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 Since the announcement that Spider-man 4 was getting trashed in favor of a Marvel Ultimates style reboot, there has been tons of speculation on who will play the new, younger Peter Parker. The speculative choices range everywhere from Taylor Lautner to Shia Labeouf, and what choices those are... It seems that if you are young, relatively short, with adverbless brown hair, and look like you might make a Twilight fan soil her underoos, you might have a shot at being the next wall-crawler. A couple of guys that have supposedly had a real shot at the role include Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Meet Bill), Jospeph Gordon Levitt (500 Days of Summer), and most recently, Josh Hutcherson who is set to star in the upcoming remake of Red Dawn.

I don't have any particular beef with those candidates, other than the fact that they may be too pretty, but what can you do—its Hollywood. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is probably a little too old for the high school setting of the new story, and seeing as his name hasn't popped up in a while in the news concerning the project, who knows if he's still in the running.

I don't care who they get, as long as he is capable of playing the part. Tobey Maguire was a good Peter Parker in the sense that he has such plain features; it was easy to believe he could be a nerdy kid (I'll use the word “kid” loosely here). But, what he had in looks, he lacked in what I can only label “moxie.” One of Spider-man's most entertaining characteristics is his ability to drop a witty one-liner in the midst of a superhuman showdown. Maguire did okay, but it sounded so unnatural for him to make jokes, the only exception being the line delivered to Bonesaw McGraw in the first installment:“Nice outfit. Did your husband give it to you?” But, at least he could emote...

That's where I see the plus side to these younger guys; maybe they'll exude some more energy and be able to bring that smart ass vibe that a teenage web-head should have. Maybe I'm just being a nostalgic child of the 90s, but they should force whichever one of these guys they wrangle to watch Spider-man: The Animated Series. I always thought Christopher Daniel Barnes perfected the delivery of the mid battle corny quip.

The most important thing, at least to the purist geek, is that the new guy has the right vibe that fans have come to associate with the character. And say no to Twilightization.

-Andrew

Preacher on screen....? I have so many mixed emotions about that one.

After a while with no updates on the progress of the (possibly) upcoming film adaptation of the Preacher comic, news has dropped that Sam Mendes (American Beauty) severed his loose attachment to the project to direct the next installment in the Bond franchise. This is disappointing considering his history of directing good stuff and his experience with adapting graphic novels into movies, i.e. Road to Perdition.

This might slow the already snail's paced project down even more, but that may not be such a bad thing. For anyone who's read Preacher, you know that it is a tough project to adapt to the big screen.

Every issue of the comic created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon is riddled with raunchy, vulgar, violent awesomeness. It's fun stuff to read. But, some of that shit is nuts, I dare say too nuts to be a success in theaters. A man with a head that looks like a penis, a kid whose face looked like an ass-hole, and a retarded descendant of Jesus Christ himself are just a few of the series' more charming elements. It is tough to say that it would do well at the box office...

But, that's assuming that they wouldn't try to nerf the deuce out of it for a PG-13 rating, which would be a travesty. Doing justice to the source material should be a top concern of any party trying to adapt a comic or book to film. I have mixed feelings about how Watchmen was handled, but in general if your a writer or director and you think you might feel inclined to shit all over the source material that has already been worked hard on and laid out for you, you should probably just leave it alone.

An HBO series would be great. Those premium cable channels are getting more lurid all the time with their original programming. It would be much easier to fit all the material into a series anyway—how else would the Tale of Arsface be adequately told? I think keeping it off the big screen is the best way to go.

-Andrew

I read from a variety of sources today that the man to helm the upcoming (in the distant future) Marvel flick, The Avengers, is Joss Whedon.  This is fantastic news.  The dude knows how to entertain.  I happened to come across the Firefly series last week while browsing through the Watch Instantly selection on Netflix. I hadn't seen it before, but I hadn't heard a bad thing about it.  Knocked that series out in two days and was left in a state of minor depression. I wanted more!  Thank god Serenity was on there too.

To me that's a good sign in terms of what he could do for this movie. He is capable of making great television with clearly limited budgets and on top of that he seems to have a knack for creating unique, likeable, and most importantly fun characters (Dr. Horrible, anyone?). The ensemble cast he will be handling will have to be all of those things. Can't deny that it is a tall order though--these won't be lesser known TV stars he'll be dealing with (Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Evans, possibly Edward Norton...some big personalities).

As far as his feature film history goes, I've read rumblings like "Serenity was like a two hour epsiode of a television show."  That's a BS criticism.  It was based on a television show which didn't attract enough viewers to get another season; how much money do you think he got to make that film?  $39 million! That was good shit when you compare it with the budgets for other genre-similar movies (District 9 doesn't count--Neill Blomkamp is on directorial steroids). 

Bottom line is I think this is great news. 

-Andrew