the m0vie blog

There’s been a lot of buzz generated about the new “shared universe” that Marvel is generating on-screen in the run up to The Avengers, being released in 2012. It has generated fantastic buzz and discussion given there are only really two scenes that have been screened suggesting how the the format might work: the presence of Samuel L. Jackson at the end of Iron Man, welcoming Tony Stark into a wider “universe” and the one-scene appearance of Robert Downey Jnr. at the end of The Incredible Hulk. Undoubtedly next year’s Iron Man 2 will feature even more treats (as will Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger), but it’s interesting to see the fuss that two tiny scenes have generated. I really do think that Marvel are on to box office gold here, and I also think it’s an interesting (and honest) attempt to transfer the medium of comics to film. However, these are all playing into one giant box office buster. Might it be worth taking the same concept and applying it to some of Marvel’s smaller screen franchises?

Fighting over top billing...

Of course, the only reason that this overlap occurred in the first place is because Marvel themselves started producing films (with the help of Paramount). By the time they had figured out that they could do this, they had already made multiple deals with studios like Sony (on the Spider-Man franchise) and Fox (X-Men and Fantastic Four). Such companies won’t tolerate the use of any of their characters in another studio’s feature film line – Sony infamously refused to allow Louis Leterrier set a scene of The Incredible Hulk in the same fictional university that Peter Parker attends (let alone have a cameo from Tobey Maguire or Dylan Baker), so Fox certainly won’t let Wolverine migrate across to join the Avengers. Which is a shame.

The only way such characters will migrate over will be if the studios allow their interest to lapse. That’s why Fox is spinning of X-Men Origins movies like nobody’s business and trying to reboot The Fantastic Four – they don’t want to lose a potential cashcow. I’m not sure where the studios would stand on co-financing a venture, which is the closest you could possibly come to getting a classic Wolverine-against-Hulk standoff on screen. Nobody wants a situation like Iron Man, a project which languished in development hell until it returned to Marvel and then became one of the year’s biggest films and a criticall acclaimed genre movie. Sure, studios may have minor interactions between their own projects (there’s a cameo from X-Men II in the original The Fantastic Four, in a still photograph of William Stryker appearing, and there’s an easter egg reference to the child of two Fantastic Four team members in X-Men II), but we can all but rule out large-scale interaction with the greater on-screen Marvel universe.

Still, I think there’s potential for Marvel to overlap some of their smaller properties. For example, the rights to the flop Daredevil have reverted back to Marvel after the disasterous Ben Affleck movie and there are fairly common rumours of a reboot (featuring Jason Statham), but I don’t think the character has the name recognition outside of geek circles to smash the mainstream. Being honest, I blame the character’s ridiculously unimpressive selection of bad guys. There’s Stilt Man, for example, who does exactly what it says on the tin. You remember the godawful Oirish assassin played by lad o’ the moment at the time, Colin Farrell? That’s about as good as his selection of bad guys get. I wish I were kidding.

The comic book character has three aces up his sleeve which can be made in his defense. The first is Frank Miller’s definitive run on the character. However, this was the basis of the offending film and… well, we know how that turned out. The second is his introspective nature. He’s a compelling hero who has real drama in his life. That, however, is a given in an superhero adaptation worth giving a crap about and is little to no good if you can’t produce a villain to match your character’s dramatic potential. The third fact is his relationship with other Marvel characters. He has an interesting dynamic with Spider-Man, but that character is tied up with the Sony franchise and is a far more colourful hero than the one who should inhabit the greyed out and dark world of Daredevil. There’s really only one match among the successfully developed Marvel screen franchises. It would make a great deal of sense to pair-off the character with The Punisher.

Yes, The Punisher. The guy who has had not one, not two but three failed attempts to start a movie franchise. If killing John Travolta couldn’t gain him the public’s respect, a change of tack is obviously needed. The whole killing bad guys in incredibly hyper-violent ways schtick was old when Dolph Lundgren took out the Triads back in 1988. We’ve seen it all, and he’s really not that compelling a protagonist in the simple good-guy-bad-guy dynamic which these films enjoy. It probably doesn’t help that in each and every film, he treats killing bad guys more as a job than a vocation, punching the clock and doing pretty much the same straightforward thing every damn time.

Violence and lethal vigilantes are something that no real screen superhero movie has dealt with (though The Dark Knight hinted at how impossible being a non-lethal vigilante would be). It’s always pretty much accepted that superheros don’t kill, and it’s as simple as that. Introducing Daredevil into a Punisher film (or The Punisher into a Daredevil film) would shake things up. What is the point of putting on a mask and doing all that crazy stuff when there’s a much more direct route that will yield more obvious results? The two characters have played off each other in the comics and – it seems to me – would work well together on screen.

I really think an idea like this might be worth looking into – treating comic book movie crossovers not as spin-off generators or a ramp up to any number of complex summer event films, but a chance to tell two superhero stories at once, and generate chemistry from their interactions. I don’t suggest flooding any major franchises with superfluous other characters, but I make the observation that there are heroes who really can’t support a feature on their own – or at least not as envisaged under the present model – and pairing them off would minimise risk and double the apepal to the base. Plus the fact that any character who already has a film has name recognition, and the more name recognition the stronger the film’s potential commercial success.

I don’t know, the idea of bring the merging of big Marvel films and applying it to some of the lesser known or regarded franchises seems the way to go on this.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: captain america, crossover, crossovers, daredevil, film, films, iron man, marvel, marvel comics, Movies, punisher, the avengers, the punisher, thor |