When I wrote about my always-evolving feelings towards spoilers last week, I got several e-mails from people asking if that means I’ll never write about a movie during production again.
Of course not.
It just means that I am trying to be more conscious of what I say about something while it’s being made, and I want to try to safeguard your experience with a film. I don’t want to be the reason someone has to scrap an idea again, and I’ve put my foot in it enough times that I’m trying to figure out how to do my job better.
Now, when a studio decides to release a big sneak peek like Marvel did with the Phase One box set they put out, I consider that fair game. I would still warn that if you don’t want to know anything, don’t look at the gallery we’ve attached below, but if you don’t mind being teased a bit, I think this is a great job of showing us enough to get fans talking but not enough to ruin anything they’ve got coming between now and “The Avengers 2.”
I’ll go ahead and say it right now: I am fascinated by “Guardians Of The Galaxy.” I still remember when my buddy Bill Rosemann first turned me on to the character. This was the mid-’80s, and Bill was the comic book nerd just like I was the movie nerd. I would share films with him, and he would share comic books with me, and a lot of what I still read today was influenced by the things Bill turned me on to at that time. He was positively crazy for Rocket Raccoon, as he was for most things that were written by Bill Mantlo, and looking back now, I’m amazed to learn that Mike Mignola was the one who handled the pencils for that introductory mini-series. Keith Giffen was the one who co-created the character with Mantlo, but it was that four-issue mini-series that really made a case for him as an ongoing character in the larger Marvel universe. When Rocket made his return to Marvel in recent years, I was not even slightly surprised to learn that Bill, now an editor at Marvel, was one of the guys helping steer things. I would imagine that as he sees images from the film start to roll in, he’s got to feel like someone is playing an elaborate prank on him. Who would have ever imagined that this would end up as a movie, or that it would be such a big piece of Marvel’s movie plans for the next few years?
The quick glimpses we get of “Thor: The Dark World” are promising, and I’m certainly excited to see what they do with “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Showing us Bucky’s “death” again is a nice touch, and I love the glimpses we get of The Falcon, although I could probably stand to see a little more red and black in that costume. And while some of us saw the “Ant-Man” tease at Comic-Con last year, the vast majority of fans will be getting their first look at what Edgar Wright is doing with the character. I love that Devin Faraci dubbed this fighting style “size-fu,” and I think that perfectly captures what it is that Wright seems to be trying.
https://dailymotion.com/video/xyoruf
Look, all of this is marketing for movies that are ostensibly marketing for a larger movie that comes at the end of each cycle, but that’s a really cynical way to look at these films that have managed to successfully bring to life a universe that many of us have been reading for decades now. I still remember sitting across from Avi Arad and Kevin Feige in a conference room at the now-defunct Artisan Pictures, listening to them talk about their vision for what Marvel could be on the bigscreen. At the time, it sounded impossible.
These days? No such word. Bring it on, gents. All of it.