Comic-Con 2015 – Suicide Squad, X-Men 8, Sherlock, Warcraft and more

The San Diego Comic-Con of 2015 has arrived in style with some of the biggest announcements of the year. We’ll roundup some of the biggest events of film’s biggest weekend.

Film: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2
Panelists: Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss, Silver Linings Playbook), Liam Hemsworth (Gale, The Expendables 2), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta, Escobar: Paradise Lost), Willow Shields (Primrose, Beyond the Blackboard), Francis Lawrence (director, I am Legend), Nina Jacobson (producer, One Day), Conan O’Brien (superfan)
Release: November 2015

Show: Doctor Who season 9
Panelists: Peter Capaldi (The Doctor, In the Loop), Jenna Coleman (Clara, Death Comes to Pemberly), Michelle Gomez (Missy, Green Wing), Steven Moffatt (writer, Sherlock)
Release: September 2015

Show: Sherlock season 3.5
Panelists: Rupert Graves (Lestrade, The White Queen), Steven Moffatt (writer, Doctor Who), Sue Vertue (producer, Coupling)
Release: December 2015

Film: Rock the Kasbah
Panelists: Bill Murray (Ghost Busters), Bruce Willis (Die Hard), Zooey Deschanel (Elf), Danny McBride (This is the End), Kate Hudson (Almost Famous), Scott Caan (Ocean’s Eleven), Mitch Glazer (producer, Magic City)
Release: October 2015

Shows: Agents of SHIELD season 3, Agent Carter season 2
Panelists: Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter, Testament of Youth), James D’Arcy (Edwin Jarvis, Cloud Atlas), Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson, Much Ado About Nothing), Chloe Bennett (Daisy Johnson, Nashville), Brett Dalton (Grant Ward, Beyond Still Water), Ming-Na Wen (Melinda May, Mulan), Iain De Caestecker (Leo Fitz, In Fear), Elizabeth Henstridge (Gemma Simmons, Delicacy), Nick Blood (Lance Hunter, Babylon), Adrianne Palicki (Bobbi Morse, John Wick), Henry Simmons (Alpohnso McKenzie, No Good Deed), Luke Mitchell (Lincoln Campbell, The Tomorrow People), Jeph Loeb (producer, Heroes)
Release: September 2015 and January 2016 respectively.

Film: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Panelists: John Boyega (Finn, Attack the Block), Daisy Ridley (Rey, Toast of London), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron, A Most Violent Year), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren, Girls), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux, Ex Machina), Gwendoline Christie (Captain Phasma, Game of Thrones), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker, Arkham City), Carrie Fisher (Leia Solo, When Harry Met Sally), Harrison Ford (Han Solo, Blade Runner), Kathleen Kennedy (producer, Jurassic Park), Lawrence Kasdan (writer, Raiders of the Lost Ark), JJ Abrams (writer/director, Star Trek Into Darkness)
Release: December 2015

Film: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Panelists: Lily James (Elizabeth Bennett, Cinderella), Bella Heathcote (Jane Bennett, Dark Shadows), Sam Riley (Mr Darcy, One the Road), Douglas Booth (Mr Bingley, Noah), Jack Huston (Mr Whickham, American Hustle), Matt Smith (Mr Collins, Doctor Who), Ben Sturr (writer/director, 17 Again), Seth Grahame Smith (author, Dark Shadows)
Release: February 2016

Film: Crimson Peak
Panelists: Mia Wasikowska (Edith Cushing, Stoker), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas Sharpe, Avengers Assemble), Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe, Interstellar), Guillermo Del Toro (writer/director, Pacific Rim)
Release: October 2015

Film: Warcraft
Panelists: Ben Foster (Medivh, Lone Survivor), Paula Patton (Garona, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol), Dominic Cooper (Llane Wrynn, Captain America: The First Avenger), Travis Fimmel (Anduin Lothar, Vikings), Daniel Wu (Gul’dan, The Man With the Iron Fists), Clancy Brown (Blackhand, The Shawshank Redemption), Ben Schnetzer (Khadgar, Pride), Toby Kebbell (Durotan, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), Duncan Jones (director, Source Code)
Release: June 2016

Film: Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Panelists: Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne, Argo), Henry Cavill (Clark Kent, The Man From UNCLE), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince, Fast & Furious), Amy Adams (Lois Lane, American Hustle), Jesse Eisenberg (Lex Luthor, The Social Network), Jeremy Irons (Alfred Pennyworth, The Lion King), Holly Hunter (Senator Finch, Cast Away), Zack Snyder (director, 300)
Summary: The superhero smackdown showed off a trailer and Q&A.
Release: March 2016

Film: The Hateful Eight
Panelists: Kurt Russell (John Ruth, The Thing), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Daisy Domergue, Road to Perdition), Walton Goggins (Chris Mannix, The Shield), Michael Madsen (Joe Gage, Donnie Brasco), Tim Roth (Oswaldo Mobray, Selma), Bruce Dern (Sandy Smithers, Nebraska), Quentin Tarantino (writer/director, Pulp Fiction)
Release: January 2016

Film: Fantastic Four
Panelists: Miles Teller (Reed Richards, Whiplash), Michael B Jordan (Johnny Storm, Fruitvale Station), Kate Mara (Susan Storm, House of Cards), Jamie Bell (Ben Grimm, The Adventures of Tintin), Toby Kebbell (Victor Domashev, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), Simon Kinberg (writer, Sherlock Holmes), Josh Trank (director, Chronicle)
Release: August 2015

Film: Deadpool
Panelists: Ryan Reynolds (Wade Wilson, Safe House), Morena Baccarin (Vanessa Carlyle, Serenity), Gina Carano (Angel Dust, Haywire), TJ Miller (Weasel, Cloverfield), Ed Skrein (Ajax, Ill Manors), Brianna Hildebrand (Ellie Phimister, Prism), Tim Miller (director, Gopher Broke)
Release: February 2016

Film: X-Men: Apocalypse
Panelists: James McAvoy (Charles Xavier, Trance), Michael Fassbender (Erik Lensherr, Prometheus), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven Darkholme, The Hunger Games), Nicholas Hoult (Hank McCoy, Warm Bodies), Oscar Isaac (En Sabah Nur, A Most Violent Year), Evan Peters (Peter Maximoff, American Horror Story), Lucas Till (Alex Summers, Walk the Line), Tye Sheridan (Scott Summers, The Tree of Life), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey, Game of Thrones), Alexandra Shipp (Ororo Munroe, Ray Donovan), Kodi Smit McPhee (Kurt Wagner, The Road), Ben Hardy (Warren Worthington, Eastenders), Lana Condor (Jubilation Lee), Olivia Munn (Betsy Braddock, The Newsroom), Channing Tatum (Remy LaBeau, 21 Jump Street), Hugh Jackman (Logan, The Prestige), Stan Lee (writer, The Fantastic Four), Simon Kinberg (writer, Sherlock Holmes), Bryan Singer (director, The Usual Suspects)
Release: May 2016

Film Suicide Squad
Panelists: Will Smith (Floyd Lawton, Independence Day), Margot Robbie (Harleen Quinzel, The Wolf of Wall Street), Joel Kinnaman (Rick Flagg, RoboCop), Jai Courtney (George Harkness, Terminator Genisys), Cara Delevinge (Enchantress, Paper Towns), Adam Beach (Christopher Weiss, Flags of our Fathers), Jay Hernandez (Chato Santana, Hostel), Karen Fukuhara (Tatsu Yamashiro), Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje (Waylon Jones, Thor: The Dark World), Viola Davis (Amanda Waller, The Help), David Ayer (director/writer, Fury)
Release: August 2016

Peter Dinklage and more cast as Angry Birds voice cast is revealed, Whedon regular teases SHIELD role

Its UK debut is yet to have been aired but the second series of Marvel’s action thriller show Agents of SHIELD has already kicked off in America. The original cast (Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen, Chloe Bennett, Iain De Caestecker, Brett Dalton and Elizabeth Henstridge) expanded drastically in the second half of the show, introducing regular spots for Bill Paxton, BJ Britt, Saffron Burrows, Ruth Negga, J August Richards and Patton Oswalt with cameos from Amy Acker, Cobie Smulders, Adrian Pasdar, Ron Glass and Samuel L Jackson. Reed Diamond, Lucy Lawless, Nick Blood, Adrianne Palicki and Kyle Machlachan have already boarded season 2 as newcomers but they don’t seemed to have stopped there.

Fran Kranz has posted a fairly cryptic tweet featuring the words “Robbie Baldwin, SHIELD, soon!” Baldwin would be referring to the Marvel hero Speedball. Kranz is a Joss Whedon regular following a lead role on Dollhouse, the Whedon-written horror Cabin in the Woods and played Claudio in Whedon’s Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing. He’s the fourth Much Ado star to join the show after Clark Gregg, Amy Acker and Reed Diamond, who played Leonato, Beatrice and Don Pedro respectively. Should this theme continue, we may see Nathan Fillion make his MCU debut on the small screen. Alexis Denisof may be after more of the action after his abrupt exit in Guardians of the Galaxy.

In a plethora of Appstore installations, ornithology anthology Angry Birds is likely the most iconic. Across numerous sequels, the game has tied into the Fast and Furious, Rio and Star Wars franchises but is now ready for a film of its own. The film’s incredible, and largely comedic, voice cast has now been unveiled: Jason Sudeikis (We’re the Millers, Horrible Bosses), Maya Rudolph (Bridesmaids, Away We Go), Bill Hader (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Paul), Josh Gad (21, Frozen), Danny McBride (This is the End, Tropic Thunder) and Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones, X-Men: Days of Future Past).

Angry Birds – July 15th 2016

Agents of SHIELD – continues this year on ABC and Channel 4

Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool reportedly greenlit, Toby Kebbell joins Ben-Hur, new Agents of SHIELD teaser and (another) Interstellar poster

The marketing team for Christopher Nolan’s secrecy soaked sci-fi Interstellar will be having the time of their lives: across this week, a whole series of posters for the film have been revealed one by one. Today is no exception. This one sheet sees a spacecraft downed in either domestic or alien waters. Nolan, British writer/director behind The Dark Knight trilogy, Memento, The Prestige and Inception, directs the cast of Matthew MacConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Anne Hathaway, David Oyelowo, Matt Damon, Ellen Burstyn and John Lithgow.

A planned spin off for Ryan Reynolds’ (Safe House, Buried) crazed superhero Deadpool, who made his only, mediocre appearance in the vastly disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, has been in development hell for the past six years. Most of that time the project has only been kept alive by the comic book character’s ongoing popularity. It has now been reported that Fox have greenlit the film for an early 2016 release. Tim Miller, who for an excruciatingly long time has been attached to the film, is now confirmed as director. My key hope for the film is that it can settle for a 15 rating: any lower and it wouldn’t have the same tone as the often adult comics but higher and the gore would unfairly become the focus.

I was one of many distraught by Toby Kebbell’s casting in the prestigious role of Doctor Doom in next year’s Fantastic Four but the star proved himself greatly going up against Andy Serkis’ Ceasar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. He’s now setting himself up for another villainous role as Messala in the new remake of Ben-Hur. The historical epic already has Morgan Freeman (Batman Begins, The Shawkshank Redemption, Seven) signed on to play mentor Ildarin while Jack Huston (American Hustle, Broadwalk Empire) is negotiating to play the titular hero. 12 Years a Slave’s John Ridley writes while Wanted’s Timur Bekmambetov directs.

Finally today we’ve got an awesome new poster for season 2 of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. The expansion of the multi billion superhero universe got off to a fairly rough start but pulled itself together with an excellent second half to the series. Deduce what you like from the teaser. Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen, Chloe Bennett, Brett Dalton, Elizabeth Henstridge, Iain De Caestecker, BJ Britt, Adrianne Palicki, Patton Oswalt, Nick Blood, Reed Diamond, Adrian Pasdar, Kyle MacLachlan and Lucy Lawless will all feature in some way in the new season.

Agents of SHIELD season 2 – this autumn on ABC and Channel 4

Deadpool – February 12th 2016

Interstellar – November 7th

Ben-Hur – February 19th 2016

Hawkeye’s removed Captain America appearance revealed and first teaser for SHIELD’s second series

With two Oscar nominations to his name, Jeremy Renner (The Town, American Hustle, The Assassination of Jesse James, The Hurt Locker) is one of the Marvel Universe’s most decorated stars although his character was deprived of some crucial character development time in his only lead role, 2012’s The Avengers. We know Renner will reprise his role next year in Age of Ultron while he’s rumoured to be starring in Captain America 3 and the latter’s directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, have revealed that the archer did have a role in Cap’ 2. Be warned that the next passage does contain major spoilers for The Winter Soldier.

Joe Russo explained “What it was going to be, we were trying to complicate the relationship between Cap and his S.H.I.E.L.D agent friends. If Hawkeye got a call from S.H.I.E.L.D saying Captain America is a fugitive, would he listen to that call or not listen to that call? That sequence actually was heartbreaking for us to cut it. I think it ultimately might have been a conflict with Renner’s schedule. But there was a great sequence where Hawkeye was chasing Cap through Washington D.C. there was an awesome sequence where they confronted each other in a ravine on the outskirts of D.C. and Hawkeye was shooting a series of arrows closing in on Cap, Cap closing in on him. And then Cap took him down and he realized for the first time that Hawkeye was trying to trick S.H.I.E.L.D, where he whispered something into Cap’s ear that Cap had a tracker on his suit and to punch Hawkeye to make it look real, because there was a Quinjet hovering above where they were watching the feedback back at S.H.I.E.L.D.

“So it was a cool sequence. But look, there’s a million iterations of films, and especially when dealing with Marvel movies where characters can come in or come out during the creative process. And you keep working and working like a Rubik’s Cube till you find the right configuration where everything lines up. So even though we lost that sequence, I think we may have streamlined the movie and made it a little bit more propulsive.”

Also from the world of Marvel, the very first trailer for the second season of Agents of SHIELD have emerged. Many were quick to criticise the show but it transformed into something spectacular in its last sequence of episodes. Clark Gregg, Chloe Bennett, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge but the trailer made no such mention of J August Richards, Ron Glass, David Conrad, BJ Britt, Ruth Negga or Patton Oswalt. Lucy Lawless, Reed Diamond, Kyle MacLachlan and Adrianne Palicki also join the cast.

Agents of SHIELD season 2 – September 23rd on ABC/Channel 4

Captain America 3 – May 6th 2016

ABC calls for more Marvel TV, Bourne 5 gets a new writer and John Goodman and Ken Watanabe

The Bourne Legacy was a fairly mediocre action spin-off to a modern masterpiece trilogy, and was a minor box office let down, and yet Universal want to expand on Aaron Cross’ (Jeremy Renner) story, despite Matt Damon, the original Jason Bourne, saying he’s willing to do another with director Paul Greengrass. We had believed that Sherlock Holmes’ Anthony Peckham would be the new Bourne’s writer but newcomer Andrew Baldwin has been appointed. Baldwin has no existing credits but has multiple projects in development such as Bastille Day and The Outsider. As long as the script has smarts to it, my only existed issue would be the style. The Bourne films are far more hard hitting when they subscribe to less CG effects but that’s unlikely with Justin Lin (Fast and Furious) aboard.

The principal photography of Michael Bay’s action sequel Transformers: Age of Extinction wrapped up long ago but that hasn’t stopped it from making a few last minute castings. These aren’t your run of the mill extras or post production stand ins. Golden Globe winner John Goodman (The Big Lebowski, Monsters Inc, Argo, The Artist, Barton Fink) and Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Inception, Letter From Iwo Jima, Godzilla, Batman Begins) will be voicing their own transformers named Hound and Drift respectively. They join the likes of Mark Wahlberg, Jack Reynor, Peter Cullen, Nicola Peltz, TJ Miller, Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci in the cast.

Agents of SHIELD hasn’t been the ratings smash many expected but the meticulous twists of the second half of its first season have been great fun. That lead to the making of Netflix’s The Defenders but ABC will be looking to install future Marvel adventures. It’s pleasing to hear that a second series has been confirmed, most likely in time for the new season.

As well as this, Captain America star Hayley Atwell took to Twitter to confirm a 13 part Agent Carter series which, if successful, will likely be extended to 22. The expansion of 2013’s Agent Carter short film will likely explore the origins of SHIELD shortly after WW2. Hopping and dancing around MAOS and The Winter Soldier spoilers, we’d be surprised if the eagle eyed Carter doesn’t find something askew in the intelligence organisation. Although there’s been no word on this, it’d be awesome if the films’ stars Dominic Cooper (Howard Stark) and Toby Jones (Arnim Zola) reprised their roles to become series regulars.

Agent Carter – 2015 on ABC

Agents of SHIELD season 2 – this autumn on ABC

The Bourne Betrayal? – August 21st 2015

Transformers: Age of Extinction – July 10th

Lord and Miller rumoured for Ghostbusters 3, Andy Serkis reads Jungle Book and Patton Oswalt set for Agents of Shield

It was recently announced that Ivan Reitman would not be returning for the upcoming sequel Ghostbusters 3, although producers were determined that the project was still in place. This is perhaps because they had a new director, or directors, in mind. It’s rumoured that Phil Lord and Chris Miller will be rebooting a series that hasn’t seen a genuinely successful instalment since its 1984 beginning.

Lord and Miller are of coarse the brilliant minds behind The Lego Movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street. For potential stars, we reckon surviving G’busters (RIP Harold Ramis) Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd will have a small role, and I doubt appearances from the original’s Rick Moranis, Sigourney Weaver or Ernie Hudson but will most likely be handing the baton over to a new era of Slimer-fighters and (Stay Pufft) Mashmallowman-hunters. Altogether now: Who you gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!

There’s two adaptations of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book racing into production at the moment. Disney have gone as far as appointing Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Zathura, Elf) as director and Idris Elba (Pacific Rim, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, American Gangster) for the voice role of Shere Kahn while Warner Bros named Ron Howard (Rush, Apollo 13) atop of their list of potential shot-callers. The latter production has now stalked the jungle for their new director who’s none other than Andy Serkis. Serkis (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Return of the King’s Gollum, Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ Caeser and King Kong’s King Kong) is set to make his directing debut with The Jungle Book although his not alien to the job – he’s worked very closer with Oscar winning director Peter Jackson as second-unit director on The Hobbit films where he directed the Moria battle sequence.

Patton Oswalt has consistently proved himself as a comic talent in Young Adult, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and a brilliant cameo role in Brooklyn Nine-Nine (pictured) as well as having the lead in animation Ratatouille. He’s now attached to star in an upcoming episode of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, a show which had a rough beginning, took and extended Christmas break and then returned with (hopefully) better quality of writing to finish off and to bid for a second season greenlight. Others set to join the main cast of Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennett, Elizabeth Henstidge and Iain De Caestecker include Jaimie Alexander and Bill Paxton.

Oswalt had this to say: “I’m lucky that I’m visible enough that they wanted to bring me in to play this character. I’d worked with Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy, Angel and Firefly and director of Serenity and The Avengers)  before on Dollhouse, and I guess I wasn’t too annoying and they decided to put me on another one of his shows. So I was very lucky.”

Agents of SHIELD – continues on ABC and Channel 4

Ghostbusters 3 – 2016?

The Jungle Book – 2016?

Comic book special: Michael Douglas is Ant-Man, Bill Paxton for Agents of SHIELD and more rumours for Gotham

Today’s first story may confuse you with the initial title, as it did when I first saw it. Yes, Paul Rudd (Anchorman, Role Models, I Love You Man) will play Ant-Man but not Hank Pym, as we’d thought, in the upcoming Marvel superhero adaptation. As well as the confirmation of some script details, we now know Rudd will play Scott Lang while two time Oscar winner Michael Douglas (Wall Street, Falling Down, The Game, Basic Instinct, Behind the Candelabra) is to play the older Ant-Man who’s adventures were more the “Tales to Astonish” from the 1960s, similar to Captain America in the ’40s. Somewhere down the line, Ant-Man’s career took a turn for the worse and was forgotten, meaning there was no successful superhero until the arrival of Iron Man in 2008. In 2015, the film’s release and setting, Pym is now a weary, elderly scientist who hires friend and colleague Scott Lang to take up the mantle of Ant-Man. Edgar Wright (The World’s End, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs The World) directs while Joe Cornish (The Adventures of Tintin, Attack the Block) handles the script.

Gotham is a TV series to spin-off Batman, much like Agents of SHIELD did with The Avengers, and has seen some major developments in the last week. Comic-book writer and CSI producer/showrunner Danny Cannon will direct the pilot while Fox’s Kevin Reilly announced that the show will be populated by a younger Jim Gordon (previously portrayed by Gary Oldman) and Bruce Wayne (previously played by Christian Bale) as well as featuring origin stories for classic Batman villains.

“The show will arc Bruce Wayne,” Reilly elaborates, “from a child aged around 12 into the final episode of the series when he will put on the cape”. The aforementioned classic Batman villains are to be The Joker, The Penguin, The Riddler and Catwoman among many others. “We will see how they get to become who they are as Gotham is teetering on the edge.” It’s well established that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, starring Bale, Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cottilard, Heath Legder, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart, will not be associated with Gotham and I doubt they’ll convince Ben Affleck to come and play Batman on TV so a new cast will be in order. We can expect more details on cast and crew in February which is when Fox knuckles down with hiring writers.

We did mention Agents of SHIELD today and we’ve got some good news on that front. Marvel comic-book legend Stan Lee will make one of his sly cameos in an upcoming episode as well as another major guest star. Four time Golden Globe nominee Bill Paxton, of Big Love, Twister, Titanic, Aliens and Apollo 13 fame, will play a new character names Agent John Garrett, a SHIELD employee which followers of the comics will know of. Paxton joins series regulars Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Elizabeth Henstridge and Ian De Caestecker.

I’m not sure if the series needs a major star to increase either popularity or quality. What’s needed is more ethnic diversity in a series predominantly populated by white heroes and that seemingly abandons interesting characters, played by Ron Glass (Dr Streiton, you know, him from Firefly), J. August Richards (Mike Peterson, the Centipede Guy who was on Angle) and Pascale Armand (Akila Amador, the eye lady), who’d make better additions to the team than some of the existing characters. In America, Agents of SHIELD has already returned for the second half of the series after a Christmas break while, in the UK, Channel 4 won’t broadcast the remaining episodes until late February so that they con be broadcast consecutively, after many complaints about the show taking far too many weeks off the air due to the fairly unreliable American broadcasting rates.

Ant-Man – July 31st 2015

Gotham – 2015

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – USA: Tuesdays on ABC, UK: Thursdays on Channel 4 from late February

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot review

“What does SHIELD stand for, Agent Ward?”

“Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

“And what does that mean to you?”

“Someone really wanted our initials to spell SHIELD!”

This is our first TV review and we’re unlikely to do more than series openers and finales but there’s no better way to start our new category with Joss Whedon’s great new series. It’s already huge with this opening episode being the most watched American network show debut for four years. You may not want to read on in case you haven’t yet seen the excellent pilot episode.

SHIELD is a organisation dedicated to hiding the truth of superheroes, gods and aliens from the humans. One year on from a catastrophe called The Battle of New York, everyone knows of the powers that some possess. When single father Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) suddenly finds himself with incredible powers, SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) assigns a team, former violent field agent now reclusive pilot Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), Scottish engineering expert Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), English bio-chemistry nerd Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), tough-guy-and-definitely-not-a-people-person type Agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton) and Coulson himself, to go in search of the man to ensure that he stays good as well as to investigate hacker group The Rising Tide, led by the cocky, obsessive yet mysterious Skye (Chloe Bennet).

Everything about the show oozes awesomeness. Whedon’s signature slick humorous writing style shines throughout and, like all great Whedon projects, there’s a lovable team at the centre, be them Buffy’s band of high-school misfits (and that’s not just the students), Serenity’s quirky crew, the super-powered Avengers or the Agents of SHIELD.

We get more of the playful trickster in Coulson as he sets up a brilliantly funny sequence with Agent Ward and the truth drug. Dalton’s portrayal of Ward is one that makes the character more than the generic muscle of the team. The British scientific duo are certainly entertaining watch (“I’m not Hermione; I can’t just conger up a paralysis spell!) while Agent May could be an interesting character. Skye initially came off as a bit annoying but her potential mysteries are certainly a redeeming feature.

One of the main reasons I loved this episode was because of the sense that it really is set in the Marvel world. It’s not just the occasional reference to Romanoff (Black Widow) or the Director (Nick Fury) but the Super Soldier Serum from Captain America, the Gamma radiation from The Incredible Hulk and the Extremis from Iron Man 3 all come together as major plot points that are unveiled at the same rapid pace of the mystery. We’ve been told that this is Agent Maria Hill’s (Cobie Smulders) only appearance in the series but I hope that characters like Fury (Samuel L Jackson) or the Galaga man also have cameo appearances.

My only queries are that there’s no distinguishable theme tune and that there’s not really a strong link (other than the title) from this to the Marvel SHIELD comics. The latter can be fixed in future episodes that we hope can be more character focused with more terrifying villainous monsters. It would be nice to have the episode continuity established in Buffy series 2 rather than the Doctor Who/X-Files monster of the week kind of theme.

It’s not perfect but there’s a great cast, dozens of quotable lines and is something that’s going to have us glued to our screens for the next 13 weeks. Sharp, witty, great effects, an excellent plot and could be the next big thing for sci-fi TV for the next few years. It’s fun, riduculous, big budget popcorn television if such as thing exists

8/10