It was only a question of time but it’s insane that it only took a day before the news hit that former Disney CEO Bob Chapek‘s internal executive structure is already falling apart. As it seems, the head of media and entertainment distribution, Kareem Daniel, is set to leave the company as well with former CEO Bob Iger returning. It was a strong move away from Iger’s creative-focused era that has left the company with a few scars in its wake, especially souring the views on its streaming ambitions with Disney+. Iger always was the kind of leader that used data but didn’t overly rely on it to muddle creative ambitions; the issue the current leadership fell into, especially with dramas surrounding Black Widow‘s release.
In a world and business that is awash with data, it is tempting to use data to answer all of our questions, including creative questions. I urge all of you not to do that.
Bob Iger
Daniel and Chapek’s goals were quite ambitious and they aimed to grow Disney+ as fast as possible with investment, but it seemingly led to many sparks internally, especially with the issue of return on investment being left behind in those ambitions. Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu stand at a proud 235M combined subscriber base making it quite competitive with Netflix and shouldn’t be ignored, but the concern that the $1.5B investment can’t be recouped by the time it was meant to be is definitely one of the reasons for this massive executive switch. Still, with Daniel‘s exit, we can expect some major changes in Disney+’s streaming strategy and structure moving forward.
Disney has been under constant fire for some time with a lot of uncertainty about where exactly the company is truly trying to head. Bob Chapek took over at a rather rough time, as streaming was still a booming market, and then suddenly the pandemic happened. No matter where one lies in regard to streaming’s future, Disney was all in long before Chapek took over and Bob Iger was still leading.
in a shocking twist though, it seems that Iger is back in business. While having left the position behind, the iconic manager has once again decided to return to the position. Chapek is set to leave the company with the Disney board of directors has announced it on a Sunday night, a very uncommon move in the industry.
We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period.
Susan Arnold, Chairman of the Board
What makes this announcement bizarre is that Chapek already signed a multi-year contract. So, he’ll definitely be leaving with a nice package as he leaves the role behind. Iger has already sent out an e-mail to employees and going by online reactions, there’s a certain excitement in the air.
It should be noted that Iger’s new contract is only set for two years, as he prepares for a true successor; a highlight of why this decision was made. The controversies surrounding their digital expansion have definitely left a sour taste with the market’s boom, especially when Netflix hit a sudden ceiling; though has seen some more positive developments as of late.
The issue on top of it all is also the controversy surrounding Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which was a PR nightmare for the company and ended up souring its relationship with many. Add in some harsh quarter developments with heavy investments and not hitting profitability targets, and the board definitely has been concerned and took immediate action to correct the course, or rather find the man to steer a “complex period of industry transformation.”
Jonathan Majors‘ memorable performance as He Who Remains in the Season One finale of Loki was a titillating taste of the type of talent the ascending actor brings to the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though He Who Remains met his end at the hands of Sylvie, Majors isn’t done with the MCU. As teased in Loki, there are many Variants of Nathaniel Richards in the Multiverse, including “something worse” than He Who Remains.
It looks like “something worse” will come in the form of Kang the Conqueror in next February’s Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Both Majors and director Peyton Reed have described Kang the Conqueror as a warrior who looks poised to be a threat not only to Scott, Hope, Cassie, Janet and Hank in the Quantum Realm but also to Earth and its other heroes. The first look at the film makes it clear that this Variant of the character is nothing like his quirky doppelganger from Loki and according to Majors, the ability to create different versions of the character is exactly what drew him to the role.
In an interview with THR, Majors was asked if the opportunity to never play the same Kang twice was what ultimately sold him on taking the role:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s what’s on the page. That’s what the IP says. I was cool, very cool. Kang just lives in his own world in the MCU. No spoilers here, but there’s so many variants of him.
Jonathan Majors
Expanding on the thought, Majors pointed out that Marvel Studios’ “brain trust” is working hard behind the scenes to make the most out of one of Marvel Comics’ most fascinating villains.
And with the powers that are the MCU, that intelligentsia and that brain trust there, they’re just really working to use the IP to its best ability, and it’s extremely humbling that they picked me to step into that. So I’m honored to do it, and I’m always excited to see what we’re doing…Kang is a career in itself. It’s either the cake itself or the cherry on top, I don’t know. But to play multiple versions, it’s just beautiful. It’s a workshop every day.
Jonathan Majors
Given Majors’ versatile talents, it’s easy to see why Marvel Studios went after him for the role and it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to imagine anyone else in the role.
De-aging technology has become quite the rage nowadays, especially with the work that Marvel Studios has invested to make actors seemingly play their younger selves. It doesn’t always work out, such as how Martin Scorcese‘s The Irishman featured some impressive technology, but given the actor’s age, one could tell something wasn’t right when they started trying to beat each other up. Still, it’s a fun tech innovation that has found its home in IP franchises, and it seems Indiana Jones 5 will do the same.
I wanted the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George-and-Steven old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast.
James Mangold
He also highlights that they use the opening set piece of a castle swarming with Nazis that pays tribute to the franchise’s early beginnings, especially in how it also helps guide audiences into the 60s setting of the fifth entry.
So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ‘40s and ‘60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days… and then the beginning of now.
James mangold
It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how they pull it off and how it’ll tie into the overarching narrative. Whatever Indy is up to might end up inspiring the events that tie into the space race storyline we’ll see later in the film, but we can only speculate for now. Still, it’ll be a blast to see a younger Indiana Jones once again, even if it’s digital.
We’ve already had quite a few reveals that some familiar faces will arrive in John Wick‘s first spinoff titled Ballerina. It’ll further expand the world filled with assassins that Keanu Reeves‘ first introduced us to back in 2014, which would eventually grow into a major franchise that stands out from the rest. Production is already underway on the spinoff with Ana de Armas set to take on the title role. Now, one more familiar cast member is set to return from the main series.
The Len Wiseman-directed film will see the return of Anjelica Huston in the role of The Director, who is the head of the Ruska Roma crime organization. She was introduced to us in John Wick 3 – Parabellum and it’s unclear just how big a role she’ll have in this expansion. There is likely a deeper connection between her and the unnamed main character of this spinoff, especially with her focus on teaching dancers to embrace their killer side. That is highlighted by her being the inspiration for the spinoff, to begin with.
The idea of Ballerina was formed around the scenes with Anjelica in John Wick 3. Anjelica Huston is an icon and is nothing less than Hollywood royalty. The world of Wick is always made richer by her commanding screen presence.
Erica Lee
While franchise building is all the rage at the moment, John Wick is in a unique position to make use of its rather simple but creative take on world-building. So, we’ll see if Ballerina manages to become a success and potentially even pulls in more interest to further explore other veterans that made this world their own.
Over the past several months, Marvel Studios Blade has perseverated through some turmoil. The project, which was announced at SDCC ’19, had to undergo a search to replace both its writer and director following the departure of Stacy Osei-Kuffour and Bassam Tariq. Beau DeMayo, who worked on Moon Knight and is the head writer and executive producer of the animated X-Men ’97 came on board to work on what looks like a near-complete rewrite of the script and now the film has found a new director.
According to THR, Lovecraft Country director Yann Demange has signed on to direct the project. Additionally, writer Michael Starrbury has joined the production and is preparing a brand new script for the film. THR also reports that despite the complete overhaul to the project, it is still expected to go into production in 2023 and meet its currently slated release date of September 6th, 2024.
While a complete rewrite of the script doesn’t mean throwing the bathwater out with the baby, THR indicated that the expectation is that Blade will be “dark and gritty in tone, falling on the edgier side of Marvel fare and maybe even find common shading” with the 1998 Wesley Snipes‘ film.
Guardians of the Galaxy have become quite the household name in the industry. No one would’ve believed that the wacky group of space pirates would end up among Marvel Studios’ most famous IPs. Still, director James Gunn made it possible and is now ready to prepare for his third, and probably final entry in the franchise.
While the comics included a wide variety of members throughout the years, Gunn always stuck to a smaller group throughout the films. Naturally, many wondered where some fan-favorites are, especially the character of Nova and the reasoning turns out to be quite simple as revealed in an interview with ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero.
There were a billion versions of Guardians before I came aboard… Yes, I guess maybe some script had Richard Rider in it, but like, there’s a lot of different versions. Yeah, I was never gonna– I never had Richard Rider in anything. He’s just too big of a character and he seemed too… From the beginning, when I came on board Guardians, I didn’t wanna have two human beings. I wanted to have one human being so that he could be surrounded in this world of aliens and then we realize little by little that all of these characters are the only of their kind. They’re the only human beings to them, you know?
James Gunn
The idea of Peter Quill being the only human definitely was the appeal for this story, even if some aliens just looked like normal humans, especially in the Nova Corp. Still, Nova is significant character from the comics that has a lot of history to explore, which might detract from Star-Lord’s fish out of water storyline early on. So, it would be a shame if Nova’s story ended up overshadowing the main focus of the franchise. Luckily, the is already rumored to get his own Disney+ spinoff at some point.
When Jonathan Majors was first announced to be portraying the villainous Kang in Ant-Manand The Wasp: Quantumania, it was revealed that his deal with Marvel Studios set the actor up for several appearances over the course of multiple projects. By the time Majors appeared as He Who Remains in the season finale of the first season of Loki, it started to become clear just how big of a factor Majors was set to be in what ultimately became known as the Multiverse Saga. The aloof He Who Remains, as it turns out, was just one of an infinite number of versions of Kang and, as he said himself, definitely not the worst one. Majors teased that He Who Remains was just one of “many iterations” of Kang that he’d be playing during his tenure in the MCU and now Ant-Man franchise director Peyton Reed has chimed in on which version audiences will see in Quantumania.
“Kang The Conqueror in our movie is a very different character,” from Majors’ He Who Remains, teased Reed in an interview with Empire. “He’s someone who has dominion over time, and he’s a warrior and a strategist,” added Reed, whose description is in lockstep with how Majors has previously described this version of the character. Reed finished the thought by describing this version as, “an all-timer antagonist“, giving fans of the comics (and probably Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heros) a pretty good idea of what to expect.
The third installment in the Ant-Man franchise has always been destined to break the mold of the first two films, which were small, palate-cleansing features that followed Avengers films into theaters. According to Reed, Quantumania “has a profound affect on the MCU” and teases a connection between it and 2025’s Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, both of which are written by Marvel Comics and Rick and Morty writer Jeff Loveness. “There’s been a lot of discussion about the impact that this appearance of Kang The Conqueror makes,” said Reed, adding “there are big things in store.”
But what about Lang and his Ant-Family? Do they stand a chance against someone like Kang. Reed didn’t give anything away, but does make it clear that Lang is definitely the underdog. “That’s interesting to me: to take the tiniest, and in some people’s minds weakest, Avenger, and put them up against this absolute force of nature.”
Audiences dont’ have to wait too long to find out exactly what happens as Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters in February.
Captain America: Civil War was one of Marvel Studios’ most jam-packed films. Not only did it pay off on the long-gestating hostilities between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, but it also introduced two major new heroes in Black Panther and Spider-Man AND set the stage for both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. A big film, to be sure, and as Marvel Studios Executive Producer and Parliament member Nate Moore revealed it was a major step up from the original pitch for the threequel.
In an interview with Matthew Belloni, Moore let slip that the original pitch for the film revolved around a story arc from the 1970s that was written by Marvel Comics’ legend Jack Kirby: the Madbomb!
So we were developing Captain America 3 and we were [doing] really good. Winter Soldier worked, people were back in, they’re interested, and we were talking about a movie, and we knew we had to resolve, obviously, the Winter Soldier storyline. We wanted Cap and Bucky to ultimately reunite. And the plot that we… And we knew we wanted to use Zemo. What a great character. You know, he’s obviously a classic Cap villain. And we were building the movie around a MacGuffin around the Madbomb, which, the Madbomb goes off and causes normal people to start fighting each other. It’s honestly a little similar to what I think they did in Kingsman.
Nate Moore
Moore’s comments give some insight into the creative process at Marvel Studios. Regardless of what the plot was, Cap 3 was seemingly always going to include Zemo and the reunion of Steve and Bucky. Moore and his team were high on the possibilities of the story, but unfortunately for them, Kevin Feige was not. According to Moore, the Madbomb simply was “not a big enough idea” for Marvel Studios The One-Above-All. But Moore wanted to prove him wrong.
And it was cool, and it was grounded, and it was political, and whatever, and [Feige] was like, ‘That’s not a big enough idea, guys.’ And we’re like, ‘Let us write a draft, we’ll prove it to you.’
Nate Moore
Moore mentioned that Feige responded by saying, “Okay, prove it to me” and so they set to work on adapting Kirby’s Madbomb arc for the big screen. Moore continued the story and described the genesis of the jump from Madbomb to Civil War.
As we’re getting done with it… he pulls me into his office and he said, ‘You know, I think we should try to do Civil War.’ And I was like, ‘Kevin, we don’t have half the stuff that’s in Civil War. We don’t have the New Warriors, we don’t have… Here’s all the reasons why we can’t do it.’ And he’s like, ‘Go home, read it, let’s talk about it.’ So I went home that night, read it… I re-read it, ’cause I had read it before and I was like, ‘Yeah, look we don’t have the Negative Zone prison…’ There were so many things that we didn’t have.
Nate Moore
Shortly after that, as Moore tells it, Feige approached Joe and Anthony Russo along with co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and gave them their marching orders saying, “So, stop with the Madbomb, you guys are doing Civil War.” Moore and the team were then faced with throwing out a great deal of work and having to start over. According to the executive producer, it was a scary time, but as we all know now, Feige was right.
Look, It was scary and when you’re throwing out a whole thing and starting new, it’s always a bit weird, but he was right. He was right. We were still able to pay off the Bucky storyline. We still figured out how to use Zemo. But the central conceit of the movie was something that audiences would gravitate towards and they did.
Nate Moore
It’s well-known that Marvel Studios will often use discarded storylines in other projects and the Madbomb idea may at one time have been part of the plot of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. A common rumor ahead of production on the project was that the series, which filmed under Pandemic Productions LLC, was going to feature a terrorist bioweapon that could have been similar to the Madbomb. As a real-life pandemic beset the world, rumors swirled that the pandemic plot was rewritten, though director Kari Skogland debunked the rumors that the plot was ever in the script. Whatever the case with The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, the Madbomb arc remains open to adaptation down the road in the MCU whether as part of a streaming series or as the first act in another Cap film.
We live in a world where many actors have made their respective roles very much a reflection of themselves. Many can’t look at Iron Man and not think of Robert Downey Jr. or even recently Iman Vellani truly personifying Ms. Marvel in live-action. The same could be said about Ryan Reynolds, who was long the fan-favorite to play the Merc with a Mouth, Deadpool, even before he took on the role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine back in 2009.
Yet, it seems that he wasn’t always set to take on the role, as Supernatural and The Boys star Jensen Ackles revealed during an appearance at SPN PHX J2, he was originally cast to play the character before scheduling conflicts got in the way. It’s crazy to think that we may have had a very different version of the character.
There was definitely a movie that I was very much in talks about… I wasn’t available, so the train just kind of stopped there. But, had I been available, I would’ve had to, you know, jump through the studio hoops and jump through the, you know, producer hoops and stuff. But I had a really good shot, and it’s a movie that I really, really like. [What was the movie?] Deadpool. It was probably a good thing because my ex-girlfriend was on there and so that probably would have been awkward, so it probably worked out for the best. I think that whole cast was amazing. I probably would’ve messed that up for a lot of people had I been a part of it, so probably best I didn’t. But that would’ve been cool.
Jensen Ackles
Ackles‘ performance as Soldier Boy in The Boys may be a good indicator that he’d make a great superhero, but it’s always tough to say if he’d nail exactly what makes Deadpool special even among the many quippy superheroes out there. It also raises the question if we’d even have the two films (with a third on the way) if it weren’t for Reynolds‘ heavy involvement in the process. No matter what, it’s a fun little detail to find out and who knows if they want to play around with a Deadpool multiverse-inspired storyline that could see him play a Variant of the character.
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