avengers – Page 2 – Dangerous Universe

For the first time in a decade Marvel won’t be kicking off the summer movie season by opening a movie the first Friday in May! They’ve decided to start summer a week early and will launch Avengers: Infinity War on April 27. If The Avengers was the movie that brought together all the separate heroes in the Marvel movie universe, then Avengers: Infinity War is the movie that will bring together all the teams from The Avengers, the Black Panther contingent to Guardians of the Galaxy and basically everyone else too in order to do combat with the villainous Thanos (Josh Brolin) in a battle that’s been brewing in that cinematic universe for years now.

The R-rated surprise smash of 2016 Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is set to return with more superhero movie mayhem with Deadpool 2 on May 18. The movie studio has been pretty tight-lipped with this one plot-wise, other than to reveal it will introduce two fan-favorite comic characters Domino (Zazie Beetz) and Cable (once again, Josh Brolin who really is “Mr. Summer” this year).

A fourth modern Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, is due out May 25. Right now, Solo is more well-known for what went on behind the scenes with its original directors being fired months ago and director Ron Howard being brought on to finish the film. Supposedly, Solo will feature the first meeting between the title character played by Alden Ehrenreich and his furry co-pilot Chewbacca sometime before the events of the very first Star Wars.

The Ocean’s 11 series of movies gets a follow-up with the “don’t call it a ‘reboot’” Ocean’s 8 on June 6. This time, Sandra Bullock stars as Debbie Ocean and will lead the likes of Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter and Mindy Kaling in order to pull of some amazing heist at a stunning local.

Fourteen years after the original film Incredibles 2 blasts into theaters on June 15. The nice thing about this superhero family lead by Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter is that even though the first movie took place so long ago it doesn’t really matter since it’s animated and characters don’t have to age when they’re computer generated. Reportedly, this one deals with superhero pop Mr. Incredible (Nelson) playing stay-at-home dad to infant Jack-Jack while Elastigirl (Hunt) is out saving the world.

A second film in the Jurassic World franchise entitled Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hits theaters June 22. If the first Jurassic World was a bigger remake of Jurassic Park then Fallen Kingdom sure seems like it’s a bigger remake of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Here, the cast of Jurassic World including Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard have to venture back to the ruined, dinosaur crawling island for one reason or another that I’m sure will make sense within the confines of the movie.

Ant-Man and the Wasp, the sequel to Ant-Man, will skittle into cinemas July 6. The third Marvel movie of the summer, this time instead of having just Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) having to do battle with the bad guys he’ll also be joined with the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) forming an incredible shrinking team.

A sixth (!!!!) Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, zooms into theaters on July 27. This film franchise might have a lot going against it from its action star Tom Cruise being in his mid–50s, nearly as old as John Voight was in the first one when he played a nearing retirement behind-the-desk Jim Phelps to none of the films in the franchise having a coherent plot. Yet I adore the Mission Impossible franchise and welcome each new one with a lot of anticipation.

One TV series that the pre-teen set is really into these days is the animated Teen Titans Go! which makes its way to theaters in Teen Titans Go! to the Movies also on July 27. This over-the-top series pokes fun at the whole superhero genera with characters like Robin, Starfire and Cyborg who crack-wise and almost never get into fights with the villains. Reportedly the plot to this one has the Teen Titans thinking they deserve a movie too after seeing all sorts of other DC heroes get movies with them stuck on TV.

I can’t wait!

Rumor Control

I’ve been working on my yearly “best of” TV series column for the Fort Wayne Reader the last few weeks and I’m amazed at how many great series there are out there. Depending on what all gets printed due to space limitations, right now I’ve got seven shows on my “best of” list. And I could pretty easily find seven more shows to put on the list and then seven after that. There’s so much great TV on nowadays it makes “good” TV series look average. These days I find myself watching one or two episodes of shows that just a few years ago I would have watched full seasons of simply because there was nothing else on. And I still wonder how many shows other people love that I end up skipping altogether since I just don’t have enough time to watch everything I should?

There are shows I don’t watch because I don’t have enough time and there are shows I don’t watch because I don’t get whatever streaming service or cable outlet they happen to be on that I don’t get. I’d love to watch shows like Star Trek: Discovery, The Runaways or Ash vs Evil Dead, but because I don’t pay for CBS All Access, Hulu or Starz means I don’t have an opportunity to check out those shows.

But honestly, though, I’d rather be in the position of there being too many good things to watch than what it was like a decade ago. To be sure there was good, no, great shows on then too — there always have been. The difference was the good things to watch a decade ago were few and far between. Looking back at my “best of” list even from a decade ago there are a few shows I’d consider “great” even by today’s standards, but the majority of the shows on that list are simply “good.” That’s not meant as a knock against those “good” shows, just that when I was building my list back in 2007 I had to put a lot of “good” shows on it when there were just a few “great” ones airing.

Now it’s an entirely different matter. There are so many shows that are “great” the problem is I don’t have enough room to list them all or time to write about everything. I have to think that there’s surly some “great” shows these days that don’t get critical acclaim since today shows can’t just be “great,” they also have to be “innovative” or “ground breaking” or “unique” too to get loads of people to watch them.

I do wonder where this all ends? There are so many networks, channels and services all creating original content and there are only so many eyeballs available to watch said original content, what does the TV landscape look like 10 years from now? I think we’ve already caught a glimpse of what’s coming with WGN. This year the channel which had done some original content of its own in the past with the likes of Manhattan and Salem cancelled all their original series and instead decided to focus on cheaper syndicated fare. In 2018 the channel will begin running series from Canada and Sweden instead of original programming. And that’s not saying those Canadian or Swedish shows might not be interesting, but they’re not being created by WGN.

It’s happened in the movies already. The 1970s were considered a high watermark of cinema in the US yet by the mid–1980s things had devolved to the point where everyone was chasing big box office successes rather than wanting to make interesting movies. For example, in 1976 a movie about Watergate All the President’s Men was the third highest grossing film in the US that year. By 1986 the third highest grossing movie was Platoon, but that was overshadowed by the likes of Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee as the two highest grossing movies that year.

I feel like we’re living what films went through with TV series right now. There’s a lot of really great stuff on, but right now that “great” stuff isn’t attracting as many viewers as the creators of these shows would like. Oddly enough that doesn’t matter since everyone’s in the same boat as it were ratings wise. I figure someday some network will “crack the code” and create some lowest common denominator (read “bad”) show that gets lots of viewers that’s easy to emulate that other outlets will start copying. We’ve kind’a seen that with reality TV already that’s very cheap to make that in a few cases lots of people watch. But I think it’s only a matter of time the same thing happens on the drama/comedy side of TV too.

It will be interesting to see how this all pans out someday. My only hope is that when everything does come crashing down and all networks start running repeats of Big Bang Theory and whatever hot new show from Croatia everyone’s talking about, that I’ll have missed enough of the “good” shows over the years that when all this happens I’ll have the chance to go back and check them out.