The Buzz: The Girl Who Played with Fire, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Marvel, and More!
Dan Koelsch
The Buzz is a feature in which we round up the Top 3 most-buzzed-about movie/TV stories of the week (in more-or-less chronological order). Why go through pages of blogs just to find out what everyone is talking about? We’ve got it all right here in The Buzz.
1) Daniel Craig Might Be Written Out of “Dragon Tattoo” Sequel
While The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo didn’t sweep the box office stateside, it’s international gross of $232 million was enough for Sony to begin working on a sequel to the 2011 thriller based on the “Millennium” series of crime novels. So, what’s the hold up in making The Girl Who Played with Fire? An article by The Hollywood Reporter claims that everything is in place to begin filming, but star Daniel Craig is holding out for a bigger paycheck. Craig played a major role in the first film, and his character is a key part to the entire series. According to the article, Craig is looking for a larger salary because of the $1 Billion success of Skyfall, but Sony is considering writing his character out of the sequel. This is obviously a worst-case scenario (negotiations have yet to even begin), but the blogs have lead with this part of the story, and based on comments I’ve seen, people aren’t happy with this sensationalist journalism.
2) “X-Men: Days of Future Past” News
This week saw few updates on X-Men: Days of Future Past, the sequel to X-Men: First Class. The biggest news by far is that Anna Paquin, Ellen Page and Shawn Ashmore will be reprising their roles of Rogue, Kitty Pryde, and Iceman, from the original X-Men series. The film is based on the comic arc of the same name that involved time travel, and we already knew Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan were returning, so it’s not surprising to see some more characters from the “future” (i.e. the present). We also found out that Director Bryan Singer had talked to James Cameron about time travel, which is pretty smart. Cameron directed the first two Terminator movies, which deal heavily in time travel. The last piece of news is about the film’s timeframe. First Class took place primarily in 1962, but according to a Canadian casting call, at least some of the sequel takes place in 1973. It seems odd they would fast forward over a decade and skip some great real-world story lines from the 60s.
3) Other Marvel News
There were two other big Marvel stories this week, starting with news on the Phase 3 of Marvel Studios’ Cinematic Universe. The Avengers ended Phase 1 of Disney’s continuity, and its sequel will conclude Phase 2, but what comes next? We found out at last year’s Comic-Con that Ant-Man was definitely being developed. This past week, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige confirmed to MTV that the film, which is scheduled to release on November 6th, 2015, will indeed be start Phase 3. Feige also confirmed that the studio was developing a Doctor Strange movie, which presumably would fall into Phase 3 as well. Moving to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, in a odd bit of news, Paul Giamatti is in talks to play the villain The Rhino. Giamatti is a great actor, but at 45 years old and overweight, he’s not exactly what people would have in mind for the superbuff character. Add in the fact that Rhino seems to be a difficult character to bring to the big screen, and we already have another villain in Electro, this movie is definitely getting dangerously close to Spider-Man 3.
