It's no wonder Hollywood is in a panic

Is it any wonder that movies are so messed up these days? You take a known quantity like, say, one of the most recognizable fictional characters on the planet and you spend two decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to decide how to make a new movie.

I was reading a rather lengthy recap of the process Warners has put themselves thru in the past twenty years as they tried to figure out what to do with Superman. Even with the understandable stall following the Golan/Globus catastrophe, they found the next sizable comic to movie crossover with Batman by the end of the decade. The clues were all there. Instead, they turned to Burton, who was scuttled. The right decision probably made for the wrong reasons.

The less said about McG the better. I watched part of Full Throttle a week or so ago and it was petrifying. As for Ratner, we'll get a taste of what he could have done next summer.

Most of this stuff I had read before, but it was fun reading it all together. As with anything on the internet, some of it is innaccurate but that doesn't take away from the surreal peepshow of Hollywood suits trying to make a movie.

How do you make a Superman movie? There's only fifty years of source material as well as two examples on film, two of which work and two that don't. And that's what WB had to work with Before Batman, Lois and Clark, Superboy, Dini on Batman and Superman, The Matrix, Spider-Man, X-Men, and the character's continued portayal in the comics.

And to think that the same studio considered Bll Murray and Eddie Murphy as Batman and Robin.

http://www.agonybooth.com/forum/topic2730.htm

Nic Cage waited for this?

I should be writing about Kong, but I probably won't make it until next weekend.
In the meantime, however, "Ghost Rider" has been pushed back from next summer to the following February. And the suits are talking it up as a strategic move, which is like a coach with a losing record getting "full support" from the front office.
Considering how Cage is a comicbook fan, stole his stage name from a comicbook, named his kid after a comicbook character, and how he wanted to be Tim Burton's Superman, one would think that an actor of his notoriety and (too often unused) talent would attach himself to something with the commercial and creative gravitas of Batman Begins.

Nope. He chose "Ghost Rider", directed by the inimitable Mark Stephen Johnson. Johnson brought us Daredevil and, along with J.Lo, caused Ben Affleck to take a hiatus from the public eye excluding Sox games, political rallies and conventions, and Jennifer Garner's labia.

Did I mention that "Daredevil" sucked? Johnson drew from the right source material, but made a movie that had no connection to it. No character. No emotion. Little plot. All sizzle, no steak, and the sizzle wasn't much to speak of.
The movie did well for February and spawned a sequel (hmmm, with Garner and not the title character). But really, did Cage finish watching DD, grab his blackberry, ring his agent and tell him "I HAVE to make a movie with this Johnson guy!"? Somehow I don't see it.

In the long run, "Ghost Rider" is a movie that I would only care about if it looked like it was going to be killer. But Cage was going to be the leader of the pack for the next generation of actors when I was in college. "Raising Arizona" "Vampire's Kiss" "Wild at Heart" "Moonstruck" "Peggy Sue Got Married" He was daring and a damn fine actor, to boot.

Now, we've got "Face Off", two Michael Bay movies and one that wants to be: "National Treasure" And can't forget "Gone in Sixty Seconds"

We'll give him partial props for "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Bringing Out the Dead" because it don't cost nothin'.

Maybe in a few years he can play the crystal powered projection of Jor-El. It would be a step up from "Ghost Rider".