Here’s the latest geek-tastic film/TV news:
1. BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN
Rumor: Doomsday One of the Five Villains in BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (Collider)
Wouldn’t you know it, less than a day after Kevin Smith shot down the last Batman Vs. Superman rumor a new one sprouts up: Doomsday will be among the villains the film. This is actually an old rumor since speculation about Doomsday pre-dates the casting of Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor, but it’s back in the news now because Bleeding Cool says an inside sources got eyes on a design for Doomsday in Batman Vs. Superman.
Whatever. It’ll happen. It won’t happen. Personally, the whole Kevin Smith fiasco has made me very cynical about any and all Batman Vs. Superman rumors.
In the comics, Doomsday, a monstrous beast from the pre-historic era of Krypton, was pretty much just created in the early ’90s for the sole purpose of killing off Superman, and while that feat has forever made him a legend it’s not exactly like you hear people frequently raving about some killer Doomsday story you just have to read outside of Death of Superman. My point is there isn’t much to him other than being a big brute, although the Smallville version went to great lengths to make him a sympathetic figure. You put him in something like Batman Vs. Superman to introduce the idea that maybe Superman can actually die and will clearly need plenty of help from future Justice League members.
Batman Vs. Superman is due out May 6, 2016.
2. GOTHAM
‘FOX’s ‘Gotham’: New Trailer and Preview Tease the ‘Batman Begins’ Of It All (ScreenCrush)
Who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents? That’s the question you ask to tell what kind of Batman fan you’re dealing with. If they say The Joker, they’re probably someone who first discovered Batman through the first Tim Burton film. If they say it was just random mugger, regardless of whether or not they remember that his name was Joe Chill, they know their comic book lore or have seen Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins or both.
My first Batman was Michael Keaton, and it was literally over a decade after that when I found out the Joker did not actually kill Bruce Wayne’s parents in the comics. Who might turn out to be the trigger man behind the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne in Gotham, though?
That’ll be a mystery. At least it seems that way based on the below video in which Bruce loses his parents only to later be comforted by the guy from the OC (Ben McKenzie) as not-yet-Commissioner Gordon:
My only real reaction to this 30 second clip is mostly how jarring it was to hear the young Bruce Wayne’s surprisingly high-pitched scream. I was reminded of Shavar Ross’ ear-killing shrieks as Reggie in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. I’m not trying to mock or criticize; I just didn’t quite expect that.
Gotham premieres Monday, 9/22.
3. PACIFIC RIM 2
YES! Finally, we got what we wanted – confirmation that Legendary Pictures is indeed moving forward with a Pacific Rim sequel. Sure, the first movie wasn’t perfect, and, sure, it actually ended in such a way that it’s not really clear what you’d even do in a sequel. But, dangit, we want Guillermo del Toro back to bang his cgi robots and cgi monsters together like an adorable kid playing with his toys.
That’s what we’re getting, just not until April 2017. Yay? You bet your ass “yay” because to hold us over while we wait there’s going to be an animated series. But, wait, what? An animated series? About what, specifically? Will any of the characters from the first film be in it? A couple, but it’ll mostly be new people. How many episodes will there be? 13. When will it air? No idea. Obviously some time before April 2017. Where will it air? Again, no idea. They don’t have a network yet nor do they even have an animation house signed up. They’re still hiring writers and interviewing for a potential show runner.
Del Toro offered some more details to Collider:
“We’re going for a long arc, so the idea is to show a group of characters—we have pilots, functional jaegers, but we have all these younger characters. I really want to explore
things that are complimentary to the things that I want to explore in the second movie: drift, what drifting does to you, what is needed to drift, a lot of stuff that I think is important, but also the jaeger technology, the kaijus being evolved, ideas about the precursors—the guys that control the kaijus [...] I don’t want it to be weekly adventures. I don’t want it to be like Chapter One is a little action thing and it gets resolved in 40 minutes or an hour and then the next episode, [it’s like] nothing happened. My favorite anime series always have a long arc.”
Pacific Rim 2 is due out April 7, 2017
4. SyFy
Syfy Orders ‘The Magicians’ Pilot Based On Lev Grossman Fantasy Books (Deadline)
Within the past year, SyFy has undergone executive re-shuffling, with the new people in charge given two directives: greenlight a Battlestar Galactica-esque space opera and return the network to being the premiere destination for high quality sci-fi TV shows and mini-series events. The result has been a steady release of new shows (Defiance, Helix, Dominion) with many more on the way (12 Monkeys, Ascension, The Killjoys and The Expanse).
Now they have one more possibly on the way after greenlighting a pilot for the fantasy novel series The Magicians. I won’t pretend to have heard about these books before today, but maybe I should have because according to sweet lady Wikipedia both The AV Club and The New York Times loved the first book, the latter referring to it as “Harry Potter for adults.” The series, of which there are currently only two novels, the first one published in 2009, centers around “a teenager from Brooklyn, New York, who discovers that the magical world he’s read about in books is real.”
It’s just a pilot, but it has people attached to it I’ve heard before, like John McNamara (Prime Suspect) and Sera Gamble (Supernatural). They wrote the script for the obviously soon-to-be-filmed pilot. This is the second attempt by a network to adapt The Magicians. Let’s hope it sticks this time.