First up, Battleship. With the success of G.I. Joe and Transformers, Hasbro started looking for other properties they own that could be turned into movie, and they settled on the classic board game Battleship.
In the movie version, alien invaders fence off a giant section of the Pacific around Hawaii, as part of phase 1 of an invasion. Luckily, also trapped inside that force field is an American Nany fleet. Commanding this fleet is Gambit from X-Men Origins: Wolveriene, one of the sexy vampires from True Blood, Rihanna, and the wolf puncher himself, Liam Neeson.
Looking at the designs of the alien ships, and the sound design in this spot...dude, they are trying hard to make this look like Transformers 4.
Battleship hits theatres on May 18.
And speaking of Hasbro, next up we have G.I. Joe: Retaliation, aka G.I. Joe 2. In this second adventure, the Cobra-controlled President of the United States (yeah...that's how the first movie ended) orders the Joes terminated with extreme prejudice, and the remaining Joes band together to clear their names and stop Cobra. It's a largely new squad of Joes this time out, including DJ Catrona as Flint and Adriene Palaki as Lady Jaye, and their led by Dwayne Johnson as Roadblock. Bruce Willis also shows up as General Joseph Colton, the man who founded G.I. Joe.
Much like the first film and the first trailer, my inner child is going nuts for this. G.I. Joe: Retaliation hits theatres June 29.
We also have Disney's John Carter. Based on the legendary series of sci-fi novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, the Tarzan guy), this film is mostly based on the first novel in the series A Princess of Mars. It follows the adventures of John Carter, a hero of the American Civil War, who is somehow spirited it to Mars, and finds it to be a fantastical land at war, a war in which he is quickly drawn in.
Movie versions have long been attempted since the 1930s, but it has long been considered unfilmable because of the amazing creatures described, such as one Martian race, the Tharks, who are 10-feet tall with four arms and tusks. But, if there's anything that The Lord of the Rings and other films of the past 10 years have shown us, the unfilmable has quickly become filmable.
Our hero John Carter is played by...Gambit from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The guy has a name, I should start using it. It's Taylor Kitsch. Using the Avatar performance capture technology, Willem Dafore plays Tars Tarkas, the leader of the Tharks.
I've never read the books...hardly heard of them until I started reading about this film. I'm curious about it because the director is Andrew Stanton, the veteran Pixar animator who directed A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E. He's making his live-action debut with this.
John Carter hits theatres on March 9.
And lastly, the superhero film no one thought would ever happen. The Avengers. The Marvel Comics supergroup bands together to fight off the threats that no one hero can handle alone! Robert Downey Jr is back as Tony Stark/Iron Man, Chris Evans is back as Steve Rogers/Captain America, Chris Hemsworth is back as Thor, Jeremy Renner is back (he cameoed in Thor) as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, Scarlett Johanson is back as Natlie Romanov/The Black Widow, and Samuel L. Jackson is back as Nick Fury. New to the team is Mark Ruffalo, who takes over Edward Norton as Bruce Banner/the Hulk.
Fun trivia fact: Ruffalo is the first guy to fully play both Bruce Banner and the Hulk. In Ang Lee's Hulk, the Hulk was completely computer animated, with Lee doing some of the motion captures. For The Incredible Hulk, Norton provided the motion capture. But for The Avengers, they put Ruffalo in the full Avatar performance capture rig so he could fully play the Hulk.
Fan favourite Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly/Serenity) is the writer and director on this one.
It's looking really good...Cap's updated costume looks kind of cheezy to me, but I can live with it.
The Avengers hits theatres on May 4.
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