Thursday, September 08, 2005

No. Rubber. Ears.
I'm pretty sure I had heard this before, but Marvel is going to try and pull a Lucas and make their own films, rather than sell the rights to other studios. Paramount has agreed to play the role that Fox plays for Lucas and distribute the films for a fee. The key grafs:

Marvel Entertainment -- previously Marvel Enterprises -- is set to announce Tuesday its name change and completion of its loan package, and also will divulge that superheroes Captain America, the Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack and Shang-Chi will get the feature-film treatment.

Paramount Pictures, under a deal announced in April shortly after Brad Grey took the helm of the studio, will distribute and market the films, the first of which will be released in 2008 or possibly sooner.

I'm crossing my fingers as many times as they'll go for a good Captain America movie, the good Captain being, easily, my favorite superhero character from way back. I have strong doubts they'd do it this way, but for my money the best, if somewhat risky, way to go would be to do the first movie completely retro. World War II, Red Skull, Bucky, the works. Big, epic, war battles, Nazis, thrilling action--do it all.

See, the central appeal of Captain America is in large part the whole "man out of time" aspect. The notion that this great, near-mythological hero from decades past has returned to fight the good fight. It's going to be hard to really capture that in one movie through flashbacks and the like. But if they take the time to spend a good two to two and a half hours building that reputation, actually showing us the whole World War II history of Cap, the origin and all of it, in one whole movie, only to end with a huge cliffhanger--Cap being frozen and then found 50, 60 years later--then they have not only the background to make the character really compelling to new audiences (and face it, Cap isn't that well-known outside of the comics-savvy community), but also one heck of a hook for the sequel.

That's what I'd do, anyway, but, in case you weren't sure, I'm not in charge.

Until Whenever

P.S.--While the universally acknowledged horribleness of the low-budget early-90s Captain America film (the source of this post's title) is entirely deserved, they did get one thing right--the teaser poster. The font and backlighting may be pure cheese, but the concept is perfect. Captain America's mighty shield indeed.

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