movies
BOOM! Studios takes aim at ’2 Guns’ sequel
Timed to coincide with the August premiere of Universal Pictures’ 2 Guns, starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, BOOM! Studios has announced a sequel to the 2007 crime comic by Steven Grant and Mataes Santolouco.
Grant and cover artist Rafael Albuquerque will return for the new six-issue miniseries, appropriately titled 3 Guns, joined by Hack/Slash artist Emilio Laiso.
The original comic followed a DEA agent and an undercover Naval Intelligence officer who, after unwittingly investigating each other, team up to seal money from the mob — only to learn to late that the $50 million actually belongs to the CIA. This time they’re brokering weapons deals from opposite sides, but little do they know there’s a third gun in the mix.
“The guys haven’t seen each other and are on the outs with their agencies,” Grant tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They both independently end up on opposite sides of a deal going down with Russian weapons manufacturers and anti-government revolutionaries.”
Directed by Batlasar Kormakur, Universal’s 2 Guns opens Aug. 2.
‘The most important thing is the long, involved soap operas’
“They’re missing the full spectrum of these character’s emotional lives. The most important thing is the long, involved soap operas. It’s a type of narrative that you don’t get anywhere else except on very long-running soap operas, where characters can go into depth. 20 pages every month going into these characters lives over decades give you a lot more insight and a lot more involvement than say a two hour movie, even with Robert Downey Jr.”
– Grant Morrison, explaining what fans of superhero movies are missing if they don’t read the comic books
‘I wore those furry underwear with pride’: Six questions with Dennis Hopeless
Thirty-six questions. Six answers. One random number generator. Welcome to Robot Roulette, where creators roll the virtual dice and answer our questions about their lives, careers, interests and more.
Joining us today is Dennis Hopeless, writer of Avengers Arena, Cable & X-Force, Lovestruck, Gearhead and more.
Now let’s get to it …
Hugh Jackman sinks his claws into Free Comic Book Day
Following in the footsteps of Punisher star Thomas Jane, The Wolverine‘s Hugh Jackman has released a video in support of Free Comic Book Day, which will be held Saturday at comic stores across North America and around the globe.
“Let’s face it, as we all know, all the best movies end up being made from comic books, like The Wolverine,” the actor says.
More than 4.6 million comic books are expected to be given away Saturday. Find a participating store near you with FindAComicShop.com.
Quote of the Day | Marvel Studios in the age of the Internet
A photo leaked this week of Anthony Mackie as the Falcon on the set of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
“… Since X-Men 1, frankly, where a photo was stolen off a wardrobe thing and it was the very first look of Hugh Jackman in costume as him under fluorescents … it looked awful. It was just like, ‘Oh, this is the world we are living in. This is the reality.’ So we’ve always just accepted it. Spy pictures will leak and we used to try to run ahead and put out a cool picture first and now if we have a cool picture we will put it out, but if we don’t, that’s OK. Misinformation … You know, it gets a little annoying when somebody is like, ‘This is what’s happening! This is what Kevin Feige is doing!’ It’s annoying when they are right and it’s equally annoying when they are wrong, because everybody passes it. ‘Planet Hulk is the next thing’ and everybody talks about it and you’re just like “OK, but you’ll be disappointed if you’re expecting it.’”
– Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, discussing how the company deals with leaks and rumors
Three sentenced in $3.6 million comics & film rights scheme
Crime
Three men who concocted a Ponzi scheme while in prison are heading back behind bars for bilking investors out of $3.6 million in a fraudulent business that dealt with comic book and film rights.
CBS Chicago reports 62-year-old Daniel Parrilli, 48-year-old John Lauer and 57-year-old Christopher Anderson were sentenced last week in federal court after pleading guilty to the fraud charges brought against them in 2010. Anderson, the lead defendant, is set to serve 95 months in prison; Parrilli was sentenced to 70 months, while Lauer received a 31-month term.
According to Patch.com, upon on their release from a minimum-security prison in Oxford, Wisconsin, Andersen and Parrilli opened Sundown Entertainment, a business that purported to buy and sell film and comic book rights. Together, they raised more than $7 million from about 150 investors. Lauer later entered the picture to offer false assurances to victims, some of whom prosecutors say “depleted their 401K funds or their college savings, or took out loans against their homes in order to invest with the defendants.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Kohler said that while some comics and movies were actually produced, the con men weren’t able to repay the outlandishly high returns promised to investors — as much as 150 percent within days, in some instances — and the scheme began to collapse.
Parilli, who begins serving his sentence Aug. 1, was ordered to pay more than $3.6 million in restitution, while Lauer must pay $457,367 and surrender June 12. Anderson, who’s already serving his sentence, must pay $3.7 million.
Quote of the Day | Greg Rucka on a PG-13 ‘Man of Steel’
“Words like ‘realism’ and ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ get bandied about Hollywood as if the only merit a story can have is in its verisimilitude, but that’s a lie. Emotional honesty transcends reality; it’s what allows disbelief to be suspended, and yet what makes a story stay true. When Superman: The Movie was released, Richard Donner promised us we’d believe a man could fly. We did, but it wasn’t the wire-work alone.”
– comics writer and novelist Greg Rucka, voicing his misgivings about the PG-13 rating for director Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel
200,000 more passionate customers or 20 million casual ones?
March’s best-selling comic book
Is the goal for comics to become a mainstream form of entertainment an unattainable goal? That seemed to be the angle Tom Spurgeon took on Monday’s Deconstructing Comics podcast and in his additional commentary at The Comics Reporter. He feels the industry is better served by regaining a few hundred thousand more devoted readers to restore unit sales to mid-six-figure levels. While comics have shown there is longevity in niche markets, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of also attaining a larger readership.
With March’s estimated direct market sales figures showing yet another double-digit month of growth, manga publishers giving anecdotal reports of the manga market stabilizing, and something of a convention boom going on, there’s no better time than now to re-examine how comics can secure a healthy and vibrant future. Taking advantage of this growth is tricky because, as Spurgeon mentions, no one is exactly sure why the turnaround happened. Although people complain about DC Comics’ New 52 being a mess and Marvel crossovers not having the punch of the Civil War days, overall sales are rebounding. Was it digital comics? Was it the mainstream press for the New 52 or Marvel NOW, or some other stunt? Is it the Hollywood movies?
Quote of the Day | Warren Ellis on which comics get adapted
“I don’t get to decide what gets made into a tv series or film. I cannot, I’m afraid, cause people to give me money for things by magic or force of will. Because, let’s face it, if I could, you’d be part of the slave army building my hundred-mile-high golden revolving statue right now.”
– Warren Ellis, responding to a question about the chances of seeing FreakAngels make the leap to film or television
WonderCon ’13 | A round-up of news from Saturday
The Rocketeer/Spirit: Pulp Friction
It doesn’t look like there were as many comic-related announcements on Saturday at WonderCon as there were on Friday, but the second day of the con certainly brought some gems.
• IDW and DC announced that Mark Waid (Daredevil, Insufferable) and Paul Smith (Uncanny X-Men, Leave it to Chance) are teaming up for The Rocketeer/Spirit: Pulp Friction. “Not many writers have been lucky enough to write The Rocketeer or The Spirit,” Waid said in a press release, “so I feel like I’ve won the lottery. This is one of the most exciting-and scariest-assignments I’ve ever undertaken. Luckily, I’ve got Paul Smith to make me look good!” The first issue of the miniseries arrives in July.
From ‘Robot Stories’ to Jonathan Coulton: Six random questions with Greg Pak
Thirty-six questions. Six answers. One random number generator. Welcome to Robot Roulette, where creators roll the virtual dice and answer our questions about their lives, careers, interests and more.
Today Greg Pak, writer of Batman/Superman, Vision Machine, Red Skull, Incredible Hercules, X-Treme X-Men and many other comics, steps up to the wheel.
Now let’s get to it …
Cristiano Siqueira’s posters for imaginary Batman films
Cristiano Siqueira, the Brazillian illustrator/designer sometimes known as CrisVector, is another one of those guys who spends a fair amount of time dream-casting Batman films in his head, but unlike most, has gone on and created posters for these imaginary movies. He’s posted a gallery of them on Behance, and some of them are quite inspired — Mel Gibson as Frank Miller’s returning Dark Knight? Suitably mental!
Take that, Doc Ock: Spider-Man’s web could stop a subway train
It turns out that scene in 2004′s Spider-Man 2 in which Peter Parker used his webbing to stop a subway train from hurtling off the tracks and into the river may have been the least-outlandish thing about the movie.
Playing MythBusters, physics students from the University of Leicester put the sequence to the test and discovered that, yes, some spider silk is strong enough to stop a runaway train. Their findings were published in the new issue of the Journal of Physics Special Topics, which is undoubtedly on pull lists everywhere.
It’s Dodge & Twist, just not Tony Lee’s Dodge & Twist
“Dodge & Twist” art by Paul Peart-Smith
Hardly a week goes by that some film studio or producer doesn’t snatch up the rights to a comic book, intent on transforming the property into the next big Hollywood franchise. While it’s rare for one of those projects to move beyond the development stage, it’s rarer still for the people involved to go out of their way to stress what a movie isn’t based on.
Such is the case with Dodge and Twist, a sequel of sorts to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist from Sony Pictures, said to be based on an idea by producer/actor/writer Ahmet Zappa. The third paragraph of The Hollywood Reporter announcement reads, “The project is set on an idea by Zappa and not on the more serious book of the same name by Tony Lee.”
That book would be Dodge & Twist, a graphic novel by Lee and Paul Peart-Smith announced as early as 2007 that at one point was targeted for release by AiT/Planet Lar (you can still see an unedited 19-page preview on the company’s website). Although the graphic novel was never published, Lee released Dodge & Twist in 2011 as a prose ebook set 12 years after the events of Dickens’ classic, with Oliver forced to assist the Artful Dodger in stealing in the Koh-I-Noor diamond from the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Bryan Lee O’Malley vs. Battle Royale
Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley and artist Kevin Tong have created a movie poster for the cult film Battle Royale in conjunction with Mondo and Tugg Inc.
Mondo is the T-shirt/limited edition print arm of the Alamo Drafthouse, which creates really awesome but also really hard-to-get prints for various films. (check some of their past ones out right here). Tugg Inc., meanwhile, is “a web-platform that enables individuals to choose the films that play in their local theaters and create their own events.” Which sounds pretty cool, if you’ve got the time and energy to pursue it. They’ve recently added Battle Royale to their library, meaning you can create an event in your town and get your hands on some of these posters to give away at it. Or if you’re in Houston, there’s one scheduled for Feb. 16.
Check out the poster and the variant edition below, along with the complete press release.