Comicbook Movie News: Marvel Hunt Leak, DKR Dividing Audiences

Marvel have hired a "private security consultant" to find out who leaked the information of the 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy film adaption to Latino Review prior to the SDCC official press release. This results in them harrassing them to release the source, which kind of explains a lot about Marvel's treatment of journalism within their comics recently. http://boingboing.net/2012/07/23/marvel-harassing-news-sites.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

The fact that they decided to go with Guardians of the Galaxy is itself pretty curious. It's certainly not the most well known comicbook in the Marvel stable, being an apparently popular science fiction series starring a talking raccoon and a tree-person, but it is interesting that a potential film based around the African superhero Black Panther has apparently been rejected on the grounds that they don't think that an audience would buy into it. So a story based in a fictional African country that happens to have advanced tech due to evading European colonisation is apparently a harder sell than a team of superheroes that look like this,

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/07/20/marvel-guardians-of-the-galaxy-leaks/

Now, I'm not really a fan of Black Panther in a lot of his appearances (the writers occasionally deciding to make him do things like deliberately withholding the cures for cancer and AIDs don't exactly endear him people) but I'd at least consider watching a movie about him, given the Marvel Cinematic Universe's track record, before I'd watch a movie about those guys.

Oh, and MAN is Dark Knight Rises proving to be divisive. People currently seem to be breaking up into three groups.

- The people who think that it's the Greatest Superhero Movie of All Time (debatable), and even better than the Dark Knight.

- People who think that it's a good movie, though suffers from the fact that it's a sequel to tDK, in that it's predecessor set the bar so high that it would have been impossible for the new film to top it (again, debatable, the action scenes in DKR are bigger and more elaborate than tDK for certain, for example).

- And the people who seem actively annoyed with the film, feeling let down by it for a number of reasons. These reasons range from Bane's voice (I didn't mind it personally, even if he did sound like Brian Blessed talking into a beer glass), Catwoman in general (she acts like she does in the comics, and this somehow pisses people off because she isn't tonally the same as everyone else), the fact that Bruce had retired for some eight years in between tDK and the events of this film (the accumulated injuries sustained as a superhero and the depression caused by Rachel Dawes' death, combined by his and Jim Gordon's deception effectively making Batman redundant in Gotham, leads to Bruce retiring and leaving Wayne Enterprises/the Wayne Foundation in the hands of Lucius Fox and crimefighting to Jim Gordon), and the ending...

My view? I thought that it was a good enough movie in of itself, the villains were set up well, and had certainly the best screen versions of Bane and Catwoman. It was certainly a very good way to do a finite Batman story, though I do understand how people would be annoyed at the interpretation that this is a film where Batman quits from being a superhero (not ENTIRELY accurate, as said).