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
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