...and THAT little piece of Movie-Executive-to-English translation is really all anyone can reasonably take away from this Hero Complex piece on Warner Bros. honcho Jeff Robinovs vague, non-commital intimations of a "Justice League" movie. In fact, from now on you can use THIS as your "Avengers" indicator-light: If people from Warner Bros. are tossing "JLA" non-news to the fanboy-press, it means the insider-buzz is good for Marvel's big-scale team-up experiment and they're makng ready to hit the ground running on their logical "me-too." If they slip back into the "our characters are bigger, they have to stay seperate" party-line, that means they're thinking "Avengers" is an overreach.
The fact of the matter is, Warner Bros. is in a state of outright PANIC as far as their "tentpole" positioning goes. The annual gaurantee of a "Harry Potter" cash-deluge has been carrying the studio for the last decade - that's an ETERNITY in executive years - comes to an end a few months from now. The year after that, the other cash-cow, Christopher Nolan's "Batman" movies, wraps up with what Nolan's camp has openly called a "definitive" ending. And after that... they've got NOTHING in the way of garaunteed, reliable income.
Robinov and others have been saying for a year now that the plan is for a string of non-Batman DC superhero movies to take Potter's place, but thus far either WB are the best secret-keepers in the studio system (spoiler: they aren't) OR the "we don't know what to do with anyone who isn't Batman" rule remains firmly in place: The buzz on "Green Lantern" has been iffy-to-negative from day one, and the ONLY reason "Superman" is coming together so fast and attracting so much name talent is that Warners is working/spending like MAD to get the thing made before a big chunk of the rights switch over to Siegel & Schuster's estates after the most recent court decision.
The article also mentions "rebooting" Batman after "Dark Knight Rises," which is sort of a given - though one hopes they just mean getting a new actor/director/style and not a full on "let's make the origin story AGAIN" like Sony is doing for Spider-Man.
Don't get me wrong - a JL movie is a fine idea: Far and away the best move WB coluld make, both in terms of their (probable) need for an answer to "Avengers" and also as a kind of proving-ground for future franchises: "People seemed to like runs-fast-man, give him a movie!" I just don't expect them to actually go through with it anytime soon... unless people come out of "Captain America" RAVING about the innevitable "Avengers" tease; in which case it'll have a green light before Sunday's numbers even come in.
No comments:
Post a Comment