Marvel‘s Cinematic Universe is a big hit, yes? Judging by all the box office records broken by The Avengers, now only to be re-broken by Iron Man 3 with its $700 million+ earned so far, it’s safe to say there’s no franchise bigger or more profitable than Marvel’s. And at this point, you have to wonder how much of this franchise’s success is from love of these characters, or was it the performances of Roberty Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth that made Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor mega-stars?

By now, Marvel’s got themselves a reputation of tying actors into long contracts for little pay – obviously, we’re talking comparatively, whatever an actor makes can never really be called “little pay” – which works out great for Disney and Marvel when they’re looking to make at least two or three sequels. Evans’ is current signed into a six-picture deal, after renegotiating down from nine, and Mark Ruffalo is signed on for six, Avengers being his first. And what their paid is a pitiful fraction of their film’s earnings.

Not so for RDJ. He, smartly, had his agents renegotiate his contract after the first Iron Man which is what allowed him to take home over $50 million from The Avengers‘ haul. And he’s doing so again, because officially RDJ doesn’t have to put on the metal suit even if Tony Stark/Iron Man are an integral part of The Avengers 2. So the question is, how much will Marvel have to pony up to re-sign RDJ? And is that an option? I know, I know, it’s unimaginable to think they’d ever recast Tony Stark but if a company believes they can make a good enough product for cheaper, they will. Let us not forget, as Screen Rant rightly reminds us, Terrance Howard was the highest paid actor in Iron Man and look how quickly they recast him once he asked for more money.

Now, yes, Howard is no RDJ, but what of his Avengers‘ co-stars? How will they fare in their contract negotiations? Deadline is reporting they are rallying behind RDJ, who with his success both at the box office and in negotiations, has become something of a leader.

He’s the only guy with real power in this situation. and balls of steel, too. He’s already sent a message that he’s not going to work for a place where they treat his colleagues like shit.

What if RDJ holds off on resigning in order for his fellow Avengers to get better deals? Will Marvel play that game, or will they simply recast and possibly downsize his role? Honestly, I think it’s tough to tell what they’ll do, but I, like many of you, can’t see anyone besides RDJ in the role. And I’d figure Marvel and Disney will be checking these box office figures, collected again by Screen Rant, showing the gross of the Marvel films with and without RDJ,

With.
$585 million - Iron Man
$624 million – Iron Man 2
$1,512 million – The Avengers
$711 million – Iron Man 3 (in less than two weeks)
Without.
$263 million – The Incredible Hulk
$369 million – Captain America: The First Avengers
$449 million – Thor

Soo, where do you think this leaves us? Can Marvel re-assemble The Avengers?

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For those unfamiliar with Science Bros., it’s one of those Internet things, created by fans of the science tag-team that is Tony Stark and Bruce Banner.  Naturally, since Robert Downey, Jr. and Mark Ruffalo played those iconic characters in the films, they’ve ended up as the staple faces of said Science Bros. phenomenon.  This fan-love graces the digital airwaves in many forms, from depicting the pair as science-wielding bad-asses to…er, showing some more intimate moments between the two (mainly with each other).  Apparently, Mark Ruffalo knew nothing about the trend and was asked about it in an interview with vulture.com.  Check out the actor’s rather amused response below.

As quoted from vulture.com, Ruffalo’s response was as follows:

“Are you joking?” he asked as he began scrolling through the images. “There’s all this art of me and Robert?” Giggles gave way to full belly laughter. A concerned publicist came over, though Ruffalo was laughing so hard that he could barely explain himself to her.

“Is that a cartoon of you?” she asked.

“Yes! It’s me and Robert! Look at this! There’s thousands of them!” Ruffalo tried to contain himself. “It’s called the Science Bros. This is awesome. I’ve never heard of it. Why hasn’t anyone told me about that?”

So, what was Ruffalo’s final judgment?

Yeah! I love it; it’s awesome. I endorse it 100 percent. You know what it is? It’s open-source creativity. I’m going to call him [Robert Downey, Jr.] and tell him, and he’s going to laugh his ass off. He’ll love that.

Well, it’s always nice to know that the actors portraying our super hero favorites have a sense of humor.  Hopefully we’ll get to see more of Ruffalo as The Hulk in the near future.  And hopefully the Science Bros. trend can avoid any homoerotic pairing between Stark and Banner in his big green form.  I mean, ouch.

Thanks to vulture for the interview.

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The Marvel movies have made it more rewarding to sit through their lengthy credits with the post-credits scene. First seen at the very end of Iron Man, the short sequence between Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) was the beginning of what would become known as Phase 1, the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the first step towards The Avengers. In that film they changed things up even a little more by including a mid-credits scene in addition to the now infamous, post-credit Shawarma scene.

Iron Man 3 continues this tradition and since the film has already held a premiere in Paris there are those – like the attendee who gave this description to Latino-Review - who are willing to share just what the new post-credits sequence is. Want to know? Hit the jump for their description. Obvious SPOILER warning, is obvious.

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The Internet is a hot bed of rumors and wishful hopes for Marvel fan-boys and girls and the latest round of Hulk movie rumors are a fine example. Ever since Mark Ruffalo‘s fantastic version of the Hulk (Along with the terrific special effects of ILM) hit the big screen in Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers, Hulk fans have been hoping for a stand alone Hulk movie that would make the hero shine.

Planet Hulk and World War Hulk are recent Hulk stories that fans would love to see on the big screen and I include myself in that group of Hulk fanatics. El Mayimbe of The Latino Review reported that there was a Hulk movie in the mix, but soon Whedon and now Ruffalo both have pretty much squashed that rumor.

Ruffalo took on the rumors when asked on Twitter late last night.

So we’ve got the Director and the lead actor both shooting down rumors of a stand alone Hulk movie. It is interesting that both Whedon and Ruffalo’s denials are for a stand alone Hulk movie before Avengers 2. Which makes sense and yet it still allows room for a Hulk movie in Phase three. El Mayimbe did day that the Hulk movie would take place after Avengers 2 when the threat of the Hulk is too much to allow him to remain on Earth.

What do you think? Do these two denials mean it won’t happen?

Via: /Film

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Everyone loved Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk in The Avengers right? So why can’ t The Hulk seem to work in a film of his own?

Well, Avengers director Joss Whedon has some thoughts about that at a recent Q&A. And via Geek Chocolate, here’s what he said about whether or not it’s possible to make a good Hulk movie:

“Yes. But it would be very, very hard. Hulk is a tricky son of a bitch. He’s the Claudio of superheroes. Because the problem is it’s a very popular character, but it’s not a superhero. Half of it’s a superhero, half of it’s a werewolf. And you can’t structure it like a superhero movie, you can’t light it like a superhero movie. How do you develop that? It would be extremely difficult. The one thing you would have in your favor would be Mark Ruffalo. But right now I don’t know if they have plans to do that or not, because he works so well as part of a greater whole, but by himself, it’s tough. I don’t envy the guys who went before.”

Whedon forgot to mention that any Hulk movie is also part-Fugitive, so that’s at least three different genres you have to mesh together into order to create a decent Hulk flick. I think The Incredible Hulk came pretty close to getting that mixture right, but it wasn’t perfect.

What do you Bastards think? Did Whedon nail it on the head, or is he way off?

Source: Blastr

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The Avengers may have been the biggest movie of 2012 at the box office, but when it came to Oscar love it got a total of one nomination for Best Visual Effects. Now giving The Avengers recognition in this category is a bit like saying apple pie is the best tasting apple-flavored dessert, but for a consolation prize, the Oscars are giving what fans really want: a reunion of the Avengers themselves.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this morning that several, though sadly not all, of the main Avengers cast will take part in an awards presentation at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony on February 24. Sadly, it seems as though Black Widow and Thor – or at least their portrayers Scarlett Johansson and Chris Hemsworth – are unavailable, but this is honestly the closest thing we’ll get to a sequel till 2015.

The Avengers men. In formal wear. Handing out awards. To other people. I can picture it now.

Here’s the press release from the AMPAS:

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – “Marvel’s The Avengers” cast mates Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo will present together on the Oscar stage, show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron announced today.

“We are happy to re-unite the ‘Avengers’ cast to present on our show,” said Craig Zadan and Neil Meron. “Audiences who enjoyed the year’s biggest box office hit will be excited to see these terrific actors back together again.”

Downey has twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his leading role in “Chaplin” (1992) and for his supporting role in “Tropic Thunder” (2008).

Evans, who will be making his first Oscar show appearance, will be seen in the upcoming “The Iceman.”

Jackson was nominated in 1994 for his supporting role in “Pulp Fiction.” He can also be seen in this year’s Best Picture nominee “Django Unchained.”

Renner was nominated for his leading role in 2009 Best Picture winner “The Hurt Locker” and for his supporting role in “The Town” (2010). Renner had roles in this year’s “The Bourne Legacy” and “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” (2011).

Ruffalo received his first nomination for his supporting role in 2010 Best Picture nominee “The Kids Are All Right.”

Oscars® for outstanding film achievements of 2012 will be presented on Oscar Sunday, February 24, at the Dolby Theatre™ at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and will be hosted by Seth MacFarlane live on the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.

Source: Coming Soon

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In what’s either going to be extremely awesome, or extremely disappointing news depending on whether or not it’s true, El Mayimbe at Latino Review has dropped a very interesting piece of scoopage.

First, a preamble. You may have noticed that the Hulk has been mysteriously absent from the development slate of Marvel Phase II. True, Guillermo Del Toro and David Eicke were developing a live-action TV series based on the Hulk, but del Toro himself has confirmed that those plans more or less ground to a halt a year ago. It’s also true that Mark Ruffalo, who played the character to some acclaim in The Avengers, is signed on for five more Marvel films under his contract, and doesn’t it seem rather unlikely that Marvel would keep Ruffalo in the back pocket until Avengers 2 in 2015?

So could Marvel be planning something big in Hulk’s future? More than another solo film, but an event that ties together all the characters introduced and not yet introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What possible, Hulk-centric story could possibly do that?

If you said Planet Hulk, then you get the prize.

In the comics, Planet Hulk is a storyline where in a group of the world’s most powerful heroes called The Illuminati – which is made up of Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Black Bolt, Professor X, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and Doctor Strange – send the Hulk into space after one too many rampages. Hulk crash lands on the planet Sakaar, where after leading a rebellion against the tyrants that rule the planet, the Hulk finally manages to find peace, even taking a mate. But when the ship that carried him to Sakaar explodes, and kills his pregnant wife and many of the planet’s inhabitants, the Hulk leads his army home to get revenge on the heroes that sent him to space in the first place in the storyline World War Hulk.

So how could this breakdown in movie form? Mayimbe reveals that Avengers 2 will feature a Hulk gone wild, and the end result will be a decision by multiple power players in the MCU deciding to cast the Hulk out into space. This would lead to a solo Planet Hulk movie to be released sometime between Avengers 2 and Avengers 3, which would then be followed by a full-on World War Hulk that would make up the storyline in Avengers 3.

Impressed yet? That would be a bold decision on the part of Marvel to pursue this plan. It would definitely require a degree of inter-connectivity rarely seen across franchises, even more than Marvel’s dipped their toe in thus far. But given Ruffalo’s popularity as Bruce Banner/the Hulk, and the characterization by Joss Whedon in The Avengers, Marvel would have to be crazy not to want to capitalize on that. And doing Planet Hulk would give a lot of meat for an actor like Ruffalo to chew on while doing something completely different than watching Bruce Banner on the run from Thunderbolt Ross for another 90 minutes.

Phase II kicks off later this year with Iron Man 3, and continues on through Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers 2. Phase III will feature Ant Man and rumored projects like Doctor Strange, Black Panther and more. The Avengers 2 is scheduled for release on May 1, 2015.

More news as it develops.

Source: Collider

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So yeah, I know (nearly) everyone out there hated the 2003 movie version of Hulk directed by Ang Lee. I didn’t, but it’s more or less universally-acclaimed that it was terrible. Regardless, Ang Lee broached the subject recently in an interview with Vulture about his latest movie, Life of Pi.

The ambitious project, based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, involves a lot of visual effects work and CG, especially considering that the main characters include a tiger, a zebra, a hyena and an orangutan. According to Lee, his work on Hulk gave him the ground work and practical experience he need to make Pi. He also talked about his reaction to Mark Ruffalo‘s Hulk performance in this past summer’s The Avengers, as well as a, uh, reconsideration of the work he did with the character almost 10 years ago.

I learned quite a bit about CG from The Hulk, and I wouldn’t have been able to do Life of Pi without that. But it’s easier to create an animal, because there exists a good reference — so a tiger or a hyena is easier than a 2,000-pound rage monster. The hardest thing to do is the weight, not the skin, because there’s no reference for something that size that is agile. And the technology’s improved, so you can have more details with Mark’s Hulk. My problem is that I took the whole thing too seriously. I should have had more fun with it, instead of all the psychodrama! [Laughs.]

So there! Let’s let bygones be bygones now that Ang Lee’s admitted that he dropped the ball on Hulk. You can now go back to your Michael Bay bashing, which is undoubtedly already in progress.

Source: Comic Book Movie

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Comic book and movie fans love the most recent version of Marvel‘s big green gamma powered machine, the Hulk, but it’s had an abysmal movie run in its past. Ang Lee’s Hulk was embarrassingly terrible while Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk delivered a bit more – thanks in part to Edward Norton, but Marvel Studios and Universal Pictures were both unimpressed with their final box office totals.

Now that we live in a post-Avengers world, we’ve seen what a proper Hulk can act and look like thanks to Joss Whedon, Mark Ruffalo and the many hours of work the wizards in the visual effects business did. With such praise about every aspect of the character’s execution, the Hulk series that ABC and Guillermo del Toro have been “developing” for ages should be a breeze to get going, right?

The movie and television site Screen Rant spoke with Industrial Light and Magic’s Jeff White, one of the Visual Effects Supervisors for The Avengers, and discussed the challenges Guillermo will most likely face for a series based around a different/younger Hulk and Bruce Banner:

“I think we’d have to have a lot of Banner. You know I think from beginning to end we got much faster at doing shots. We learned a lot about the process and about how to light him and how to make him look good. One of the things that was interesting was when we started off we kind of took our typical approach of really art directing the lighting, like rim, rim, rim, you know super stylized. And he really looked fake and kind of popped out. And what we found is that we ended up having to kind of flatten out his lighting to get him to sit in there with the rest of the Avengers. So I think after learning things like that, you know we could – if you’re talking about a TV schedule and how fast you need to turn around production, it would be a matter of, you know trying to build off everything we did for the movie and then, you know get him in there, get him lit. You wouldn’t have time to do the – you know all the really detailed shape, you know per frame corrections that we do.”

Since the Avengers’ Hulk is one of the most sophisticated visual effects of the entire movie, with CGI and motion capture used in a majority of Ruffalo‘s scenes as Hulk, fans are going to expect the same kind of treatment on television. Seeing another actor get painted green and appear once or twice an episode just doesn’t quite cut it anymore, so what kind of quality can we expect?

“I think that would be one of the big challenges. How do you turn that much animation around and still have it be believable? Because there is like animation, then simulation then, you know sort of hand correction after that. And I think where we found the biggest time suck ends up being is all the facial work, getting the eyes to look right and then how much that changes once you start lighting him.”

It all come down to the body type, as The Avengers Hulk was designed specifically for Ruffalo’s body and facial features. Sure, Marvel has the access and knowledge to use the current modeling of the Hulk on TV, but unless Ruffalo signs onto the series (which is highly unlikely) the current character models, motions and emotions are effectively useless. And even with these issues are somehow miraculously sorted out, the main issue is going to be the quality of the character.

White does mention that the TV effects team could possibly “youngify” the Hulk model, saving both the shows budget and visual effects time, but the character would still have to be based on an entirely different actor.

“[Even if you could youngify him], it would still be a challenge because you’d really have to put some thought and design work into it. For us, some of the hardest shots were not Hulk or Banner but what does he look like when he’s half-way there because on one you have a reference of a real guy and on the other you have all this artwork and then half-way in between there’s this weird amalgamation of how much brow and how much cheek and what do his eyes look like. For us, those were some of the more difficult shots was figuring out the half-way in between. Especially because Joss didn’t just want the transformations to be like either a slider or a guy who is a balloon. So that ended up being quite difficult.”

There’s no doubt that should this project go forward, which many of us are hoping, the visual effects team is going to having a taxing amount of work ahead of them. Unless these problems are addressed first and foremost, the conflict between great visuals and what’s practical will always be present.

And seeing as ABC is also currently working with Marvel on the S.H.I.E.L.D. television series, everyone is going to want to stay on their “A” game - that is, if they want another Hulk film once Avengers 2 hits theaters May 1st, 2015.

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Want to see Captain America struggle with a parachute? Ever wonder what it would have been like had Alan Rickman played Loki? Ladies and Gentlemen, here is the 4 minute gag reel from the Avengers and damn it is actually funny. No only are we treated to the likes of Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, and Mark Ruffalo being hilarious. We also see Cobie Smulders being really freakin hilarious. PLUS more Hawkeye/Jeremy Renner screen time than the actual film!

Enjoy:

Via /Film

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