The actor claims that the studio breached her contract by releasing her standalone Marvel adventure on Disney+
Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over the recent release of Black Widow.
The actor is claiming that the studio’s decision to launch her first, and last, Marvel standalone film on Disney+ as well as cinemas is a breach of contract.
Continue reading...What does a 163% surge in demand for red hair dye tell us about the way Marvel’s latest, and star Scarlett Johansson, have been marketed and received?
If you happen to see an unusually large number of women with red hair today, do not be alarmed. We haven’t been invaded by vikings again, nor is there a Nicola from Girls Aloud convention happening in your vicinity. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the sudden outbreak of redheads, and it is that Black Widow was recently released.
According to the website Justmylook, there has been a 163% spike in demand for the colour since the release of Black Widow, presumably because lots of people sat through two hours and 14 minutes of a film about a woman grappling with the psychological torment of knowing she was part of a Soviet military programme that brainwashed, sterilised and murdered hundreds of abandoned girls, only to think: “Ooh, I bet I’d look lovely with her hair.”
Continue reading...Great fun is had in giving us the backstory to the assassin’s place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
The sensuous cough-syrup purr of Scarlett Johansson’s voice is something I’ve missed in lockdown; now it’s back with a throaty vengeance in the highly enjoyable standalone episode for which her character Black Widow was well overdue. It is co-written by WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer and directed with gusto by Cate Shortland, with touches of Terminator 2 and Mission: Impossible but undoubtedly keeping the tonal consistency of a typical MCU melodrama.
This movie gives us the backstory to Black Widow’s presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, involving an origin-myth tale of family trauma, identity crisis and sibling rivalry with a pugnacious kid sister, Yelena, entertainingly played by Florence Pugh. Yelena can’t help mocking – but also maybe envying – Black Widow’s balletic fight stance which involves absurd posing and resembles the mane-tossing antics of a woman in a shampoo advert.
Continue reading...From Superman’s Y-fronts to Hulk’s tattered shorts, superheroes have made their fair share of fashion faux pas – but whose outfit actually works?
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all
When saving the planet, it’s important to dress the part. This isn’t like taking the bins out. You can’t hang off a chopper in a slanket and Crocs. Superheroes understand this. Unlike James Bond – who is permanently tuxed up as if he’s about to host a pharmaceutical industry awards bash – the offspring of Marvel and DC Comics have brought spandex, codpieces and vulcanised rubber out of the niche-interest sex-toy trade and into the multiplex. But which superhero has the best costume?
Continue reading...Soon to be seen in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, the actor has a CV taking in dancing losers, choric narrators, a Bible-misquoting killer – and Marvel’s coolest middleman
Samuel L Jackson is the elegantly besuited, cane-twirling, fourth-wall-breaking narrator in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (pronounced “shy-rack”), set in the city of Chicago, where the homicide rate has exceeded the US death toll in Iraq. It is a twist on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, about one woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian war with a sex strike. Teyonah Parris plays Lysistrata, the girlfriend of a gangbanger. She reaches out to the wives and partners of their enemies with a similar idea – and the chant: “No peace, no pussy!” Jackson is the dapper, impish Dolmedes, whose rhyming couplets bring us into the story.
Continue reading...Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new comic sees Red Skull mobilising young men against ‘the feminist trap’ and other Petersonian targets
In the new issue of Captain America, the superhero’s longtime nemesis Red Skull espouses his views about “10 rules for life”, “the feminist trap” and “chaos and order” – and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is none too pleased.
Written by the award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Marvel comic features a version of the villain who looks to radicalise young men by telling them “what they’ve always longed to hear … That they’re secretly great. That the whole world is against them. That if they’re men, they’ll fight back. And bingo – that’s their purpose. That’s what they’ll live for. And that’s what they’ll die for.”
Continue reading...Disney’s Avengers spinoff series offers up a patchy yet encouraging combination of exhilarating action and soapy drama
There was every legitimate reason to feel a little daunted and wearied by Disney’s glut of small-screen streaming announcements back in 2019 that was then compounded last year during another migraine-inducing investor day, an overlong list of shows expanding universes that were already stretched beyond necessity. But after The Mandalorian brought a surprising new edge to the Star Wars universe and, more recently, WandaVision found a certain offbeat creativity within the overly straitlaced world of Marvel, exhaustion was replaced with intrigue as Disney+ insisted on itself as more than just a digital dumping ground.
Related: Marvel's next wave of heroes will tear up tradition in the name of progress
Continue reading...She’s a chaos magician. He’s a density-changing synthezoid. Are Scarlet Witch and Vision really classic sitcom material? The stars of Marvel’s foray into TV reveal how it all came about
Marvel’s 2020 should have gone much differently. Its Black Widow movie and The Eternals should both have been released last year, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings imminent. But the pandemic struck and now all three have been booted into the middle distance. And so it has now been 18 months since we last heard from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when Avengers Endgame became the highest-grossing movie ever. And in that vacuum, the question of what happens next has only grown more intense. But the answer might not be what anybody expected. Marvel is about to break its silence with WandaVision – and it’s a huge departure. Not only is it the first TV show produced by Marvel Studios, it is also presented in the form of a half-hour sitcom. It is no exaggeration to call WandaVision the weirdest thing Marvel has ever done.
“Weird is good,” says Marvel Studio president Kevin Feige from beneath his trademark baseball cap. “I like weird. After Endgame, after the completion of a 23-movie Infinity Saga, we were soul-searching about what was coming next. WandaVision being our first for Disney+ is perfect. It was always about pushing the boundaries of storytelling, doing something we could only do with the narrative structure of television.”
Continue reading...Gal Gadot does battle with supervillains and everyday sexism in DC’s cliche-clobbering sequel. Is it a sign of the genre’s future?
There’s a scene in Wonder Woman 1984 where the luminous Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) glides into a crowded party. Everyone is staring at her – but this is no Cinderella moment, with admiring glances and a collective gasp. It’s an exposé of sexual harassment. The camera switches to Diana’s POV, and we experience a series of persistent, entitled men cracking on to a woman who is clearly not interested. It’s a rare case of a superhero movie showing everyday sexism from the woman’s point of view.
Related: Wonder Woman 1984 review – queenly Gal Gadot disarms the competition
Continue reading...Hayden Christensen returns as Darth Vader in the Obi-Wan Kenobi mini-series, while Chadwick Boseman won’t be replaced for Black Panther sequel
Disney has unveiled a huge slew of new projects for the next decade at an investor event.
Speaking on Thursday, Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy announced that the new Star Wars film, Rogue Squadron, will be directed by Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins – the first time a female director has taken charge of one of the franchise films.
Continue reading...Agriculture department says fictional country from Marvel movies was used to test systems and was not meant to remain visible
Trade talks between Captain America and Black Panther didn’t quite pan out, it seems. Wakanda, the fictional home of the Marvel superhero, is no longer listed as a free trade partner of the US.
Until Wednesday, the made-up east African country was listed on the drop-down menu for the agriculture department’s foreign agricultural service’s tariff tracker along with Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.
Continue reading...Official Trump War Room re-election campaign posts video to social media superimposing his face over that of Marvel character
Donald Trump is a genocidal warlord hell bent on destroying half of existence in the universe. That’s not a criticism from the unhinged leftwing media, it’s apparently how the president and his team see him.
Shortly after the House brought two articles of impeachment against the president for his efforts seeking foreign interference to bolster his own political interests, the official Trump War Room re-election campaign Twitter account posted a video to social media that superimposed his face over that of the villainous Marvel comic book character Thanos.
Continue reading...From romcoms to Marvel blockbusters, east Asian actors are enjoying unprecedented success. What’s taken the film industry so long?
It was the moment that all romance fans look forward to at the end of a film, hearts bubbling with anticipation: the kiss. I was watching The Edge of Seventeen, a smart coming-of-age movie, in which Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) had rushed to see her awkwardly endearing classmate (Hayden Szeto). After a bungled date and a crush on another man, she had decided Erwin was the one she wanted.
And then, instead of any show of passion, there came … an affectionate pat on the back as he introduced her to his friends. Moments before, I had been delighted that a Canadian actor of Chinese descent had been cast as the love interest of a white American woman. As the credits rolled, I felt cheated.
Continue reading...They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?
Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.
Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?
Continue reading...Marvel Studios sequel has earned $3bn since its release in April, breaking 10-year record
Avengers: Endgame has surpassed Avatar to become the highest-grossing film of all time.
The Marvel Studios sequel, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, earned over £2.3bn ($2.9bn) in revenue by Sunday, since being released in April. Avatar, directed by James Cameron, which was released in 2009, previously held the record as the highest grossing movie of all time , earning $2.79bn.
Continue reading...Marvel’s superhero adventure veers from boomingly serious to quirkily droll as Larson wages a vicious war against evil aliens
This latest tale from the Marvel cinematic universe takes us way back in time, many years before the great catastrophe shown in Avengers: Infinity War. We have crash-landed in mid-90s America: a hilariously antediluvian world of Blockbuster video stores, dial-up internet, web searches via AltaVista, and grindingly slow CD-Rom drives. At one important stage, there’s a soundtrack outing for Nirvana: “Come as you are, as you were / As I want you to be / As a friend, as a friend / As a known enemy ...”
This is an engaging and sometimes engagingly odd superhero action movie from directors and co-writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, a weirdly nonlinear mashup of past and present, memories and present experience, Earth and non-Earth action. It’s an unconventional origin-myth story, which makes it initially uncertain what the nature of those origins is, and maybe even whose origins exactly we’re talking about. There’s an eccentric splurge of tonal registers from boomingly serious to quirkily droll. It gives us a playful first glimpse of a number of things, important and otherwise, including how Shield agent Nick Fury acquired a notable part of his badass image – Fury played of course by Samuel L Jackson, his face digitally regressed to the way it looked around the time of Pulp Fiction. A lovable cat makes an important appearance.
Continue reading...