Here’s an interesting little tidbit. On the website StarNow, which includes information on actors and casting listings for major brands including Netflix and Disney, actress Vivian Tung includes a rather curious tidbit in her credits and experience. In her 2021 list, she highlights that she played a featured extra on the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder film. What stands out is that she’s listed as a Valkyrie. Tessa Thompson‘s Brunnhilde is the last known living member of the elite Asgardian warriors. So, this listing could hint at their return in the upcoming sequel.
There are many ways to bring back the Valkyries. Either we get to explore Brunnhilde’s past that was hinted at before they were killed by Hela, or she reestablished a new generation after taking over New Asgard. She was given the title to rule over the remnants that are living on Earth. So, it wouldn’t be too surprising that under her rule she’d empower young Asgardian women to start a new generation of warriors.
It’s great to dive deep into this part of the MCU’s mythos, as we only got a glimpse of it in Ragnarok. There’s also the fact that they may build upon the reestablishment of the Valkyries through the reintroduction of Jane Foster. In the comics, she ends up becoming a Valkyrie after giving up the mantle of Thor. Perhaps, there’s a future for Natalie Portman‘s character beyond the fourth entry in the franchise as she takes on a new persona. Of course, it’s still speculation and we’ll see what kind of role they might have once the film gets released next May.
It looks like the box office is truly recovering, as current estimates have No Time To Die set to surpass the recent record-breaker, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and potentially be the first film to pass $100M domestically in its opening weekend. The Venom sequel barely inched above the $90M mark, but this is a great sign for later-year releases. The latest James Bond flick managed to surpass international expectations.
Advanced ticket sales are currently on par with the latest major release. The film’s advertising pushed it as the Avengers: Endgame of the 007 franchise. It’ll end Daniel Craig‘s run as the character before someone else takes up the mantle, which was confirmed not to take place anytime before 2022. They utilized this “end of an era” tagline to push the film’s general marketing and it’s certainly paying off. At this point, it also bodes well for future films to do the same.
It’s been a rocky year, it wasn’t until Godzilla vs. Kong that we had some hope for recovery. Once the Delta variant reared its head, things looked a bit more depressing but cinema-only releases have been dominating the box office lately. Shang-Chi was that extra push as it far surpassed early predictions that were kept low due to the pandemic. It even continued to remain at the top spot for four weeks running. At this rate, it’s clear that the box office will continue to slowly rise in numbers. It doesn’t mean we’ll see 2019 numbers again next year, but it’ll certainly be inching closer.
Here’s a curious piece of news, as The Direct has exclusively shared the news that the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness film may feature the return of Ultron’s sentry bots in live-action. They do not go into detail if we’ll also see the return of the one controlling them, but it seems to potentially hint at a connection between the film and Disney+’s current What If…? series. They only state it’ll be from one of the universe’s Strange visits, but the natural connection would be with the recent reveal of an Infinity Stone-wielding Ultron who is taking on the Watcher.
The inclusion of Ultron Sentries could be a general short diversion. There’s a chance that the upcoming What If…? finale might tie into the upcoming film. So, it could further develop the franchise’s concept o the multiverse and also opens up the possibility that others appear. There was a rumor that Captain Carter and the corrupted version of Strange may appear in the sequel. So, more elements may manage to find a way into the upcoming film.
Of course, these are still rumors. The concept of the multiverse leaves almost any possible approach. We’ll see what the future has in store, especially if they continue building upon it. There’s a good possibility that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania may join in the multiversal fun. The arrival of Kang the Conqueror could lead to another multiversal war. As such, we might see a lot more of Ultron in the future.
Five Nights at Freddy’s was quite the popular game for a while. It currently is preparing for the upcoming PlayStation-exclusive game Security Breach but has been quite silent for some time. There have been some issues with creator Scott Cawthon, as he moved on from the franchise. Yet, he was still involved with the film adaptation. Sadly, it seems that there’s still no hope for it seeing the light of day, as director Chris Columbus has officially exited the project. The reasoning seems to be Cawthon not signing off on the film’s script.
In an interview with Collider, producer Jason Blum confirmed the director left the project, who has been attached since February 2018. He didn’t reveal if they may already have someone new attached to tackle the project, but he did offer some insight into the reasoning why it’s been taking so long to enter some form of production.
We’ve written multiple scripts, and we’ve got where we’re threading a needle, which is doing justice to Five Nights at Freddy’s and making Scott (Cawthon) happy. The only way that we would go about it is giving Scott … I don’t want to do something that Scott doesn’t like. Let me say that a different way. I don’t have the right to do anything Scott doesn’t like. Basically, Scott has kind of like the equivalent of ‘final cut’ and it’s taken longer than I hoped to get the right story.
Jason Blum
Cawthon is very productive of the property. So, it’s understandable he wants to make sure that everything is perfect when tackling the project. Yet, we know they went through ten scripts by this stage, as revealed by him back in November. Yet, he also said they’ll enter production in the spring of 2021 and already signed off on a script. So, something might’ve changed since and creative differences led to Columbus leaving.
It looks like Shang-Chi’s director, Destin Daniel Cretton, has already found his next project. According to Deadline, he will adapt the action-comedy American Born Chinese for Disney+. It’s an adaptation of the 2006 graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. He’ll also act as executive producer for 20th Television alongside Bob Burger‘s exec Kelvin Yu and Charles Yu, who will write the series.
Melvin Mar, Jake Kasdan, and Gene Luen Yang also will join the production as executive producers. Kelvin Yu will serve as its showrunner. They are currently preparing for casting. Disney Branded Television president, Ayo Davis, shared the following on the project:
We are delighted to continue our relationship with Melvin Mar and Jake Kasdan and thrilled that Destin Daniel Cretton is set to direct. The team are visionaries in bringing character-driven adventures to life, and we cannot wait for our audience to experience this fantastically memorable and imaginative adaptation of the graphic novel. This is a great universal story that moves between worlds and explores the impact of culture, identity, and acceptance through the lens of adolescence.
Ayo Davis
Mar and Kasdan might be familiar to fans of the Fresh Off the Boat ABC series. They’ve recently expanded with the Disney+ original Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. Their work on the only Asian-American series to pass 100 episodes is a cultural landmark, and it’s great to see them continue it with American Born Chinese. Cretton’s hot off his success with Shang-Chi and the Legends of Ten Rings, which seems likely to get a sequel in the future after its box office success. It’ll be interesting to see if he will tackle it after this series wraps production.
Of course, he famously moved away from the franchise after the turbulent production on Justice League after Zack Snyder left the project. We only got teases of his Batsuit from set photos, but never a direct sighting of Affleck. While silent on his exact role, Variety lucked ou stand got a chance to ask him how it was like working on the film. In the interview, he ended up also opening up about how it compares to his previous DC project.
[The Flash] was a really nice way to revisit that as the prior experience had been difficult. This was really lovely. Really fun… I had a great time… I love Ezra and I had a chance to see Jason [Momoa], who’s over there making ‘Aquaman [and the Lost Kingdom].
Ben Affleck
There’s been a lot of hope he can revisit his original Batman pitch before he ended up moving on from the project. While it’s exciting to see Matt Reeves bringing a gothic touch to the series, but there’s always curious about what Affleck‘s version would’ve looked like. A positive experience could interest him in giving it another chance. So, we’ll see if its success may kickstart a separate Batman franchise to exist alongside Reeve‘s adaptation.
The following article contains spoilers on the film’s plot, ending, andpost-credit sequence. If you still haven’t seen the film, only continue at your own risk.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Venom: Let There Be Carnage is its willingness to embrace the absurd. A symbiote makes pancakes, a man licks a spider, and a combination of the two bellows the film’s title before credits roll. It’s pure scripted chaos, mixed with appropriately goofy performances from stars Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson. This is why the film’s choice to not fully embrace its villain is so baffling.
Carnage has long been one of Marvel’s meanest rogues, and that doesn’t change here. The red symbiote is portrayed as giddily sadistic and all-out ill-willed as one would hope. Yet, something about the character feels less imposing than it should. The lack of R-rated violence, which some fans have wondered about since the announcement, is an easy first guess when it comes to pinpointing the problem. Yet, it’s not a loss for blood that throws Carnage out of whack. It’s something much deeper than that, in connection to the film’s central themes. It’s the relationship between Carnage and host buddy Cletus Kasady that truly serves to incapacitate the first live-action adaptation of Venom’s greatest adversary.
It feels ridiculous to say, but Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a relationship drama first and comic book action second. This is not an issue with the movie, which actually uses the love and bond between protagonists Eddie Brock and Venom to its advantage on many occasions. Unfortunately, where the story knows exactly how to play to Eddie and Venom’s strengths, it fails to understand what makes Cletus and Carnage so unique. Whereas the Venom symbiote has spent much of it’s existence bouncing from host to host, viewing itself as a separate entity from the bodies it inhabits, the Carnage symbiote was born to one man and one man alone. Unlike his father, Carnage has never been a “we” guy, and neither has Cletus.
While Carnage’s erratic fighting style and lust for death are a major part of what makes him dangerous, it’s his absolute unified bond with Cletus that truly makes him so terrifying. Their perfect relationship is the chainmail protecting an already pretty-dang-powerful set of armor. In an attempt to make their antagonist more susceptible to defeat, and perhaps even a little more relatable to audiences, the film stripped the character of his hallmark and turned “them” into an emotionally cruel couple. This works to a degree for the movie’s lovesick, abused version of serial killer Kasady, but it certainly weakens the screen presence of a character that should have been among Sony’s biggest bad guys.
The link between Cletus and Carnage could have been used as a dark foil for Eddie and Venom. A sickened, Terminator-esque peek into what a symbiote can do when left unchecked or even urged on, by its host. The Carnage symbiote’s parricidal feelings towards Venom are hinted at but left unexplored, despite the overwhelming potential of balancing that hateful association with the loving parallel Venom finds in Eddie. All of this is thrown to the wayside so that Cletus may have a love interest of his own, acting as a mirrored reflection of Eddie’s own relationships and an easy out for concluding character arcs in the third act.
It’s almost shameful that the film chooses to end Carnage’s story so soon after it begins, with both host and symbiote receiving an unceremonious death at the hands of their progenitor and rival. At the very least, Let There Be Carnage had the potential to serve as a functional origin story for Carnage, with his more threatening aspects set to be fleshed out in a later franchise installment. Nevertheless, the multiversal implications of the film’s post-credits scene offer hope at another shot with Carnage down the line. It’s possible that audiences will one day see the character in all his merciless glory, but until then, we’re left with a take on Carnage that feels like a decent impression at best.
The multiverse is an unwieldy storytelling device with potential positive and negative impacts. For example, meeting alternate variations of favorite characters has the potential to undermine earlier stories. However, it could also potentially provide emotional flourish to stories that haven’t been possible previously. Some fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s consistency are concerned about how the multiverse could fray the cohesion of the MCU. The multiversal elements of Loki and What If…? have shown us hints of how the multiverse stories we might be seeing in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness can be kept tight and concise.
Loki’s head writer Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron have both spoken in multipleinterviews about the themes of their series. Loki spends much of the season up against the bureaucratic order of the TVA. He also finds himself grappling with his identity in the face of Loki variants from alternative universes. Order versus chaos. Self versus selves. The structure of these debates brought up in the show also show another theme Waldron and Herron have spoken about, in the gray space between villainy and heroism. It’s clear that these themes are present even without confirmation from interviews because of how tightly woven into the narrative action they are.
On the surface, an anthology show like What If…? shouldn’t necessarily have a narrative or thematic coherence between episodes. Yet we have seen enough to know we are getting a conclusion to some of the previous episodes in the finale. In this context, should there be a thematic reverberation between the heroes of each episode? It’s not easy to point one out. Loki’s themes are much tighter as almost every scene has a thematic resonance. An anthology show doesn’t need coherent themes but where there is a continuing story, What If…? is perhaps missing something thematic to bring the season together.
So perhaps if Spider-Man: No Way Home can use the multiverse to weave themes tightly, it can produce an impactful story regardless of multiversal incursions. Much of the trailer is connected to Spidey’s identity as Peter Parker. The public release of that information and Peter’s going to Doctor Strange to have it erased from public consciousness. It’s clear that they “tampered with the stability of [the] space-time” continuum when performing the spell. The full impact remains to be seen but it is easy to see how themes of identity, responsibility, and fate can be tied to this spell gone wrong and possible multiversal variants. It remains to be seen how tightly woven those themes might be into the story.
So can we spot the themes for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as clearly and easily? Given Wanda Maximoff was last seen studying The Darkhold, also known as The Book of the Damned, it stands that she might face some corrupting forces. To some extent, this is a theme that can be extended from Doctor Strange as Kaecilius became corrupted by Dormammu. Corruption, alongside the fraying of the multiverse which Strange admits he knows “frighteningly little” in the No Way Home trailer, can also point in the direction of balance as a theme. How will Strange weigh up the dilemmas of the incursive multiverse? In a meta-sense, if the film can get that thematic balance right, then the rumoured cameos won’t seem as uncoordinated as some fans fear they might be.
Parenthood and family are themes that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania could manifest. With Kathryn Newton taking on the role as Cassie Lang it seems as though she might play more of a role with the heroes, with Scott, Hope, Janet, and Hank having to figure out parental decisions related to that. It’s not immediately obvious how Jonathan Majors’ Kang will connect to that, though being a citizen of the future, it’s possible an ancestor of his might be involved in the story. How they will connect the multiversal elements to the existing Ant-Man themes will be the test for how tight of a story we’ll be getting.
Beyond the second seasons of Loki and What If…? there are no major clues about what other Marvel Studios projects the multiverse incur upon. It will be interesting to see whether Loki can keep up its thematic resonance during its sophomore season. Similarly What If…? could either fully embrace the anthology format or increase the thematic and narrative continuity between the episodes. The multiverse certainly won’t be vanishing so other characters like Doctor Strange, Wanda Maximoff, and Ant-Man might still have to contend with it. Wherever it does emerge though, using the multiverse concisely and closely connected to the themes of the project seems like it will be a successful approach.
In an odd move for any film, in the weeks leading up to the release of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Sony put a lot of effort into marketing the movie’s post-credits scene specifically. Marvel movies are, of course, no strangers to including exciting material throughout a film’s credits, but generally, the movie itself is what studios advertise. While it may have been one of the worst-kept secrets around, the post-credits scene does have major implications for future Marvel projects. This article goes into detail on the Venom 2 post-credits scene (technically, it’s a mid-credits scene) and why it caused such a stir. As should be obvious, there are MAJOR SPOILERS below.
***SPOILER WARNING!***
After the events of Let There Be Carnage, Eddie and Venom are lying low and hiding out in some hotel room watching a soap opera. This leads Eddie to ask Venom if he’s been hiding stuff from him. Venom gets a bit ominous and suggests if he told him everything, it would blow his mind. “80 billion years of hive knowledge, across universes, would explode your tiny little brain.” He then offers to give Eddie a taste of “the smallest fraction of things” symbiotes have experienced.
Just as Venom starts to do this, something that can be best described as an almost earthquake-like happens. A bright light shines into the room and the entire place seems to phase in and out and alter itself in a dramatic, jarring fashion. Once it stops, the two are in a similar but differently-colored hotel room and with all new furniture. A man then steps out of the bathroom and asks Eddie why he’s in the man’s hotel room.
We see that both Venom and Eddie are completely confused. Venom then tells Eddie that “it wasn’t me.” The next part is where people go crazy. J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson, last seen in Spider-Man: Far From Home, reporting from his Daily Bugle show on the TV. It’s the same information we heard him give us before–Spider-Man is a murderer named Peter Parker. It’s not just any Peter Parker, though, and Tom Holland’s maskless Spider-Man is shown on screen. Venom gets close to the screen, says “this guy…,” and then licks the screen.
There’s obviously a lot that can be read into this scene. It creates countless questions with essentially no answers. What we do know, most likely, is that Eddie and Venom apparently found their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the MCU opened its own multiverse with Loki’s finale and is exploring it more in What If… ?, this is the first time that any Sony-owned character — that didn’t debut in the MCU itself alongside Holland’s Spider-Man — has been confirmed to exist within the MCU.
It’s also the first official live-action multiverse “jump” of the MCU, if that is indeed what happened. It certainly raises a lot of questions over the mechanics of multiversal travel considering how random, unintentional and yet relatively smooth it seemed. With Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how this squares with depictions of the multiverse in those films.
Marvel Studios and Sony deciding to, at least in part, cohabitate in the same universe may have a huge impact on the MCU going forward. If the door is open, Sony could bring more of its Spider-Man properties in–including Jared Leto’s Morbius, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven the Hunter, and Olivia Wilde’s Spider-Woman project. The Morbius teaser trailer that dropped in January 2020 include details suggesting it could potentially have tie-ins to the MCU.
But will we see Venom again in the MCU anytime soon? Venom: Let There Be Carnage director Andy Serkis thinks so. He recently said that Venom and Spider-Man would “of course” meet at some point. But he also hinted it might not be as soon as the post-credits scene would suggest:
Look, it depends when you want to get there, and also, what the appetite is. If people want more Venom stories, then, to jump straight to Spider-Man, you could be missing out on so many great supervillain characters in between now and then. So, in a way, by rushing to it, you might be closing the door.
Andy Serkis
The Venom 2 post-credits definitely sent fans into a spiral of excitement and speculation. It seems clear that Sony and Marvel Studios have the intention to play nice together in the near future. This, of course, is a big win for both studios. The Marvel Cinematic Multiverse gets to be a bit more comprehensive, and Spidey fans get to see his world expand. As to the potential, and likely, Venom and Spider-Man meet-and-greet, though, people might need to be a little patient.
All eyes have been on James Gunn, as he may have kickstarted a new era for DC. The Suicide Squad offered viewers an experience unlike previous entries, and it was only the beginning of his new tenure. While he’ll take a brief pitstop to finalize his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, he’s also already putting the finishing touches on the upcoming HBO Max Peacemaker series. In August, DC President Walter Hamada teased that they may have plans to continue working with the director, but there never was a confirmation he’s already developing something. At least there wasn’t until now.
In a discussion today on Twitter, Gunn chimed in and confirmed that he is working on another DC project in addition to Peacemaker. Of course, he doesn’t give away what project it is exactly, but it’s great to know that once he’s done with the Guardians threequel, he’ll likely jump on whatever project is currently in the pipeline. He’s no stranger to working on multiple projects and we’ll likely get a hint once he’s wrapped up with his next Marvel project.
There were rumors pointing to Idris Elba‘s Bloodsport potentially getting his own series, but the director shot that down rather quickly. He confirmed that it was in no state of development, which means he’s most likely working on something else. Of course, there’s a chance that Gunn is currently still preparing a pitch for his next DC project, as him working on it doesn’t mean it’s entered any form of pre-production. Whatever it may end up being, we’re definitely going to be in for a wild ride.
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