Tag Archives: Spider-Man

Comic Books/Graphic Novels, General, Movies, TV

Disney buying up most of Fox Entertainment…

Woke up today to the news that Disney is, as the headline right above states, buying up most of Fox Entertainment’s assets.  The link below is to a CNN article written by Hadas Gold and Charles Riley concerning that big bit of news…

Disney is buying most of 21st Century Fox for $52.4 Billion

To comic book/movie geeks like me, this means that Disney, who owns Marvel Comics and the characters, nonetheless did not have the right to make movies using the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and only until recently, Spider-Man, even though those characters and the ancillary characters around them were part of the Marvel Comics stable.

Why?

Because there was a time, believe it or not, when Marvel Comics wasn’t doing all that well financially and the rights to the movie versions of these properties were sold to what eventually became 21st Century Fox.  These properties, ironically enough, were THE most popular properties in the Marvel stable, so when the Marvel films first started coming out, they were forced to use “lesser” characters at first.

Sure, people knew the Hulk and Captain America, but Iron Man wasn’t a big character.  Thor, also quite well known in comic book circles, was hardly a Marvel “A” lister.  So too the Guardians of the Galaxy.

But the movies were successful beyond anyone’s dreams and, voila, the Marvel films were hot hot hot and when Disney purchased them, lock, stock, and barrel, they continued the success… and even managed to procure the use of Spider-Man.

I suspect that small opening allowed Disney to continue their negotiations with Fox and, today, it looks like we’ve come to the logical conclusion.

So, now what?

Will we see the Fantastic Four and X-Men finally come into the Marvel Universe?

I strongly suspect we will.

And… it kinda depresses me.

Look, its nice that the Marvel properties, both in print and in theaters, are now going to be under one umbrella.  The properties should be together as they always were in print.

However…

Is it me or are we rapidly coming to the point where our entire lives are going to be influenced by only a handful of companies?

Think about it: In entertainment Disney, Warner Brothers, and Sony are a trio of incredibly big and influential companies.  Fox was, too, but now Fox is part of Disney.

I could go on with other companies, such as Amazon and Apple and Samsung and Microsoft and… the list sure seems to get smaller and smaller, no?

One other thing: Fox owns the rights to the original cut of Star Wars (1977).  Now, supposedly George Lucas, when he sold his Star Wars properties, put a clause in there nixing any release of the original cut of the film.

But now Disney actually owns that cut (again, this was like the Marvel deal, while Disney owns the Star Wars properties, Fox had the rights to the original theatrical version of the original film).

The big question: Will they finally release it?

Movies

Spidey news…

Call me cynical, call me tired, but I just can’t get all that excited over the “new” casting of Tom Holland for the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in film…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/23/tom-holland-spider-man_n_7646812.html

If there’s a superhero franchise that is in real danger of being over-exposed, I believe it to be this one.  In very short order we had three films with Tobey Maguire (all of which were hugely financially successful though most audiences panned the third and last film in that series) followed by a re-booting and two films with Andrew Garfield (unfortunately for him and the people behind that two-film set, the second film soured Sony on continueing down that particular pathway).

So now we have a new Spider-Man, one that will somehow cross-over into the Avengers movie while remaining at Sony.

Ho hum.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a time I would have killed to see a high budget Spider-Man film on the screen.  But once it finally happened with Tobey Maguire, I found myself curiously unimpressed with the whole venture.  Many site his second Spider-Man film to be one of the all time best super-hero films ever made but for some reason it didn’t grab me like so many others and I wound up thinking it was at best only an “ok” feature.  And this is coming from a big fan of director Sam Raimi (absolutely love the Evil Dead series!)!!

As for the Garfield iteration, I suspect the lingering bad feelings I had with the Raimi/Maguire Spider-Man films turned me off of the whole re-booting concept.  While I applauded the return of the mechanical web shooters (I really didn’t like the Maguire/Raimi concept of “organic” webshooters), seeing yet again a Spider-Man origin story and a new set of “first adventures” of the character felt more like a chore than entertainment.

Before you think my feelings only extend to Spider-Man, know that I had very similar feelings when I finally got to see Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, a film that some critics sang high praises to but for me was a colossal bore…an almost scene for scene/theme for theme remake of Richard Donner’s original Superman but without any of the sense of wonder or fun.

There always exists the danger that audiences might have their “fill” of the superhero genre and this big tent pole features and their equally big investment dollars may finally reach their critical mass.

The superhero genre has had something of a charmed life in recent years despite some bumps in the road, but a couple more “terrible” (in the eyes of audiences) superhero films might just tire audiences of these features and we may *gasp* one day have a summer without a single superhero film.

I know, I know, this is heretic talk, but there you have it.

As with so many things…we’ll see!