There’s been a lot going on surrounding films at Marvel Studios as we near this months Comic Con festivities beginning with continued speculation Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy will be the next big property out of the studio. Several sources (all credited at the bottom of this post) confirm they’ve heard similar rumblings which would bring the superhero team referred to as the Guardians of the Galaxy to the big screen.
The film would reportedly be set in the future and feature the team fighting an evil race called the Badoom, and in the process they would supposedly travel back in time and cross paths with some of the Avengers team. Speculation says that Thanos, the giant being seen in the post-credits sequence following The Avengers would be in the film and Guardians of the Galaxy would serve as a precursor to The Avengers 2, which is expected to be in theaters in 2015.
This all seems to make even more sense as today it was announced the 2014 untitled film from Marvel, which previously occupied the May 16, 2014 slot has been moved to August 1, 2014, most likely to prepare title art for Comic Con where Marvel will be front and center on Saturday, July 14.
So, presuming that 2014 film is Guardians of the Galaxy (which Deadline says it is), your Avengers franchise films look like this:
- Iron Man 3 – May 3, 2013
- Thor 2 – November 15, 2013
- Captain America 2 – April 4, 2014
- Guardians of the Galaxy – August 1, 2014
- The Avengers 2 – TBA 2015
But guess what, that’s not the end of it.
For the longest time Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) has been attached to direct an Ant-Man film and at the end of June it was reported Wright wrapped production on an Ant-Man test reel. In mid-June, Wright spent just under a week shooting footage for a reel that will be used to test out the potential look and tone of his movie, as well as to decide how convincing Ant-Man’s powers look onscreen.
Ant-Man has been connected to the Avengers in the comics world so if the film does eventually get underway it too would like fit into the franchise in some way or another, and one of those ways may be via the help of some Marvel short films… Yup, we still aren’t even close to being done with this update.
What you see above is the first look at Lizzy Caplan in the upcoming animated Marvel short (aka Marvel One-Shots) Item 47 in which Caplan and Jesse Bradford (Flags of Our Fathers) star as a down-on-their-luck couple who find one of the discarded alien guns from the finale to The Avengers — and proceed to make some incredibly bad decisions. Item 47 refers to the gun itself, which S.H.I.E.L.D. would like very much to retrieve from the hapless young troublemakers.
Two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents (Maximiliano Hernandez and Titus Welliver) are given the job of cleaning up the mess as wreck havoc with their new found toy of which Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito tells EW, “[W]hen this gun Âliterally fell into their lap, this is a sign: We’re going to rob a few banks, we’re going to buy a boat, we’re going to the Caribbean, and all our problems will be solved.”
And next we move into territory we’ve discussed before, but more in wondering if Pixar would ever tackle a Marvel property with an animated film. Well, it seems animation is likely, but not from Pixar as Deadline reports Walt Disney Animation Studios is in early development with Marvel on an animated feature film based on the comic book series Big Hero 6.
Big Hero 6 is made up of Sunfire, Silver Samurai, GoGo Tomago, Honey Lemon, Hiro Takachiho, and Baymax and were created by the Japanese government to protect the country from all threats.
There may be additional news on this at Comic Con, but it sounds like it is all in very early development.
And finally we have some concept art from Iron Man 3 where sites are presuming this is a look at an instance in the film where, through the use of nanotechnology, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has bonded with his actual body.
[sources: Latino Review, Variety, THR]
