Fandom 5: 'Captain America' Sequel, 'The Mummy' Reboot and He-Man's Return

"The Avengers"

We’re still weeks away from The Avengers opening but it’s been a Marvel-ous week. Read on ...

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1) Marvel Film Franchise vs. Marvel Film Franchise

Marvel Comics’ big event of the year launched this week with 250,000 copies of Avengers vs. X-Men #1 hitting stores amid no small amount of media coverage. Stores around the country had launch parties, and an event at Los Angeles’ Meltdown Comics featured one of the five writers of the mini-series, Ed Brubaker, in a Q&A with yours truly. (Newsarama covered the evening here.)

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The comic event is timed nicely with The Avengers movie and the publisher is promising big, life-altering, nay, universe-shattering ramifications for our heroes and comics.

But yearly comics events are starting to take their toll on readers so this one better pay off or this could be another footnote in the decline of comics.

2)  Captain America 2 Gets a Release Date

It’s April  4, 2014. 

Thor 2 is opening Nov. 15, 2013 and Iron Man 3 is hitting theatres on May 3, 2013.

Sure, fanboys are excited but me, I’m worried. All I’m seeing so far from the Marvel Second Wave is sequel, sequel, sequel. Where’s the Doctor Strange movie? Where’s the Guardians of the Galaxy movie? Where’s the Ant-Man movie?

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Marvel, you went bold, creating an inter-connected filmic universe the likes the world has never seen before. Don’t go soft and safe now.

3) Which One of You Got Lucky?

And has a ticket to the Avengers Movie Marathon? Because it sold out like a flash. I mean, um, quicksilver.

AMC put together a May 3 10-city film cavalcade of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, leading up to the midnight showing of The Avengers. Tickets are $40 but that’s moot because they are all gone.

But it shows the intense interest in Avengers and much anticipation there is for the movie.

4) The Mummy Returns

Seriously, The Mummy returns. Universal officially threw a reboot of its historic franchise into development this week when it hired Prometheus co-writer John Spaihts to write the screenplay. The word on this one is that the studio wants to make it “dark.”

The last Mummy movie was in 2008. So the dust has hardly settled on the franchise that began in 1999. And fanboys know it and some are complaining about it.

But the studio know those complainers will be in line to buy tickets.

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5) He-Man Returns …

… to the world of comics that is.

In what almost sounds like a joke, MTV Geek broke the news Friday that James Robinson, the acclaimed writer behind The Golden Age and Starman, is writing a He-Man and The Masters of the Universe mini-series for DC.

But if anyone has a shot of making He-Man remotely cool for the 21st century, it just may be the writer of The Golden Age and Starman.