Author: Simon Andrews

For fans of science fiction in its purest and often most unsettling forms, there’s nothing more tragic than watching a truly compelling sci-fi movie get written off by wider audiences and reviewers as ‘uninteresting’. You just sat through 90 minutes of genuinely worrying material, that forced you to question and re-evaluate exactly how humanity operates on a daily basis. Yet the trusted film critic, who you’re usually more than happy to accept the word of, decided the same 90 minutes amounted to 2 out of 5 stars and a truly toxic couple of paragraphs. Thus, it was back in 2009…

With all the evidence seeming to point towards the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation of Steve Rogers is going to be sadly killed off by the time that the end credits for Avengers: Infinity War have started to roll, the chances are that we’ll be seeing a new MCU version of Captain America before the decade has been and gone. And whilst that might sound like kind of a big thing, Marvel have traditionally unveiled a huge number of different versions of the character in their comics over the years. This week alone has seen a brand new…

Season 2 of Marvel’s The Punisher just announced the casting of three new characters. It’s definitely got us thinking on some potential details regarding the plot of Season 2, but we’ll get to that in a moment. The announcement comes courtesy of Deadline, who are now reporting: Josh Stewart (Shooter), Floriana Lima (Supergirl) and Giorgia Whigham (Scream) have been cast as new series regulars for the upcoming second season of Marvel’s The Punisher on Netflix. Stewart will play John Pilgrim, a man whose calm exterior belies a ruthless interior. Despite having left behind a life of violence, circumstances will force him to use his old…

Few directors have experienced the extreme highs and lows of being part of a rampaging and uncontrollable franchise juggernaut than Joss Whedon. At one time held up as the undisputed king of all things sci-fi and fantasy, recent events saw him awkwardly leaving Marvel to cross the floor to instead work for their arch rivals, DC/Warner Brothers. His involvement in last year’s awful Justice League movie did little to revive his flagging industry reputation, and it’s now been announced that once again, he’s unceremoniously leaving the DCEU to pursue his own projects – this time, with Batgirl. Whedon was originally…

Despite Marvel’s best efforts, 2017 was very much a DC year. Sure, Justice League may have (spectacularly) failed to set the world alight, but the combined critical and audience reception for Women Woman comprehensively outweighed anything that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to offer last year. 2018 though, is a very different affair, with a certain member of the Wakandan Royal Family breaking a mind-bending number of film records in only it’s first week of release. Black Panther. Whatever your feelings on the various racial arguments associated with the movie’s release, or the spectacularly stupid antics of people trying so…

On the strength of the opening episode alone, it was clear that Star Trek: Discovery was not going to be quite like the rest of the existing Star Trek canon. Sure, the core content of the various other TV shows in the franchise had always sought to examine the darker sides of life, with some pretty gruesome and horrific issues facing the intrepid crews of various Federation starships. The fact was though that these issues, whilst usually referenced, did not actually tend to play out onscreen. Admittedly, on occasion they did, but due to the time-slots that the show was…

Aside from all the silliness about counter-campaigns being run by disgruntled DC fanboys, and haters trying to spread fake news stories about racial assaults at screenings, it’s fair to say that Black Panther has gone down an absolute storm. Of course, amidst such a huge wave of critical and audience gushing, it’s easy to forget that five short months ago most people were saying exactly the same thing about Thor: Ragnarok. Luckily, ahead of the Thor three-quel’s home video arrival, Marvel have gone and given one of the Blu-ray’s bonus features an early online release, a short film about a…

Update: Stan Lee passed away yesterday, and that was obviously before we originally posted this article. It remains how it was written back in February, minus the adding of the newer cameos.  There will eventually come a time in life when Stan Lee isn’t around anymore to cameo in Marvel movies. And I’m not yet emotionally ready to deal with that… Stan The Man has been an integral part of the Marvel comic-book empire since the 1950s, creating a significant number of their most recognised properties, as well as being a very public and recognizable focal point for the continually…

Despite some recent very high-profile wobbles, Marvel’s collaboration with Netflix has still managed to produce the grittiest and most engaging material of any project the company has yet to put its name to. And for a significant number of fans, away from the adrenaline-fueled action of Daredevil and the eye-watering torture of The Punisher, it’s Jessica Jones that still stands out as the best show of the series to date. Literally every single episode of the first season featured a moment where you found yourself screaming “What The Actual F-ck?” at your television. It was exciting, upsetting and bizarre in…

After a decade of steadily capitalizing on a string of creative successes, and becoming one of the biggest movie franchises of all time, it’s easy to forget that the Marvel Cinematic Universe started out its life as something of a fairly desperate gamble. It’s also easy to forget about 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, which starred Edward Norton instead of Mark Ruffalo as the title character. Prior to the success of Iron Man, Marvel’s track-record of converting their comic book properties into movies was pretty much dismal. Whilst the characters they packaged up and handed to other studios tended to perform…