, it has to evolve beyond the origin story-good sequel-bad sequel franchise mold that’s been established in the past decade. Team-ups are a smart way to do this provided they are, unlike most comic book movies (*cough* Ghost Rider), well made. Get someone like Steven Soderbergh, who’s proven just how successful and entertaining an ensemble of colorful characters can be, to make an Avengers movie and then we’ll be getting somewhere.