Author: Simon Andrews

The Marvel-616 Venom already played a major part in the last year’s publications, heading up the Venomverse storyline. This saw Venom and Doctor Strange leading an alliance of heroes and villains to try and save reality from a new race of alien entities known as Poisons. These crystalline entries are capable of defeating and absorbing symbiotes, and this year the Poisons bounce back from their defeat to threaten Earth in a new Venomized storyline. This see’s Venom initially teaming up with the X-Men, before having to unite Earth’s heroes into combating a full-scale Poison invasion. Oh, and the added complication is…

Barring a very unique and specific skill-set, the Netflix version of Frank Castle doesn’t possess any wonderful abilities or superhuman powers. He isn’t equipped with any cutting-edge technology. He doesn’t associate with the Avengers or any of their supporting characters. Add to that an intense media backlash in the wake of a number of recent firearms incidents, and some particularly poor previous onscreen depictions, then giving him a television show of his own really seemed like a bit of a gamble. In an already overcrowded Marvel Cinematic Universe, and with the existing Netflix shows now starting to come apart at…

Is American Gods in serious trouble? With the relentless rise of subscription streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, Hollywood’s televisual offerings now find themselves on an equal footing with their mainstream cinematic counterparts. As the budgets and social media buzz around the big television shows become ever more comparable with those associated with a blockbuster movie, the gambles and risks that a studio takes in deciding whether or not to green-light a new TV series have unfortunately never been more open to public scrutiny. 2017 saw the big television shows continuing to grow and grow in popularity, with the…

The end of any series of Game of Thrones brings with it the inevitable cocktail of pleasure and pain for the shows legions of fans. On on one hand, each seasons closing episodes always deliver the spectacular battle sequence that the viewers have now become accustomed to. On the other, the long wait for the next lot of episodes immediately kicks off. Well, HBO have now finally gone and clarified roughly how long audiences will have to wait until the shows final landmark season. When Season 7 wrapped up back in August, it did so with an even bigger bang…

For some time now, there’s been a nagging sense that all might not be well behind the scenes of Disney’s Star Wars Universe. The Force Awakens and Rogue One seemingly washed away the stale memories of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, but a string of high profile departures from the forthcoming sequels and some very divisive reactions to The Last Jedi have somewhat undermined that. Now, it looks like things could get even worse, as a source close to the production of Solo: A Star Wars Story has revealed the company is bracing itself for that film to fail significantly. A source close to…

Seemingly emerging from the exact same ideas factory that bought you Dwayne Johnson vs The San Andreas Fault, we’re now getting Jason Statham vs a Dinosaur Shark, as next year’s The Meg sees Derbyshire’s hardest export high-kicking a 70 foot long Megaladon. Based on a series of 90’s fantasy novels by author Steve Alten, the Meg stories see US Navy Officer Jonas Taylor surviving a horrifying attack whilst on a mission at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. With half his dive team wiped out by a gigantic prehistoric predator, and nobody believing his version of events, Taylor is disgraced…

Going into Season 1 of  Marvel’s The Punisher, there was an uneasy sense of nervousness. The reasons for this were twofold. First up, both Luke Cage and Iron Fist had already proven that the standard 13 episode imposed by Netflix on their Marvel shows did not always work well. This was a problematic character, which the company had repeatedly tried and failed to make a success of. Too many filler episodes, or too much cheesy dialogue, and this project was dead in the water. Secondly, the debut season had courted controversy before it had even managed to air. Targeted by both…

Last week it was Avengers: Infinity War Memes. Within the space of half an hour of the trailer landing online, social media timelines were absolutely flooded with a combination of hastily constructed Black Panther (Get this man a….) memes, or pictures of Josh Brolin’s Thanos mocked up as either Homer Simpson or that fella off of Pawn Stars. Now, it’s the Disney FOX deal – and this time, from Ryan Reynolds. For writers the likes of me who tend to maintain membership in a number of Marvel forums and groups in order to harvest rumors and fan theories, this sudden…

Do you struggle when it comes to the concept of Batman choosing to kick seven shades of living shit out of the bad guys, but then refusing to actually kill them? Do you sometimes find yourself wishing he’d go just that little bit more ‘Frank Castle’ on their asses rather than sticking to his rigid creed of not taking a life, in order to honor the memory of his parents? Then what you need in your life, my friend, is the Flashpoint Batman. Recent developments seem to be suggesting that you may well be seeing him in the DC Extended…

Every so often, a movie comes along that ticks every single one of the requisite boxes needed in order to qualify for your ‘must see’ list. To clarify, we’re not simply talking here about one of the latest contributions to the Marvel, DC, or Star Wars franchises. We’re instead talking about something just that little bit more special and that little bit more niche. Something that has more talent wrapped around it’s inherent DNA than you can shake the proverbial shitty stick at. That something is Alita: Battle Angel. For clarification purposes, Blade Runner 2049 was one such project. Directed…