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“The Lion King” Trailer!

For one of the most highly-anticipated movies of 2019, the marketing for The Lion King has been virtually nonexistent up until today. One teaser back in November, and then just…nothing. Until today. And today, they made up for all that with this.

It starts off nice and slow, tingling with suspense: young Simba and Nala are scampering through the Outlands beyond Pride Rock. Hyenas dart around them in the shadows, and the two lion cubs cower as a voice narrates to them about how “life’s not fair” for those who “spend their lives in the dark, begging for scraps”. Then the hyenas approach, and with them comes their leader: Scar (voiced by Chiwetel Ejiofor). He looks terrifying: the way his tattered ear twitches as he advances on Simba; his ragged and disheveled coat of fur; his cold, malevolent voice. He’s perhaps lacking just a little something of the original, that almost exaggerated Shakespearean vibe to the character as voiced by Jeremy Irons, with his wild black mane and angular shape, but those are minor nitpicks – Scar looks absolutely awesome.

Then the trailer briefly turns into a nature-documentary: Mufasa brings Simba up onto Pride Rock, and in the voice of James Earl Jones tells us how the Pridelands exist in a “delicate balance”, while the music swells up, scenes flash by of Simba playing with other animals (including Zazu, voiced by John Oliver), and antelope prancing around. In this tranquil and idyllic corner of the world, we see Scar’s words made clear: Mufasa’s evil brother is bitterly jealous of this beautiful, bountiful kingdom – must be hard, when you live with a pack of ratty hyenas and your brother is living it up in this exquisitely-lit CGI paradise.

(I am aware of the fact that Mufasa and Scar apparently aren’t brothers, or are brothers, depending on which Disney executive you ask: I’m calling them brothers, for simplicity’s sake).

And, because Disney is evil, they even have the audacity to show us glimpses of a certain scene…hmm, is this a spoiler? Technically, I guess it is, so I won’t clarify exactly what this spoiler is, just that this scene in the trailer happens to involve a canyon, and a herd of stampeding water-buffalo. Yeah, they show us part of that scene.

In a throwback to the original animated feature, there’s a scene of Simba, Timon and Pumbaa walking, while the background behind them changes, and Simba grows older. I’m still left wondering how much of this film will literally just be a copy-and-paste of the original, but, hey, it looks beautiful.

We get our first good look at Nala, voiced by pop icon Beyoncé, and she looks…like a lioness. Not much more to say about her than that. She doesn’t sing, if that’s what you were expecting.

But, on that note, the trailer is not entirely without some lively song-and-dance: it closes, in fact, with Timon and Pumbaa skipping merrily along through the jungle, singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, which is peculiarly hilarious.

It looks good. It looks really good, in fact. There’s an epic quality to all the scenes, or maybe that’s just the brilliant visual effects, but it has beauty and atmosphere. The tone is perfect. A better voice-cast could not have been assembled – though I still have some reservations about Donald Glover voicing Simba himself. The movie looks like it will be incredible – or, at the very least, it looks like it will look incredible.

Trailer Rating: 8/10

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X-Men Won’t Be Joining The MCU – Yet.

The moment Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, Marvel comic fans around the world had one question: how soon will we get a Marvel reboot of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four?

It’ll be a while.

Those were Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige’s exact words in a recent interview, where he explained that he has a plan for the next phase of the MCU, and, at present, it does not include the X-Men. Specifically, he has a five-year plan that starts in 2020, apparently, so it appears we might not get our next X-Men movie until around 2026. Dark Phoenix, the last relic of the Fox X-Men, suddenly has a lot more significance: it will be a long time before we ever see characters like Professor X, Magneto, Jean Grey, Cyclops and Storm onscreen again.

Or will it be?

You see, we might not be getting an X-Men film for a long time, but does that exclude the possibility of certain X-Men and mutants appearing in other, upcoming Marvel films, not as a team, but as individuals? After all, the Avengers weren’t introduced as a group – they got solo films first, that slowly built up to their first team-up movie. Why not do something similar with the X-Men: scatter them throughout Phase 4 of the MCU, separate and distinct from each other, and then, somewhere down the line, have them meet. There’s already a lot of possibilities, so let’s explore a few right now.

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screenrant.com

First up, there’s The Eternals. This is a rather mysterious movie, which hasn’t started filming yet, but it should come out in November of 2020, kicking off Feige’s five-year plan. The Eternals are a rather unusual group of characters, and their backstory is hugely convoluted and confusing, but basically it goes like this: thousands of years ago, space gods known as the Celestials came to Earth and started messing about with humankind – they did experiments on human DNA, and were able to create a race of godlike beings, the Eternals. However, their experiments are also responsible for the Mutants: the X-Men are descended from those early humans who were mutated by the Celestials. The Eternals could be an epic spanning thousands of years, according to Feige, which means it’s likely we’ll see those experiments on humankind. That lays the groundwork for mutants showing up later in the MCU.

Then we have Black Panther 2 – the sequel to the highly acclaimed, Best Picture-nominee Black Panther. But while it will undoubtedly feature the return of beloved characters like T’Challa, Shuri, Nakia and Okoye, the film will probably add some new characters to the mix. And there’s one character in particular who has always had an interesting connection to the country of Wakanda and the Black Panther. That would be Storm, a.k.a Ororo Munroe, one of the most notable mutants in the X-Men roster. In the comics, Storm met T’Challa when they were both teenagers, and the two had feelings for each other – though they were forced to part ways for a time, Storm returned to Wakanda eventually and married T’Challa, becoming Queen of Wakanda. Imagine if, in Black Panther 2, we see something like this: T’Challa could hear rumors of a mysterious witch living out beyond the borders of Wakanda, who can control the weather – in a mission to stop her, he could end up learning her tragic story, of how her parents were killed when a fighter jet crashed into their house in Cairo, how she became a street thief before being adopted by the priestesses living in the Serengeti to whom she is distantly related. Perhaps they could end up having romantic feelings (though in that case, what happens to Nakia?), but more likely the two merely become close friends, and Storm becomes a citizen of Wakanda. And what about this for a post-credits scene: Professor X himself shows up in Wakanda and asks her to come with him. That would be epic.

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Then we get to Captain Marvel. The spunky,  faster-than-light superheroine memorably portrayed by Oscar-winner Brie Larson is incredibly powerful, armed with the power of an Infinity Stone, and there seems to be nothing in the universe that can stop her. So what kind of villain can be crafted for a Captain Marvel sequel, what kind of villain can actually pose a threat to someone so empowered? You would need someone who could use similar power.

Enter Rogue, the young mutant who can absorb powers from other people. In the comics, she has actually done this to Captain Marvel – with disastrous results. She absorbed Danvers’ powers and used them to battle the Avengers (and even threw Carol Danvers off the Golden Gate Bridge). While things eventually went back to normal, this incident left both characters emotionally scarred. And it’s interesting that Rogue happens to hail from the state of Mississippi: just one state over, in Louisiana, lives Carol’s good friend Maria Rambeau, and it’s not unlikely that Carol will spend more time there, in the Deep South. She could encounter Rogue there in Captain Marvel 2, and the consequences could be vast.

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en.wikipedia.org

There you have three movies already that could feature Mutants in some way. They’re not the only ones: multiple X-Men, such as Colossus and Magik, come from Russia, which is presumably where the upcoming Black Widow movie will be set. Magik also has some interesting connections to Doctor Strange in the comics, and the Doctor is getting a sequel which should come out in 2021. A future Spider-man movie could be a great place to introduce Iceman. There’s a plethora of possibilities, and even if we don’t get the X-Men as a team within the next five years, I have no doubt we’ll start seeing set-up for the X-Men in the near future.

Also, don’t forget that while Kevin Feige said the X-Men won’t be getting a film for some time, he said nothing about the Fantastic Four. They might be an easier group to introduce a little sooner, and wouldn’t require as much build-up to their introduction.

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New Clip From “Tolkien”

This movie does seem to be getting more appealing to me – though this clip, which was released today by Empire, is somewhat conflicting. On the one hand, it has beautiful background music, which helps the dialogue immensely; the spoken words seem to flow around melodiously in a rhythm, the effect of which would almost be hypnotic if it weren’t for the fact that the interaction between J.R.R Tolkien and Edith Bratt here seemed so peculiarly awkward! I mean, yes, their interruptions and mumbling does lend to the interest of the scene, but it doesn’t seem to work entirely. Tolkien himself (played by Nicholas Hoult) seems a little self-absorbed – when Edith (Lily Collins) tells him she has thought of a name for a character in a story, he corrects her: “It’s not a name,” he says. “It’s something else.”

He’s referring to the fact that, in his invented language, the word Edith has created is a place-name. But the line delivery sounds too sharp, too abrupt.

Similarly, at the opening of the scene, the back-and-forth between the two seems less romantic than it does snippy. Edith pushes Tolkien to tell her a story, but can only persuade him when she gives him the choice of doing it “in any language”. Once things get moving and Tolkien starts showing off his incredible imagination, the whole scene gets much better, but the dialogue between the two feels like it could have been toned down just a little. Tolkien is currently coming off somewhat impolite – not entirely rude, but very secluded and private. Edith is much more relatable: she’s clearly fascinated by Tolkien’s intellect and her eyes are wide with wonder as Tolkien explains that the name she created (which,  by the way, is just the words “cellar door”) properly belongs to an ancient place, almost impossible to reach, but held in reverence by those who find it. “Oh, is it now?,” Edith says: proving she, too, seems to have a tendency to cut in at just the wrong moment.

Tolkien, however, is by now lost in his imagination: he talks about the shrine at the heart of this magical place, and how it is marked by – and there he pauses suddenly, and the music gently trembles around him. This is the best moment in the clip. Tolkien is on the brink of saying that this place was marked by the Elves, the legendary people who inhabit much of his invented world. But he stops, staring dreamily into space, and says – “by trees.”

In a way, the idea that the trees were responsible for this place’s magic would not be alien to Tolkien – he revered trees, and would often stop to stare at them for very long times when he was out walking. Some of his most notable characters are the Ents, the tree-shaped forest dwellers who rise up against industrialism in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Magical trees populate Middle-earth, from the enchanting mellyrn of Lórien to the Forest of Nightshade in Beleriand. So for a moment I was actually caught off guard by this line, and didn’t realize that it was meant to be a substitute for Elves. When I did realize, and re-watched the whole scene, the magic is indeed much more noticeable – but the interactions between Edith and John might have needed just a little more work.

All in all, the scene is quite good: the focus on Tolkien’s linguistic and philological skills is delightful. The use of the phrase “cellar door” to drive the scene is wonderful: Tolkien once said that the word “cellar door” was one of the most beautiful in the English language. The music is just perfect (honestly, the music is so good: very Elven). And the acting from Hoult and Collins is, for the most part, really good – I just think certain lines could have been edited slightly for an even better effect. I would be lying, though, if I said that this brief clip didn’t make me more excited than any Avengers: Endgame trailer. The truth is, I am wildly hyped for Tolkien, and I’m giving it all the benefit of the doubt for now.

Trailer Rating: 7.9/10

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“Black Widow” Cast Begins To Take Shape

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denofgeek.com

Everything that Marvel has planned past the release of Avengers: Endgame is currently shrouded in a veil of secrecy and intense mystery – but that hasn’t stopped us from getting a few casting announcements for some of their upcoming films.

Currently, they’ve actually got quite a few movies going into production – The Eternals, a perplexing addition to the roster; Shang-Chi, set to be the first Marvel film headed by an Asian lead; and Black Widow, an origin film for a character who debuted in the MCU back in 2010.

That sounds unusual, and that’s because it is. Black Widow, or Natasha Romanoff, had her popularity peak just after the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in 2014. That would have been the best time to release a film for her, since she was one of only two original Avengers who didn’t get an origin film to begin with (the other being Hawkeye: I mean, you could say that technically the Hulk didn’t get an origin film, but technically he did). Since The Winter Soldier, Black Widow has been playing a more secondary role in the MCU, with only a few minutes of screentime in Avengers: Infinity War. That does seem to be changing with Avengers: Endgame, the trailers for which have highlighted Black Widow as one of the leading opponents of the Titan, Thanos. But that’s the thing: Endgame is…well, the end. After Endgame, where most of the other Avengers will presumably be retired or even die, what purpose does Black Widow have going forward? And why does she suddenly need an origin film, eight years after she originated?

We don’t know. But the origin film is definitely going forward, has a director (Cate Shortland) attached, has a release date of sometime in 2020, and has now begun casting. We first had preliminary reports that Beauty & The Beast star Emma Watson would be joining the cast, which actually didn’t come to pass – Fighting With My Family‘s Florence Pugh instead nabbed the role Watson was up for: the role of a spy, similar in strength to Black Widow herself. It would be hard to imagine Watson in such a role – Pugh seems like a perfectly good fit. Personally, I’m still hoping Watson gets to be Spider-Woman someday.

Then we got word that Andre Holland would be playing the movie’s villain, though those reports are still unconfirmed. There is still no word on who the villain is, either. That same report also mentioned the possibility of Alec Baldwin joining the cast.

Today, we received some definite casting: Stranger Things actor David Harbour will be joining Black Widow, in an unidentified role, and Rachel Weisz is also in talks to enter the cast.

So yeah, this thing is definitely on the move. We still don’t have any details on the plot, aside from the fact that this film is supposedly a prequel – as in, set before the events of Iron Man 2, where Black Widow first debuted onscreen, played by Scarlett Johansson (who, by the way, will continue to play the Russian spy). What is the need for an origin story now, when we don’t even know if Black Widow will survive the events of Avengers: Endgame? And what purpose could Black Widow serve in the future MCU, where the scope will be growing increasingly cosmic in scale? Is she going to fight off vast intergalactic entities like Galactus or the Silver Surfer with just her glow-stick batons and fists?

There is one link I can think of, though, and it could explain why a Black Widow movie is called for at this time, and not years ago. Crucially, Black Widow will be released next year, before The Eternals, which is set to come out in November, 2020.

You see, The Eternals itself has an interesting lineup of characters, and one of them is the villainous Druig. He is an immortal being, able to fly and teleport and do all the sorts of things that other Eternals can do – but he has one interesting thing about him. In the comics, Druig took the alias “Ivan Druig” and became a KGB officer in the Soviet Union. He even became the Prime Minister of the (fictional) country of Vorozheika. Now that may or may not be relevant, but Black Widow is also a KGB agent who operated out of the Soviet Union, and her movie should come out only a few months before The Eternals. Perhaps Natasha could have a connection to the greater cosmic beings that will inhabit the next phase of the MCU – perhaps, in the past, she had a connection to this country of Vorozheika, and even became entangled in the plots of “Ivan Druig”. It would be a brilliant link between the two films, and a great way of bridging the gap between the previous phase and the new one. It’s even possible that Andre Holland could be playing Druig, since The Eternals is currently shaping up to have a very diverse cast. Florence Pugh is rumored to be playing the “moral opposite” of Black Widow – in other words, she’ll most likely be playing Yelena Belova. I could easily imagine a scenario in which Druig recruits Belova, who trained alongside Natasha in the Red Room Program, to take out the Black Widow.

This is definitely looking like it will be a very interesting thriller. I’m sure there will be more updates on casting, plot details, etc, once Avengers: Endgame is released and Black Widow’s fate becomes known.