Disney/Fox merger? What Disney/Fox merger? What looked so certain in December, is still under review, as lawyerly types sift through mountains of paperwork, and executives wait to see if the deal will get government approval. So, until more is known, Fox is pressing ahead with their mutant movie plans, Marvel be damned, and they’ve got a lot in the works.
We already know that Kitty Pryde and Doctor Doom movies are brewing, but there’s more cooking up. The forever delayed “Gambit” is searching yet again for another director, after Gore Verbinski bailed in January, and it’s still being rewritten, with a new script expected to arrive next month.
Meanwhile, Silver Surfer will get on the big screen in his own movie, the first for the character since 2007’s not particularly well liked “Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer” (kinda makes you wonder how long Fox is going to dance around rebooting the Fantastic Four after the dismal 2015 movie). If you’re having a feeling of deja vu, circa ‘Rise Of The Silver Surfer,’ Fox did hire J. Michael Straczynski (“Babylon 5,” “World War Z,” “Sense8“) to write a spin-off movie for the character, but it never happened. The film’s director Tim Story has always believed he just a bit ahead of the curve to do the character justice.
“…the Silver Surfer, if you know his origin, it’s very alien. It’s outer space. It’s a whole other thing and, so, I don’t think at the time I was making the movie the appetite was for that. I really don’t believe I could have gone that far then. I don’t believe I could have,” the director said in 2014. “So, when you look at where the audiences are now, it would be fun to bring that to the screen. The excitement is so big for the filmmaker, whether it’s this group or what — to bring that to the screen, yes, to answer your question, it would have been really fun to do it in this day now. It’s just more acceptable of the supervillain because, my gosh, when you think of somebody like Galactus — that’s big. That is big. The costume is big. And you’ve got to really go for it and you can’t just put your toe in the water, you’ve got to freaking dive in.”
Well, he’s certainly right that the possibilities and expectations of comic book movies have expanded, so we’ll see how this Silver Surfer thing goes. It’ll certainly be interesting with Brian K. Vaughn (“Lost,” “Daredevil“) writing the script.
Lastly, it looks like “New Mutants” is being retooled. Originally slated to open this spring, but pushed to early next year, Fox is using the extra time to add an entirely new character to the film during reshoots this summer. World building or fixing a troubled picture? Guess we’ll see, but it’s certainly an interesting twist, particularly when you add the fact that the studio is aiming to get “X-Force” in front of cameras in the fall.
The next Fox superhero movie is “Deadpool 2” which opens on May 18th. [THR]
