Podcast of Doom (transcript):
The New 52! Ha! (part 2)

Comic Con is fast approaching, and news is already starting to leak out a bit early. One of the things that has happened in the past couple days is that the teaser trailers for both “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Avengers” have leaked online. The Internet Police are on top of it, though, so it’s really hard to find working links to either of them that last longer than five minutes. Luckily, I have nothing better to do, so I found them, and now I’m going to share with you a recap of both!

First, let’s start with The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield and some other people.

The teaser I saw was really blurry and shaky, filmed by some guy in a theatre, so the quality was pretty poor, in other words. It starts by showing Peter Parker doing some things and talking to some people. There’s a cute blonde girl that I’m guessing is Gwen Stacy, and she says some stuff, too, but I couldn’t really understand it, since the audio is so poor. About midway through the teaser, it shows Peter get bit by a spider, and then we get the standard “now he’s a geek with muscles” shot, followed by a closeup of the back of his neck, where we can clearly see the spider bite.

The overall tone of the teaser suggests the movie is going to be a lot darker than the originals, with Peter being more sulky and depressed before getting bit. I guess they’re taking their cues from the success of “The Dark Knight.” Either way, it’s not really a tone that fits with a Spider-Man origin story, so I’m not sure if it’ll work all that well.

At the end of the trailer, we’re given about fifteen seconds or so of Spider-Man running around on a rooftop and swinging between buildings. The twist is that it’s shown from his point-of-view. It’s like a first person shooter video game, only with Spider-Man instead of some dude carrying a gun. At the very end, he’s shown swinging toward a glass building, and we finally see his reflection in the glass before he lands on the wall and poses. The end.

I think it looks kind of okay, but I’m skeptical. I mean, what’s the point of retelling Spider-Man’s origin story? We already saw that. And by “we,” I mean every single person living in America. That movie broke all kinds of box office records. Do they really need to rehash that just because this is a reboot? I think not.

Next up, let’s talk about The Avengers teaser trailer. (more…)

I never thought I’d see the day, but there it is. This image is from the Licensing International Expo in Vegas, which means this is the promo picture they’ll be plastering all over toys, lunchboxes, etc. It may just be me, but seeing these characters all together is without a doubt the coolest thing I’ve seen in awhile. This can’t come soon enough.

Over on Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve broken a story for the first time in probably two years that wasn’t first posted by Deadline Hollywood. And the funny thing is, they completely lucked into it!

They originally reported that this was concept art drawn by a fan based off a description from a source on JoBlo, but it turns out that the “fan art” is actually the original concept art that JoBlo was given but told they couldn’t show. Well, since it got out, I guess Marvel just figured they may as well leave it out, so Ain’t It Cool actually broke a story! Good for them.

Anyway, I think it looks pretty sweet. Though, if the suspenders aren’t attached to a parachute, they just come across as kind of dorky and needlessly forcing the red-and-white stripes design from the comics. I mean, I understand they’re trying to make the stripes serve a practical purpose, but holding up Cap’s bloomers isn’t the most interesting purpose.

This reminds me a lot of the first picture they released of the Iron Man Mark 1 costume. It looks really cool, but there’s a part of you that just doesn’t want to get your hopes up too high. Here’s hoping this is just a taste of more cool stuff to come.

It’s fairly safe to say that everybody expected Iron Man 2 to blast open the doors of summer with a huge opening weekend box office take, and it did not disappoint.

The total estimated tally for the new flick came in around $134 million for its first three days in wide release, compared to the $98.6 million that the original opened with in 2008.

This puts Iron Man 2’s opening at the fifth biggest of all time, behind only The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, New Moon, and Pirates of the Caribbean 2.

In terms of total attendance based on ticket sales, though, it would come in quite a bit lower, probably around ninth or tenth. Keep in mind that on the list of all-time biggest opening weekends, the only movies in the top 100 that aren’t from the year 2000 and beyond are: The Lost World, The Phantom Menace, Toy Story 2, Austin Powers 2, Batman Forever, Men in Black, and Independence Day (and only four of those are from before 1999). Ticket prices are way more expensive these days – – who knew?!?

What’s interesting is that Iron Man 2 only out-performed the original by roughly 35%, which is a significantly smaller growth for the sequel than we saw with X-Men 2 or The Dark Knight or any number of similar movies. It’s surprising when you consider how we look back on the original Iron Man with such praise. You’d think that, with the same director and cast returning for the sequel, that audiences would be more open to the idea of putting money down to see the latest installment based off goodwill from the first.

The only thing I can think of that would account for such a relatively small bump over the first is that, in the previews, we didn’t see a whole lot of Iron Man or Whiplash or, to be frank, much of anything new to speak of. If the previews didn’t do a very good job of establishing a reason to care about the central conflict of the movie, then why should audiences rush to the theater?

Maybe I’m underestimating the influence of critics on the movie-going public. Iron Man 2 got fairly middling reviews, with a 75% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (nowhere near as gushing as the first installment), so maybe that’s why this number isn’t higher than it is.

Nah. That can’t be right. The sequel to Twilight got a 27% fresh rating, and that sucker grossed $143 million on its opening weekend. Oh well. I guess you can’t account for crazy.

Credit to Box Office Mojo for the numbers.