Long rumored but now seemingly confirmed by Joss Whedon to IGN, joining the team (or at least in the film to some capacity) will be Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, better known as The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. He’s basically The Flash if he was a Eurotrashy douchebag, she can manipulate probability – i.e. she can make pretty-much anything happen through “magic” handwaved with psuedo-science. They’re fraternal twins, originally villains who reformed and joined The Avengers alongside fellow ex-baddie Hawkeye during the team’s first major overhaul (everyone quit but Captain America, leaving him to train a new team of ex-villains.)

Second time is not the charm.
(Note: later-half of review has clearly-marked spoilers)

“Intermission” has some Blood Dragon for you.

I really, really hope that this marks the start of a much bigger push for this movie. Fairly or not, I feel like so much is riding on “Pacific Rim.” An original (read: not a sequel, remake, reboot, adaptation, etc) big-budget genre movie? Guillermo Del Toro finally on the cusp of the blockbuster clout he should’ve had a decade ago? Giant monsters and robots up onscreen with no “apology” for their own existence or attempt to make them palatable to audiences that might turn their noses up otherwise?

If something like this doesn’t “succeed,” it validates all the worst chickenshit instincts of the current studio-system. “Joe Popcorn” (or whatever the current euphemism is) probably doesn’t deserve this movie… but I hope “he” shows up anyway. There’s more riding on this than just this.

In case you weren’t aware, the reason Vin Diesel keeps agreeing to “Fast” sequels is because it’s the only way to force Universal to make more movies featuring his “Riddick” character. The new film, simply titled “Riddick,” now has a trailer:

An extended version of the trailer for Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” series has now hit the web HERE.

This follows the previous 30 second teaser, the 7 second teaser for THAT teaser, and the 2/12 hour teaser released to theaters last year as “The Avengers.”

This is sort-of about “Star Trek.” It’s that kinda week.

Also: NEW GAME OVERTHINKER today!

I’m an on-record eye-roller when it comes to the Orci/Kurtzman team, not because they so often make bad movies and TV shows but because the bad stuff they make is often so close to being awesome. So much of their output plays like a “sanitized” version of someone else’s batshit-nuts brilliant idea; and as I continue to say: A crazy, unwieldy, unworkably ridiculous idea unleashed full-force – even and often especially if the result is spectacularly embarassing – is preferable to competently-executed mediocrity: Please me, horrify me, just don’t BORE me.

There’s been fan-scripts and fans-becoming-writers, but this might be the first time in history that a TV series has opted to create a spin-off series and a theatrical movie… effectively based on it’s own fan-art.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000002220706&playerType=embed

And now, here it is: The first teaser for “Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.,” which effectively frames the show as “‘The X-Files’ But More Funny And With Those Guys From ‘The Avengers.'” The mysterious-man sequence is now unblurred, and we can now clearly see that the unnamed superhuman in question is indeed a black man wearing a hoodie. I still say it’s probably Luke Cage.

Gotta chuckle at how they manage to work in ultra-short “cameos” for The Avengers without having to show (and thus pay) the actors associated with them – Thor’s hammer, Cap’s shield, Iron Man flying, Banner in Hulk-form, etc.

I’m excited about this. There’s a lot of fun stuff to mess around with in the Marvel universe that may not need or warrant a full movie or full act in a movie – you could probably get a solid syndication-worthy run of shows JUST out of having them chase B and C-list supervillains around every week.

A moment ago I posted the “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” pre-tease, which opens with a motion-blurred action shot of an unidentified person(?) rescuing a woman from a burning building by jumping out the window and landing safely with enough force to crater the pavement on impact.

Below the jump, some screencaps of the very brief action-shot for a clearer look and possible guesses as to who this might be:

1. Basic window-jump shot, nothing too unusual looking under the circumstances.

2. Little more clear, can see “jumper” separate from “cargo.” Tan/gold color blur at play. Iron Man cameo, maybe?

3. Much more defined now. “Cargo” is wearing gray suit and skirt, jumper has gold/tan pants or leggings. Arm of jumper, visibly distinct from white legs (stockings?) of cargo suggest either dark skin-tone or clothing.

4. There’s a motion-blur effect on the footage, so this is about as clear as it’s going to get: Unidentified red-haired woman in a gray suit being carried by a larger person (likely but not definitely male) wearing what appear to be tan or mustard-colored pants – could be bellbottoms, but probably the wind.

5. Whoever the rescuer is, he’s strong/heavy enough to both land safely and do major damage to solid concrete when he lands. Still motion-blurred, but this last one looks about as good as it’s going to get for now.

While allowing that the aforementioned motion blur could be further obscuring things, what this looks like is an unknown woman being rescued by a larger and unusually-powerful unknown man of apparently darker complexion. Is this The Hulk? I don’t think so – he’s not quite “Hulk Big” and I don’t think the current Movieverse Hulk runs on the Silver Age comics mechanics of Hulk changing size depending on his mood like the Ang Lee Hulk did. Also, this guy appears to be wearing shoes, and his hair is either blown-upwards or styled in a manner that doesn’t scream “Hulk” to me. My (and I’m betting a lot of other people’s) best guess? Assuming for a moment that this is a Marvel character and not someone made up for the series, this could be our first glimpse of a live-action Luke Cage. 

A mainstay of Marvel’s aggressive (if occasionally awkward) diversity push in the 70s, Cage was a wrongfully-imprisoned black youth who was subjected to experiments in prison (yet another half-formed attempt to recreate the Super Soldier Serum that created Captain America) that wound up making him super-strong and virtually indestructible. You’d think they’d test something designed to that on anyone other than convicts, but there you go. He was mainly popular in the 70s before getting sidelined for a good long while, only to be brought back to the forefront in “Alias” and soon promoted by positive fan response to being a major fixture of the post-Mansion Avengers lineups.

If this is him, it makes a lot of sense: Cage is a street-level guy, doesn’t go in for elaborate costumes or gear and his abilities are fairly simple to visualize. He also has (or had) a fun, story-ready gimmick: Cage was New York’s resident “Hero For Hire” – instead of going out looking for wrongs to right, he let clients come to him and procure his day-saving services. He’d been previously set to be a recurring character in the “Alias: Jessica Jones” TV series, which never went to air and may or may not have had some of it’s assets folded into this project.

Secondary possibility: That the rescuer looks to be of notably darker complexion than the woman could be an illusion of the blur/shooting, in which case that could be anybody. There’ve been various “official” explanations, for example, as to how Coulson is back; but a popular fan theory going all the way back to “Avengers” has been that the original Coulson is indeed dead and this one is an LMD (“Life Model Decoy,” aka “a robot”) that will wind up being coverted into The Vision for a future “Avengers” sequel. Some additional tangential “evidence” to that end: Of all the onscreen superheroes, Coulson is most closely associated with Captain America; whose movie featured a hard-to-miss cameo by a certain artificial-man who, in the comics, was used to build Vision’s body. It doesn’t look like a suped-up Robo-Coulson is making the save here, but it’s a possibility sure.