Mike Dougherty, director of the long-delayed and mistreated Trick ‘r Treat and co-writer of X-Men 2 joined the /Filmcast over the weekend and in their special “After Dark” segment, where they talk about whatever’s on their mind, their conversation hit on the interesting subject of X-Men 3, for which Dougherty and Singer were not a part of, but would have been had Singer not swung over to DC to make Superman Returns (for which Dougherty helped write).

In the audio clip, Dave Chen, Adam Quigley and Devindra Hardawar bring up the subject the X3 and quiz Dougherty on his thoughts of the movie, for which he answered reservedly and professionally. The interesting parts however, came afterward, when Dougherty moved on to explain some of the ideas he pitched to Bryan Singer for what of been their version of the third installment of the X-Men film franchise.

This is one of those ideas I’d say is very bad but at the same time, it’s pretty damn cool.

Everett Bradford put up a YouTube video to demonstrate what he calls “The Prometheus Device” and since then, it’s been popping up on geek and tech sites all over the web.

The device emulates what we see from the character of Pyro in X-Men 3: The Last Stand, sans his power to manipulate the fire once launching it out of his palm. Check out the demo video for the neat-but-incredibly-dangerous device below.

A few days back, we put up part one of “The Next X-Men Films” series, our look into the future of Fox Studio’s growing and financially successful movie series based on Marvel’s mighty mutants. This was based on quotes from Empire’s recent feature on Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of all films X-Men related, and today we’ll look at the other two anticipated films she spoke about.

In Part One we discussed Wolverine 2, the most-likely-to-happen solo flick out of Fox’s development slate as well as X-Men: First Class, the prequel to Bryan Singer’s first X-Men which is currently in its writing stages with Josh Schwartz penning the script.

Now, it’s time to look at two other popular character solo movies that are in early stages of development: Deadpool and X-Men Origins: Magneto. One of these is likely to happen, one may not.

There’s been plenty of talk about the future of the X-Men franchise in recent times leading up to and after the financial success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to kick off the summer of 2009. That hefty $85 million opening weekend helped push a Deadpool spin-off for Ryan Reynolds into motion as well as the early development of other spin-offs, prequels and even a sequel to the X-Men trilogy. That’s right, an X-Men 4 is in the early stages of planning.

In addition to the speculation of future installments to the franchise, there’s been buzz about the return of one of the folks responsible for helping kickstart the live-action series of X-Men films, Bryan Singer. We know that he’s interested and that X-producer Lauren Shuler Donner is too. But just how realistic is it?

As of this morning, it seems much more likely that this will come to fruition…

In a move the reeks of opportunism and greed, Jack Kirby’s Estate (a.k.a. his family) have hired Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff to sue Disney/Marvel, Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures in an attempt to reclaim copyright ownership of the characters their late father Jacob Kurtzberg created. You may know his name better as Jack Kirby and you are most familiar with his iconic and highly popular comic book creations, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk and The Silver Surfer.

Thanks to the guys over /Film for sharing this with us and to Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool and Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywod who seem to have gotten the drop on this breaking news. This is not the first lawsuit we’ve seen involving a comic book creator’s estate vs. the current owner and publisher; Just recently we reported and discussed WB/DC’s fight with the heirs of Jerry Siegel and Jerry Schuster over the rights to Superman.

Hey gang, yesterday John Campea of TheMovieBlog.com was kind enough to invite me to be a guest on his Movie Blog Podcast. John’s podcast is the longest-running movie podcast on the net (and the third oldest ongoing podcast, period).

Also on the podcast was TMB regular guest Christina Warren of Mashable.com and FlickCast.com. Here are the topics we covered:

• Jennifer’s Body
• Edward Norton claiming no cameo in Iron Man 2
• X-Men: First Class casting
• Nic Cage leaving Green Hornet, and the mess that movie seems to be in

We were going to cover a couple more items but we had so much fun just with those above that we ran out of time.

You can download it directly here or you can head over to The Movie Blog to listen to it (but do come back and tell us what you think!).

I’ll be doing another guest appearance on a well-known movie site’s podcast soon!

Have you ever wanted to look deep into the dark recesses of a comic book movie director’s mind – nay – heart? You don’t have to look much further than the interview StarPulse.com recently held with director Brett Ratner. The Q&A session was mostly a junket to build hype for Ratner’s upcoming film The Shooter Series, but also touched on Beverly Hills Cop 4 and his thoughts on comic book fans, and it’s that last part I want to focus on.

There are sites out there (that we are most certainly friends with and fans of) that regularly rip Ratner and his films a new one. So I’m going to preface this article by saying that if you search Screen Rant you’ll find that while we may not be his biggest fans, we haven’t jumped on the “‘Brett Ratner sucks’ bandwagon” in our coverage of him or his films.

To quote the late Queen of Blues, Dinah Washington, “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Just recently all anyone was talking about in the movie industry was whether The Final Destination was in indeed final and if Rob Zombie was done butchering horror films (to answer that last question, NO, he’s trying to tackle The Blob next – and I’m not referring to my first girlfriend from high school). But here we are, just a scant twenty-four hours later and the biggest fish in the marketing sea has just eaten the biggest fish in the comic book sea.

Of course, I’m talking about the news that Walt Disney Co. acquired Marvel Comics, Inc. for the meager sum of $4 billion dollars. It’s a great deal of money, and I don’t care what the nay-sayers out there gripe about, if I owned a prospering business and a mega-company offered to buy me out for an exuberant amount of money, I’d sell too. Heck, I’d go buy a special pen just to sign the papers! Anyone who says otherwise just isn’t being honest with themselves.

OK, so just a few minutes ago Twitter literally exploded with news of a major financial announcement: according to The Associated Press, The Walt Disney Co. will acquire Marvel Entertainment Inc., for $4 billion in cash and stock.

Woah! If you ever wondered how much the Marvel Universe is worth, I think you just found out.

In our last discussion of the story and characters of Wolverine 2, we talked a little about Liev Schreiber and what his thoughts were on the sequel.

At the time, he seemed not too interested in putting his body through all the physical work again, now that he’s over 40, but he did say that he’s very interested in seeing how the character of Victor Creed goes from how he portrayed him, to what we saw of the animalistic Sabretooth from Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie.

Now, it seems that he’s changed his mindset and is in fact interested in returning to the role.

The folks at Cinema Blend spoke with Liev Schreiber the other day during a press junket for his upcoming film, Taking Woodstock, and touched base with him on what his future may be in the X-Men franchise.

Unfortunately for fans of Schreiber’s portrayal of Victor Creed, the talented actor didn’t sound too enthused about the idea of returning to the role of Wolverine’s brother and arch nemesis. Join us as we discuss what the storyline of Wolverine 2 may entail in terms of characters and what other stories and villains could be introduced.

We’ll be touching on Silver Samurai, Team X, Omega Red and more!

Yesterday Screen Rant reported that director Bryan Singer is interested in returning to the X-Men franchise, six years after directing X2. Today we have another member of the X-Men team, Anna Paquin (who played Rogue in the first three movies), showing interest in doing another X-Men movie as well – in this case, the upcoming X-Men: First Class.

Those hoping for director Bryan Singer to return to the X-Men franchise can sit up and take notice: Singer has said himself that he would “love” to make a return to the franchise! Those are certainly words that fall gladly on X-Men fan’s ears.

In a recent interview with Total Film, Singer was asked about how he feels looking back on his time making the X-Men movies and if he wished he’d stayed on for the third one. He then revealed his interest in going back to the franchise:

With X-Men Origins: Wolverine opening in a mere few days, there’s plenty of talk surrounding the X-Men franchise, sequels and spinoffs. Most of that talk centers around X-Men: First Class, the next X-project on the Fox’s development slate.

Two weeks ago, we found out some more details regarding X-Men: First Class where it was revealed that it would be another prequel tied into the X-Men movies that we’ve seen so far and not its own separate franchise that would hopefully follow a more accurate continuity from the comics.

Most blogs and movie news sites out there reported the news but none really explored the idea of who would actually be in the movie. In that report, producer Lauren Shuler-Donner discussed X-Men: First Class:

Everyone’s favorite director, Brett Ratner, recently went on a bit of a rant to MTV News, talking about how he would love to direct more comic book movies, if only there were still some of the ‘best heroes’ to go around.

Now, I know what a lot of you are already thinking–but at least take a look at what the man had to say before you go ripping into him, please.

Today, the brand new official trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine has hit the internet (click on the link to check it out).

In short, it’s good but not great. I find it rather disorganized and slow for the first half as much of it is simply rehashing what we saw in the first full Wolverine trailer. The second half however, is pure action and it makes up for it. The one thing this trailer does do right is showcase much more of the central mutants that many fans care about, notably Gambit, Deadpool and Cyclops – the three characters I’ll focus on here.

This weekend I wrote about the first official picture of Gambit from X-Men Origins: Wolverine and now we have several new photos from tha film that have appeared online for our viewing pleasure. There are five in total and are all live shots from scenes in the film.

If you got a chance to see the low-quality leaked footage of the teaser trailer featured at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, these may look familiar to you as they are all directly taken from scenes shown during that trailer.

It looks like 20th Century Fox will be continuing the X-Men franchise not just with solo spin-offs. The studio signed Josh Schwartz this week to write X-Men: First Class to bring the franchise to a younger generation.

Josh Schwartz is the creator, writer and producer of the television shows The OC, Gossip Girl and Chuck and this will be his first shot at developing a project for the big screen. You can probably guess who the target audience will be.

The film will undoubtedly follow (at least in some way, shape or form) the general idea and story from the X-Men: First Class comic book which Marvel debuted in 2006 as a mini-series, later continued as an ongoing series. The book follows the original five X-Men (for the most part) in their teens working for Professor X as it was when the X-Men comic began back in the 60’s.

The guys over at Latino Review put their peepers to good use picking out this little tidbit buried in the many movie titles recently announced on Production Weekly: X-men: First Class seems to be the next film in the series going into production!

El Toro over at Latino Review has posted new pictures from the set of the upcoming X-men Origins: Wolverine, from a scene that looks to be set during WWII???

Now, as any fanboy worth his adamantium knows, Wolverine’s mutant-healing factor has the added effect of slowing down his aging process to a crawl. Various storylines in the comics have hinted that Wolvy could be as old as 100, leaving the filmmakers behind Origins a lot of history to play with. And, If these photos are any indication, this film is aiming for a scope much more epic than originally thought. Let’s just hope it doesn’t stretch itself too thin by trying to do too much. Save something for Wolverine 2!

In the meantime, take a look at the pics and let us know what you think.

Source: Latino Review

We all knew that Hugh Jackman was in it. And we’d heard that Liev Schreiber would probably be playing Sabretooth, but other than that news has been quiet on the X-Men Origins: Wolverine casting front.

Until now.

First up, Joblo is reporting that Danny Huston, son of the legendary John Huston has signed up to play William Stryker, the character previously played by the great Brian Cox in X-Men 2.

IESB states that Lynn Collins, who has starred in such quality films as 13 Going on 30, The Number 23 and The Lake House will be starring as Wolverine’s love interest Kayla Silverfox.

AICN is stating that fan favorite Ryan Reynolds will be playing Deadpool, apparently a cameo that will lead to his own spin-off film.

Meanwhile, Empire magazine is saying that Taylor Kitsch from TV’s Friday Night Lights has snagged the role of Gambit, a character that X-Men fans have been waiting to see on the screen since before the birth of Christ (well, Mel Gibson’s screen version at least).

There are also reports that The Blob will make an appearance in the film. The character will be huge, so HUGE in fact that he will be a combination of an actor in a fat suit and CGI. Yes you read that correctly.

So what does all this mean?

Okay, X-Men: The Last Stand wasn’t good. Considering how great the first two films were, the third was woeful in comparison. While most people tend to blame Brett Ratner, I blame the suits at Fox.

Ratner isn’t a bad director, in fact I quite like him, he knows how to make a good popcorn flick, and his stab at a Hannibal Lecter film was much better than Ridley Scott’s. Yes, you did read that correctly.

The Last Stand was ruined by a release date and Fox’s wish stick a finger up at Bryan Singer, who bailed from the franchise to direct Superman Returns (a film that I really like).

Now that the money grabbers at Fox have realized that it’s just too expensive to continue with the X-Men franchise in its original incarnation, they’ve apparently decided to milk the cash cow my going straight to DVD with a series of origin films.

Not a big piece of news but – hey – it’s not about Justice League, so that’s gotta be a bonus right?

Discussing the planned 2009 X-Men spin-off Magneto, writer/director David S. Goyer has revealed budgeting and location scouts for the film have begun, with the plan being to set the story in Europe and Argentina. What struck me as interesting was that he also mentioned the plot will revolve around “the origins of the X-Men with Magneto and Charles Xavier.”

So, then, which is it? A Magneto film or the origin of the X-Men? Could fan concerns about a stand-alone Eric Lensherr film have caused a rethink? Do I smell the distinctive scent of backpeddling?

According to Superherohype.com, after having won the People’s Choice Award for “Favorite Female Action Star” Halle Berry was so pleased that fans like her “Storm” character so much that she told them if they really want X-Men 4 to be made, it’s up to them.

Here’s what she said:

“You guys really love X-Men? Ok, here’s what you have to do. Write letters. Every one of you in this building who love X-Men and want to see X-Men 4, write a letter to Tom Rothman at Fox and tell him so and you will get another one, and I’ll be there too.”

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: Much like the popcorn I ate while watching, it was kind of tasty but not very satisfying.

OK. First things first… I have to give props to Brett Ratner for stepping into this X-Men film at the last possible moment and putting it together in an insanely short amount of time. It was barely a year between the time Ratner came onboard and the movie showed up at your local multiplex. I still don’t know how they managed to do it.

Right here is where I wanted to say “And now for the bad news…”, but really it’s not so much bad as it is tepid (you know, lukewarm).

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine during filming of X-Men 3. The original image can be found here. I’ve tweaked the image a bit to make it look better.

I’m still dumbfounded that the release date for this thing is scheduled for release only 9 months from now. That is truly insane.

Ben Foster, who played a pencil-necked geek in The Punisher and a psychotic in Hostage has been cast as the winged mutant “Angel” in X-Men 3 according to Variety (so it must be true).

So far the insane release date of May 2006 is still the target.

Just thought you might like to know.

Thanks to Movie Tab for the heads up.

Avi Arad was interviewed by MTV and spilled his guts on more projects than I really believe will make it to the big screen. There’s really no point to rehashing it here, there’s a nice summary over at RopeofSilicon.com.

He mentioned X-Men 3, Magneto, Wolverine, Ghost Rider (vs a giant tidal wave ), Spiderman 3, Captain America (think: Back to the Future), Silver Surfer, Thor, Punisher 2 and Iron Man.

Sounds like on Iron Man a complete script rewrite is being done by Nick Cassavetes, who has met with Arad several times to discuss the film.

Much more info at the link above.

Sorry about the lack of posts lately… I was sick for a while and to be honest this is the first thing I’ve felt like writing.

SuperHeroHype.com has scooped the first (of many, I’m sure) poster for the upcoming film X-Men 3: Death of a Franchise. (So I kid).

It courageously lists the release date as May 26th, 2006 even though the (horrid) script probably still isn’t locked down and they’re not supposed to start filming for what, another 2 months?

It’s insane, I tell ya. Don’t big special effects superhero movies take at least two years to complete? I shudder at the thought of X-Men 3 as a completed film, I really do.

On the poster a website is listed: www.xmen3themovie.com, which at the time of this writing leads to nothing but an empty page. You’d think they could at least put the poster in as a placeholder…

Click on the image above for a larger version of the poster.

Source: SuperHeroHype.com

In an interview with MTV, Brett Ratner tried to assuage the fear that X-Men fans have over his taking over the upcoming film.

To his credit, he is at least aware of the negative buzz and as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. During his interview he actually said (concerning the brutally murdered Batman franchise):

“I’m not Joel Schumacher, and I’m not … um … who did the third Superman? I’m Brett, and all I know is what I know, what I can do and what I have to work with.”

So he knows what’s on the line and what can happen when things go terribly wrong.

Then there’s a bit more hopeful news: