On Sunday, The Hollywood Reporter announced Joe Johnson as the director of 2011’s The First Avenger: Captain America. On the good side, this movie looks like it’s actually going to happen. On the bad side — as it is with any superhero adaptation announcement — there were a number of oddities with The Hollywood Reporter’s article.
1. The title. “First Avenger”? The original Avengers are the ones who un-froze Cap from his Arctic cryogenic stasis in the first place! How the hell is he the “first Avenger”?! I know that this title has been out there for some time now, but I thought I’d mention this as it is endlessly perplexing.
2. The time the article was posted. When I went to look at the official date of announcement, I was surprised to find that this story dropped at 10:00 PM on a Sunday. I know it has to be ready for the Monday papers, but that’s still a strange time to go and publish it online.
3. Joe Johnson is directing Captain America instead of Ant-Man. You would think that Johnson, with his notable experience as the director of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, would have been tapped for the Ant-Man movie. Nope. They gave him a WWII Captain America period piece instead. This guy obviously knows how to do small stuff on a big scale, yet he’s been hired to take over the superhero that requires the least amount of fantasy special effects.
4. The picture accompanying the article. The Hollywood Reporter went out of their way to give a brief history of Steve Rogers, even going so far as to mention the horrid 90s Captain America film. But they ran a picture of the wrong Captain America!!!
Instead of showing Steve Rogers in costume, they have Bucky wearing the new Captain America outfit. WTF?! It could be Marvel’s fault or it could be THR’s fault. Either way, it’s both funny and sad at the same time. You can even see the knife hanging on Bucky’s belt in the image (not to mention those goofy stars on his shoulders).
All-in-all, I’m glad that this is going to get made. I would much rather see a Captain America movie set in the 70s with Steve and The Falcon fighting side-by-side, but any good Cap movie is better than no Cap movie.
Most of all, I’m excited at the prospect of this film hitting theaters a month or so before The Avengers movie. That means Cap will end up in the Arctic at the end of this film and then he’ll get de-thawed in The Avengers just mere weeks later. That’s awesome!!! I can’t even think of another example of tight movie continuity like that. I’m about to piss myself just imagining how sweet that will be.
After seeing the trailers for the past couple months, I had to see the new Hellboy movie. Guillermo Del Toro’s first attempt was kind of lackluster - but once I saw that the effects mirrored Pan’s Labyrinth I was sold. I skated out of work around 3 and caught the show at 4. Here is my post-mortem txt to Nick:
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