On fan concerns over the exit of Sam Raimi and the Spider-Man reboot:

Some worry that the shift to younger fans “is going to turn Spider-Man into Twilight,” says Rob Worley, editor of Mania.com. “Nobody wants to see Taylor Lautner as the next Spider-Man.”

On the possibility of David Fincher stepping up to direct:

“He’s a guy fans are wondering, ‘What if,’ ” Worley says.

My reaction to the news that Shakespeare filmmaker Kenneth Branagh may direct Marvel’s ‘Thor movie:“I think it’s kinda cool,” said Rob M. Worley, editor of Comics2Film.com. “[But] he’s not anybody I would have thought of.”

On the potential for the director to do a film unlike any he’s done before: In what might give Marvel a good fright, Worley also made the Lee analogy, as in: “This could be like Jon Favreau, or it could be Ang Lee in a total mismatch.”

On how the Shakespearean background may benefit Branagh: Worley thinks the Thor script—a “more Lord of the Rings than Spider-Man” adventure by I Am Legend’s Mark Protosevich—could be a good fit for Branagh’s classical background.

“It’s meant to be a big epic, and kind of Old World,” Worley said.

On the fan reaction to the news that 20th Century Fox was seeking to enjoin Warner Bros. from releasing the ‘Watchmen‘ movie: “It’s pure rage out there,” says Rob Worley, host of Comics2Film.com and author of the graphic novel The Revenant. “Fans are mortified this movie won’t come out, and they’re threatening a studio at a level I’ve never seen before.”

On fickle fans: Relationships between studios and diehard fans, who now have a bigger voice via the Internet, have traditionally been stormy. Many fans of the Watchmen graphic novel didn’t even want a movie in the hands of a big studio. But the movie’s trailer was a hit at this year’s Comic-Con, “and now suddenly everyone is worried it’s not going to come out,” Worley says. “And now they’re not the fans of (Fox’s) X-Men that they once were.”

On the kind of Batman villain that could appear in the sequel to ‘The Dark Knight‘: “You really can’t have too fanciful a villain in Chris Nolan’s universe,” says Rob Worley of Comics2Film.com. “Anything too science-fiction-y isn’t going to fit in his hard-core take of Batman. He likes something that’s going to fit in the real world.”

On Oscar nominee Edward Norton yielding the lead role to a CGI creation: “It’s different than, say, Batman or Iron Man,” says Rob Worley of Comics2Film.com. “Those movies have human beings in costumes, which gives you a personal connection with the hero. With the Hulk, you have to turn him into a computer-generated character. That can be a fine line to walk.”

On the dangers of the “do-over”: “It’s unprecedented for a comic-book movie,” Worley says. “And if you don’t follow the industry or comic books, you run the risk of confusing people who think they just saw that film.”

On the movie having legs at the box office: Rob M. Worley, founder of Comics2Film.com, agreed.

“I rank it among the better superhero movies,” said Worley, who watched it Tuesday night. “It’s the cool, hipster superhero movie.”

According to Worley, fan interest was nearly as hot, thanks in part to the efforts of the movie’s director.

“Jon Favreau has done such a good job hyping the movie for two years,” Worley said.

With good reviews and good vibes, there might just be one thing standing in the way of Iron Man and a killer weekend: Himself.

Said Worley, “He doesn’t have much of a TV Q outside of comic fandom.”

Article focusing on the ‘Iron Man movie:

“Everybody thinks it looks like it’s going to be the coolest movie of the summer,” says Rob Worley of Madison Heights, founder of Comics2Film.com. “It’s definitely got a cool factor ‘Hulk’ hasn’t displayed yet.”

Worley, who’d rank Iron Man on the B-list, says being a lower-profile character can be an advantage, because “filmmakers have a little extra leeway with what they can do, because fans aren’t as possessive.”

Complete Article (no longer online):

Iron supplement
Director Jon Favreau bravely sought fanboy input as he crafted the buzz-magnet movie that kicks off the summer season

BY JULIE HINDS • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • April 27, 2008

When Jon Favreau explains his role as director of “Iron Man,” the Marvel superhero movie that opens Friday, he relies on his own superpower: candor.
“I’m not operating the camera,” he says. “I’m not performing, really, in it. I’m not building the costumes or the sets and I’m not doing the CGI work. What your job is as a director is to maintain a tone that’s consistent and create a personality for the film. You’re sort of quality control, so you’re watching everything, even though you’re doing nothing.”
For comic book adaptations like “Iron Man,” quality is everything to the core audience. Comic fans don’t just sit around and wait for such films to come out. They follow their progress obsessively and watch for any sign that the source material is being neglected or disrespected.
Instead of hiding from the scrutiny, Favreau embraced it. Early on in the project, he created a MySpace page to communicate with fans. He also courted them at events like Comic-Con in San Diego and WonderCon in San Francisco, fan gatherings with immense clout in Hollywood.
“I got to stand in front of 5,000, 6,000 people and show footage and hear right from them what they thought, and then read on the Internet what they were saying around their water coolers,” says Favreau during a phone interview where he needs little prompting to sound geeked about his movie.
“Look, it’s an overwhelming time to be a filmmaker in the public eye. But there’s so much available to you if you’re not intimidated by it.”
Favreau’s lack of fear paid off. It’s fair to say the advance buzz on “Iron Man,” which stars Robert Downey Jr., has a rosy molten glow, the kind that usually translates into a huge opening weekend. But more than that, the film seems poised to become the rare comic book movie that generates admiration as well as ticket sales.
“Everybody thinks it looks like it’s going to be the coolest movie of the summer,” says Rob Worley of Madison Heights, founder of Comics2Film.com. “It’s definitely got a cool factor ‘Hulk’ hasn’t displayed yet.”
Yes, “Iron Man” is going up against the green dude with anger-control issues and some other superheroes in what’s going to be a busy season for comic geeks. The June 13 opening of “The Incredible Hulk,” the reboot of the series launched with the 2003 “Hulk,” will be followed by “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” on July 11 and “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to “Batman Begins,” on July 18.
And that’s not counting movies in the spirit of comic books, like “Speed Racer,” an update of the animated TV show by the Wachowski brothers, on May 9, and “Hancock,” a Will Smith romp about a less-than-perfect superhero in need of an image rehaul, on July 2.
More than just eye candy
For hardcore comic buffs, the opening of a superhero movie is always fraught with anxiety. Will the filmmakers preserve the integrity of the character, or will they use the brand as an excuse to drape a flimsy plot around spectacular fight scenes?
“To me, the writing is much more important than the special effects,” says Richard Rubenfeld, an art history professor at Eastern Michigan University who organizes exhibitions on comic art themes. “If it doesn’t have a strong story and characters, it’s just eye candy.”
Thanks in large part to Favreau’s efforts to include fans in the process, “Iron Man” is being greeted with anticipation, not skepticism. But it’s been a long road. There has been talk since the 1990s of a movie version of the 45-year-old Marvel series about the arrogant playboy who flies around in a cool metal suit. Back then, megastar Tom Cruise was reportedly interested in the role.
Those attempts never came together, and, eventually, the rights to “Iron Man” reverted back to Marvel. Instead of relying on outside studios, the company announced plans to self-finance a slate of projects, with “Iron Man” as Marvel’s first effort.
This raises the stakes for Marvel financially and artistically. Before, if changes were made to characters for budget reasons or to court a mainstream audience, it could always be blamed on a boneheaded studio executive.
“Now that it’s Marvel with their own money, I think we owed something to the fans, to at least take into account and consideration what the source material was,” says Favreau, who starred in and wrote “Swingers” and directed “Elf” and the family sci-fi flick “Zathura.”
Iron Man, who debuted in 1963, isn’t an A-list superhero like Batman or Superman. Non-comic fans may know the phrase best as the name of a Black Sabbath song.
“We’ll give him an A-minus,” says Dan Merritt of Green Brain Comics in Dearborn. “He’s big in the pantheon of Marvel characters. But it’s going to be a challenge to really get him to be a household name.”
Worley, who’d rank Iron Man on the B-list, says being a lower-profile character can be an advantage, because “filmmakers have a little extra leeway with what they can do, because fans aren’t as possessive.”
A link to anxious times
In the Iron Man origin story, Tony Stark is a wealthy weapons designer, suave, cocky and anti-communist, who has inherited a major industrial company from his father. On a visit to Vietnam, he’s injured and captured, but he creates a metal suit that saves his life and helps him escape back to America for a life of bad-guy fighting.
Favreau wanted the updated version to address the anxiety of the times, but without a specific political agenda. The movie opens in Afghanistan, where Stark has traveled to show off some new weaponry to U.S. soldiers.
“I really liked the image of here he is in a convoy, listening to AC/DC, sipping a Scotch, joking around without a care in the world and then, bang, he finds himself in a hostage video, which hits such a deep fear,” says Favreau.
Although Favreau had talked at one time about casting a relative unknown, the starring role went to 43-year-old Downey, who can juggle depth and humor as an actor and whose former battles with drug addiction echo the alcoholism that is part of Stark’s darker side in the comic books.
Favreau calls casting Downey the single most important element in the film.
“I got a guy that was bringing a whole body of work and a whole lifetime of experience to the role. He wasn’t sort of the obvious choice. My pitch was always, look at how everybody felt about ‘Pirates’ (of the Caribbean) when they heard Johnny Depp was cast. … It turned into, Wow, this could really be cool and fun.”
Also bringing a touch of acting clout are Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s girl Friday, Pepper Potts, Terrence Howard as his Air Force pal James (Rhodey) Rhodes, and a bald Jeff Bridges as business executive Obadiah Stane. Favreau has a tiny part as Stark’s chauffeur, Happy Hogan.
A little bit rock ‘n’ roll
Favreau wanted the movie to be grounded in as much realism as possible, yet have a style that was “a little more rock ‘n’ roll” than a dark epic like 2005′s “Batman Begins.”
He was keenly aware of the strengths and pitfalls of the computer-generated imagery that’s so dominant in modern action movies. With a laugh, he describes a meeting with the special-effects team at Industrial Light & Magic where “I walked into ILM and they assembled everybody from the facility and the first thing I said was, ‘I hate CGI.’ ”
What Favreau really meant was he prefers a certain restraint and clarity to his action scenes.
“I would show them footage of ‘Top Gun’ … completely not digital at all, completely practical, and say when Iron Man is flying, it has to look like this, which means that we have to limit the camera angles. … And I showed them ‘Stealth’ and I said, it can’t look like this, where the camera is moving wherever you want to. Even though it should be, on paper, more exciting and dynamic, because there’s so much more creative freedom, it loses me.”
He describes sending up aerial units to film sequences “and we’d film real planes and replace the plane with Iron Man so that the camera moved in a proper way.”
Favreau, who grew up reading comics, was a fan of several Marvel series. But he’s glad, from a special-effects perspective, that he got to direct a superhero who isn’t clad in tights.
“I always liked Capt. America, but I would have been very scared to direct that because it’s ultimately a human form, an organic form, in the costume. Here, you had … hard surfaces and metal, and so that allowed us to do what CGI does best.”
Still, for a director like Favreau, it all comes back to the man, not the metal.
“The fact that he doesn’t have superpowers and any kid can imagine that they can climb into that suit and be Iron Man, to me, is really about the fantasy of flying,” says Favreau. “It’s like living your dreams.”
Contact JULIE HINDS

Article focuses on the rise of comic fans in Hollywood, and how many of them are taking the reigns of major motion pictures.

“I definitely think it’s good that these filmmakers have a real appreciation for the characters, rather than just seeing it as a job and, ‘Oh, my God, I have to make this Batman character serious. What am I going to do?’ ” says Rob Worley, editor of Comics2Film, a comprehensive news site. “The fact that Guillermo knows exactly who Hellboy is because he loves the comic, it helps him find the sweet spot for making a Hellboy movie that appeals to his sensibilities as a filmmaker, but also his sensibilities as a fan.”

So far, all the marketing on this movie, The Dark Knight, has focused on the revelation of this character, The Joker, that Heath Ledger is playing. It’s really just been a phenomenal campaign so far. Now that Heath is gone under these tragic circumstances there’s a definite question mark on: can they continue to do this and should they continue to do it?

At the end of the day, the Dark Knight will prevail…

The Dark Knight posters ask, “Why so serious?” In the wake of Heath Ledger’s death, the answer is because the movie has a situation.

“So far everything’s been about the Joker,” says Comics2Film.com founder Rob M. Worley. “Can they continue to put the Joker’s face on this?”

While the ad campaign may be tweaked, fans’ interest won’t be affected, Worley predicts. “If anything, they want to see it more now,” he says. “There will be an almost spiritual component.”

On a legacy note, if Doctor Parnassus doesn’t recover, The Dark Knight will become Ledger’s final film. And even Worley’s not sure how he feels about that, about seeing Ledger, an actor of sensitivity who earned an Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, go out on screen as a sick and sadistic villain.

Says Worley: “It’s not like On Golden Pond, where it’s this sweet sentimental sendoff that Henry Fonda had.”