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Justice League Movie? Warner Begins Work…

 Comics, Movies  No Responses »
Jun 062012
 
The Justice League, as imagined in this Alex Ross painting.

The Justice League, as imagined in this Alex Ross painting.

Warner Bros. is making some plans towards the long-awaited Justice League feature film as Variety reports that screenwriter Will Beall (Gangsta Squad) has been assigned the task of writing the first draft of the screenplay.

There is almost no information available at all at this point, but you can’t get around the fact that Marvel Studio’s success with The Avengers had something to do with the decision to move forward on this project.

Part of the puzzle is what to build such a film on top of.  Marvel had a string of blockbusters to tie together into a unified whole at the end, and what does Warner have?  Green Lantern?  Superman Returns?  Both performed adequately but failed to really ignite in terms of ticket sales, and both were frankly less than they could have been and took liberties with the heroes with which many fans weren’t comfortable. Christian Bale’s “Batman” might make a good platform to build a foundation on, but next summer’s Man of Steel is a more likely one to really set things in motion.  They might also start from scratch – but doing that sets the film’s release eight years into the future, about the same amount of time it took to build the Avengers cycle of films.

The picture had been very close to production in late 2007 and early 2008, but was killed by the Writers Guild of America strike, tax credit issues in Australia, and concerns by some at Warner about presenting a competing (and conflicting) version of Batman while director Christopher Nolan’sfilms were breaking box office records.

But Jeff Robinov, the head of the Warner Bros. motion picture group has said that a new Justice League script is in the works. Also being written for Warner are scripts featuring the Flash and Wonder Woman, who could be spun off into their own movies after Justice League. Wonder Woman was also in the works as a television pilot for NBC produced by Warner, but was quickly killed once fans got a whiff of how badly it was going to stink.   Much of what Robinov was hoping to build the Justice League film on has floundered and stumbled while the Marvel properties soared overhead.

Just having a screenwriter attached to a film is no guarantee that the film will ever be made, so this isn’t as big a news item as one might think.  In other words, don’t get too excited.  A lot can happen between “go” and “finished”.

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The Tale of the Legal Battle For Superman Takes A Strange Twist

 Comics, Marvel / DC, Superhero  No Responses »
Apr 182012
 
Superman in flight
by Gene Turnbow

Happy birthday, Superman!  Today marks the 74th anniversary of the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1.  The now famous cover of the Man of Steel lifting that green car over his head and people running in panic debuted on newsstands on this day in 1938. But the day is marred by more in-fighting over his parentage, between DC Comics (now owned by Time Warner) and the descendents of the original creators of Superman, Jerry Seigel and Joe Schuster.  This time it’s the attorney representing the creator’s families who’s in trouble.

This law suit has been running for years, and we hear bits and pieces of it.  It’s really confusing – but it looks like the familys’ lawyer and business partner, Marc Toberoff, may have been trying to take the rights for Superman for himself.

Around 2006, David Michaels, a lawyer working for Toberoff, “abscond[ed] with copies of several documents from the Siegel and Shuster files,” sending them to D.C. Comics, including “a cover letter, written in the form of a timeline, outlining in detail Toberoff’s alleged master plan”.  D.C. Comics gave the allegedly stolen documents over to an outside attorney and began a quest to obtain them through discovery. Toberoff refused to hand them over, saying the documents were protected by attorney-client privilege
because they involved communication with the heirs. A magistrate judge eventually ordered production of some of the documents — including the timeline – and D.C. Comics received them in 2008.  Relying on the timeline-cover letter, D.C. Comics filed a 2010 complaint against Toberoff, the heirs and others.

Since then, “Toberoff has continued to resist the use of any of the documents taken from his offices, including those already disclosed to D.C. Comics and especially Michaels’ letter,” according to the 9th Circuit.

This basically means that he’s trying to deny that they have any bearing at all.  Does it mean he really was trying to do this and he’s trying to bury the fact?  Or that the papers are really pointless?

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Live Action “Akira” Production Shut Down Over Budget Concerns

 Animation, Fantasy / Horror, Movies, Science Fiction  2 Responses »
Jan 062012
 
Akira

Akira

Krypton Radio Newswire

The live action remake of Katsuhiro Otomo‘s anime masterpiece Akira seems to be cursed.  It’s hit one problem after another, and this time its $90 million budget is the problem. The Hollywood Reporter  tells us that Warner Brothers has halted work on Akira to give the film’s producers a chance to sit down with director Jaume Collet-Serra to figure out how to bring the budget down.  The problem is bad enough that screenwriter Steve Kloves, who did the most recent rewrite, may be brought in as well, meaning significant scenes will have to be omitted. When Akira was shut down it had an estimated budget of $90 million.  The  plan is to try and bring it down to somewhere between $60 and $70 million.  If the filmmakers can’t figure out how to bring the cost down, the film will be scrapped.

The economic crunch appears to be finally hitting Hollywood hard.  Ticket sales are the lowest they’ve been since 1995.  Disney recently had an involuntary gag reaction when they saw what their new Lone Ranger movie was going to cost, though Jerry Bruckheimer’s vision for this venerable character’s resurrection was lowered from $260 million $215 million, still several times the budget of the Akira reboot, an inconceivable amount of money for a western.Both Paradise Lost and Arthur and Lancelot slammed on the brakes, and both of these were Warner Brothers projects too.  Is Warner Brothers on the ropes, balking at production costs a fraction of what other studios are spending on their shows?  Or are they the only major studio with enough foresight and vision to see the writing on the wall with respect to runaway production costs?

Perhaps the bigger question is why Warner Brothers thinks there’s a need to redo a film that was already perfect, and that almost singlehandedly defined the anime genre when it was released in 1988.

Write your comments – tell us what you think.

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