Dear Gods (All 6 Of 'Em), Let Him Say His Name!

I don't know if you heard yesterday's casting announcement for the "other" Captain Marvel - He Who Cannot Use That Name.* We've known for ages that Dwayne Johnson will be playing Black Adam - for so long that they had to give him his own movie while he waited. (Good call there - let things build)

Friday they finally cast the part of the adult version of Billy Batson in the upcoming Shazam! movie - Zachary Levi.

That's a bit of casting that seems like a natural fit. He's shown his ability to play a boy in a man's body as Chuck Bartowski in Chuck, and over the course of the series, and continuing as Fandral The Dashing in the last two Thor movies, he's built himself up to handle the action roles. This could be a mighty fine thing. I can see a potentially excellent onscreen chemistry between The Rock and he when the inevitable meeting with Black Adam comes.

Hopefully, they'll come up with something (Captain Thunder?) that will let him say his name and avoid the ridiculous Freddy Freeman situation. Seriously - did decades of people mocking Captain Marvel Jr's inability to say his name without changing not factor at all when it came time to name our hero? Or is callng him Shazam another case of the modern comic editors hating heroes and intentionally having a laugh at his expense?


On a completely unrelated note - another news item caught my eye at the same time. Southwest Airlines is talking Live In-Flight Bands. Blasting music at a captive audience unable to escape or avoid it.
Didn't we read that was one of the ways they tortured prisoners in Guantanamo Bay? I guess it's only a natural evolution. Isn't this the airline that beat a passenger they didn't want recently?

How i imagine the press announcement, with a little help from Alex Ross

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*(When DC comics bought the rights to the old Fawcett line, including Captain Marvel, they didn't register the accompanying trademarks. Marvel decided they could find a use for that name and filed registration papers. So, even though Captain Marvel existed first, they haven't been able to use his name in publication titles for decades. Transitioning to movies only complicates things, and the name cannot be used at all. So they've taken to calling the character Shazam, inlcuding a promotion from captain to wizard. So now he needs to wear a name tag since he cannot speak his name without transforming into Billy Batson. D'oh!)

Damn

We lost another  of the Great Ones today:

 

We Miss You Already

She hasn't been promoted yet?

Just a quickie thought on another interesting bit out of San Diego this weekend.
It was announced that the Captain Marvel movie would take place back in the 90's, featuring a still two-eyed Nick Fury. San Diego Mercy General overflows with ruptured eardrums after the crowd exploded, certainly.

It's already been announced that she appears in the next Avengers movie.

This means she'll be the most experienced hero in the MCU, with two decades of super-heroing behind her, excepting Thor. If she's spent that interim time with the formation of S.W.O.R.D., she may even know more about Thanos than any of our previously established Earthbound heroes.

Interesting possibilities to contemplate...

UPDATE:
Nope. They've announced that Captain Marvel is NOT in the third Avengers movie after all. We'll have to wait for her to show in the 4th.
But, we get to watch her and Nick Fury fighting Skrulls. I'm good.

Savagely Stupid or Hail Mary Play for Salvation?

One interestingly odd bit of information that came out of San Diego this weekend is that The Flash movie is going to be based on Flashpoint, the story-line in which Flash inadvertently massively changes the timeline/reality.

My first thought was, "Well, that's stupid. You're going to have him change things before we even see his world before the change? Kinda kills the impact."
Seriously - choosing a story-line that's whole point was to shake up the status quo seems like a terribly poor choice for the movie that establishes the status quo. It would be very typical of a lot of Hollywood thinking, to go jump straight into Big Events without ever giving us the character build up that makes us give a damn about the event. This holds especially true for Warner Brothers and their hurry-and-catch-up attitude towards the DCEU.

But... (here comes the deluded optimist part of my fractured brain) ...what if?
What if this will be their attempt to fix things. What if this is a plan to abandon the dark Elseworlds universe they've been trapped in since Man Of Steel? What if the reset at the end of the movie brings us a recognizable version of Superman? Fan reaction to Tyler Hoechlin's version on Supergirl must have been a hell of a shock to the WB movie heads.

Sure, they'd still have to deal with the painful stupidity part of the stories (another day), but this could be one hell of a head start if they were going to take advantage of this opportunity for a course correction, eh?

Doom Is Nigh?

Well, That's interesting.

I made reference on the IFC post to how Fox can make a good Fantastic Four movie. It was announced today (Friday, 20July) that they're taking one of the first steps, perhaps. That step being "No Doctor Doom in the first movie. Give him his own film instead."

In the craze to make villain based films, they own one of the greatest in comics. A Doom movie could run the complete Hero's Journey and set him up as a truly meaningful confrontation when he collides with the FF. Keep Reed's involvement down to less than 2 minutes.

You've got the tale of a brilliant kid - Tony Stark type brilliant, who loses his father to a corrupt government,and then learns that his dead mother was a witch, and that he has inherited her gift for the dark arts. He comes to realize that his mother died an unconfessed witch, now suffering in Hell. He travels across the world seeking the knowledge, both scientific and occult, to breach the barrier between realms to rescue his mother from damnation. Dren happens (See Reed Richards' 2 minutes) and his experiments are explosively destroyed. Forced to leave, he finds his way to an ancient Tibetan temple whose monks help him further his occult knowledge, and to forge himself a new armored identity. Like Tony Stark, he builds an incredibly advanced battle armor, though he takes it a step further, pressing the hot forged face-plate to his own own flesh, scarring it far beyond anything done by the accident.
Now armed like a combined Iron Man/Doctor Strange, he returns to his native country to depose the corrupt regime that destroyed his family. After a brief but devastating war with the rulers & their armies, Doom installs himself as the new government. As our movie ends, we see that he is bringing a never before known prosperity to his country, advancing the science, health and lifestyle of the common peoples. And the dark edge of power that enforces his view of how things should be...

Now you're set up for an epic confrontation when he appears in the 2nd or 3rd Fantastic Four film - a hero every bit as much as villain for a pure distilled awesome clash of comic goodness on the screen.

Of course, this assumes that they're doing the classic Lee & Kirby character. I don't believe the Fox execs have ever seen him - just the pitiful creature that exists in more recent times.The one who's a villain because Daddy was a Satanist who beat him, and that's bad, so he is, too.
Somehow, they thought this was improving the character.

Man, that's pathetic.

We'll get back to how they can make a good FF film later. I jumped the gun on this one point because of today's news.