Back in January we reported on the breaking news that LEGO Marvel Super Heroes was coming. Yes, we know it was kind of a no brainer but it was great to see it was actually happening! Now we are proud to bring the first official trailer to the Flickcast faithful.

In the trailer below, check out the first official look at LEGO Spider-Man, Thor, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, Deadpool and Black Widow who will be amongst the “more than 100 memorable characters to choose from, each with their own unique powers and abilities, players are in for a brick-smashing adventure”. Those actual gameplay isn’t shown, one can assume it will probably be similar in style to that of LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes. The trailer also gives a pretty good indicator who one of the game’s big bads is going to be.

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At the SXSW Film and Interactive festival over the weekend, Marvel took the wraps off of several new digital initiatives during the company’s panel. Among the items highlighted were new content that will tie the company’s film, animation, comics, and web programming together with reality programming, news and documentaries.

All of these will be anchored by the newly announced program Marvel’s Earth’s Mightiest Show, a weekly pop culture program covering all-things Marvel and the world. Former G4 star Blair Butler will host the show, which will cover movies, comics, video games, and television with celebrity interviews and first looks at upcoming Marvel Studios films.

So yeah, you know that’s gonna be amazing. To see just how amazing, check out the preview for the show after the break.

In addition, the company also announced it is offering free downloads of more than 700 first issues of many of the company’s favorite superhero comics at no charge. The promotion began Sunday and runs until 11 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Historic issues based on classic characters in the Marvel Universe including Spider-Man and Iron Man will be available, as well as contemporary titles like Civil War and Astonishing X-Men.

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Happy Presidents Day Everyone! Or, those of you in the U.S. anyway. For the rest of you, happy Monday. You might find this interesting too.

In honor of the U.S.’s founding fathers (and those that have filled their shoes since) we are going to take a look at some of the most famous Presidential appearances in geek culture.

The Dead Presidents in Deadpool

With the most recent volume of Deadpool coming from Marvel’s “Marvel Now” campaign, Deadpool becomes an unofficial agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. to do the things that the agency needs done but cannot be officially affiliated with. In this first arc, Deadpool finds himself taking on the dead Presidents of the United States.

Not just one or two, but all of them. Teamed up with the ghost of Ben Franklin, the Merc with the Mouth chases down a wheel chair riding zombie FDR, dresses up as Marilyn Monroe for zombie JFK and goes head to head in a MMA ring against zombie Abe Lincoln to stop the dead Presidents under the leadership of zombie George Washington from taking back the USA.

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The Amazing Spider-Man was a divisive film. Some people thought it was a fair reboot that rejuvenated a popular, if tired, franchise. While others felt a resounding hollowness from a, seemingly unnecessary, reboot of a franchise that was still reasonably healthy. Despite the mixed reception from the Spider-faithful, the film made gobs of cash and a sequel is fast approaching.

We thought we had a good handle on the villainy of ASM 2 with the assumed inclusion of Norman Osbourne and Jammie Foxx as an unorthodox Electro set to conflict with the web-head. However a surprise twist to the film’s rogues gallery might just have been uncovered via a Hollywood Reporter scoop:

Paul Giamatti is in talks to join The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as the villain known as The Rhino… The Rhino first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #41in 1966 as a thug from a Soviet Bloc country who wore a superhuman suit that made him invulnerable while giving him superstrength and superspeed. It also had a deadly horn on top.  

What What What?

This film is certainly heading into some bold and interesting directions. Not only is the one-two punch of Rhino and Electro rather random, but the actor choices the casting department targeted for these roles are either brilliant or completely nutter-butter.

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Like much of the news in the gaming world, this bit was broken to everyone through Game Informer. Despite the fact that a print magazine is getting exclusives still amazes us, it is still exciting news none the less. It looks like Traveller’s Tales is already well underway to make the LEGO Marvel franchise a reality with the official announcement of a LEGO Marvel Super Heroes game.

Spider-Man. Hawkeye. Wolverine. Hulk. Magneto. Iron Man. Thor. Loki. Deadpool. Magneto. Captain America. From the looks of the early footage from Game Informer behind the scenes at Traveller’s Tales, it looks like this full list will be getting the LEGO treatment. It is worth noting that all these guys have already had LEGO figures made and there is potential for hundreds more Marvel characters to be brought into this brick world.

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For almost every Spider-Man fan under the age of 30, Mary Jane Watson has been the primary yin to Peter Parker’s yang. So it was a bold move by Sony and Marc Webb to go back to Spider-Man’s first love, Gwen Stacy, for The Amazing Spider-Man. A move that properly introduced a character whose ultimate fate might be as important to the web-slinger as Uncle Ben’s murder was.

With the Spider-Man reboot a general success, Sony wants to move quickly on a sequel. Variety is reporting that things might be getting sticky for Parker’s new/old flame with casting rumors of a new prominent female character:

It looks like Mary Jane Watson is back in Peter Parker’s life, as “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley is in early talks to play the redheaded love interest in Sony’s “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”… Character breakdowns have gone out to talent agencies, and Electro is rumored to be one of the villains the filmmakers are considering for the next installment of the hit comicbook franchise.

Shailene Woodley is a fine actress, and even though she probably looks a bit young to be Garfield’s Mary Jane, she is one of the better choices for the role. If you are going to skew younger, at least you get the one ABC Family actress that has award nominations and discernible talent. It is sort of like finding another Anna Kendrick among the Twilight muck.

Also note that it looks like Electro might finally be getting his time to shine in the sequel, and it looks like Peter’s best friend Harry Osbourne is also going to make an appearance in the sequel.

Check out a more spoiler heavy prognostication for what the Mary Jane rumors mean for Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy after the jump.

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Not that long ago Tobey Maguire battled supervillians as the cinematic incarnation of Spider-Man. Now, he’s back. Only this time his opponets are raccoons in the new movie The Details. Yes, you read that right. Raccoons.

We’ve got a trailer for that movie for you today, along with a heaping side of synopsis.

After ten years of marriage, Jeff and Nealy Lang (Tobey Maguire and Elizabeth Banks) have an idyllic suburban home… and a relationship on the skids. But, when a family of hungry raccoons ransacks their perfectly manicured backyard, Jeff becomes single-mindedly obsessed with eradicating the pests by any means necessary. Soon the relentless rodents aren’t merely uprooting the lawn, but also overturning the Langs’ entire bourgeois existence, as the man-versus-beast battle leads into an absurd mess of infidelity, extortion, organ donation and other assorted mayhem.

Check out said trailer after the break. Look for The Details on VOD October 5, 2012 and in theaters November 2, 2012.

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Activision announced today that The Amazing Spider-Man would be making its way today to the digital storefronts for XBox Live, the PlayStation Network and Steam for digital release. The XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game will be sold for $59.99, while the PC version will be going for $49.99. As much as we loved the game (check out our review here), at this point it may be smarter to bargain hunt as many stores have likely reduced the price on the boxed copies of the game.

What does excite us though more than the announcement of these games going to digital release (because let’s face it, every game that is worth anything does it eventually) is the announcement of four DLC packs for The Amazing Spiderman that go live today too. There are going to be four separate DLC packs going up today for roughly $3.00 each as well as a bundle of all four at a discounted $10.00 price.

Most exciting about these Packs (all detailed below) is that they aren’t just new missions for Spider-Man. They instead give new characters to play as in addition to new methods of gameplay. In the Rhino Challenge Pack, players will be running through Manhattan breaking everything in sight. The Oscorp Search & Destroy Pack allows players to play smart phone games resembling classic titles like Space Invaders.

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In America you almost never see two films targeting the same audience released wide on the same day, this is sort of an unwritten rule among studios to make sure films don’t directly compete with the same audience. In China, film releases are programmed by a state-owned organization who are not afraid of pitting two western Box Office titans up against each other in a single weekend.

As a result, yesterday both The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises hit Chinese cinemas, both playing to big numbers.  While both films did big day one Chinese business there has to be a winner, and surprisingly Spider-Man pulled in about a million more for the day.

While Spidey won the general box office, The Dark Knight Rises did do huge numbers as a 2D film and in IMAX . In fact both grosses represent a rather great opening day, suggesting that the direct competition might not have  as big of an impact as you would generally think.

The big day pushed The Amazing Spider-Man to over $700 Million worldwide. The movie fell short of the Raimi trilogy’s lofty domestic numbers, but all told the Sony reboot is a tremendous success in a summer where it was overshadowed by two of the biggest comic book films of all time.

Interesting international box office numbers, which is nice to see based on how much of a dud the domestic box office has been in the last few weeks.

Look at the stack of comics in your room, the long boxes you have in storage or the trades sitting on your bookshelf. Think hard before you answer. Who is the one character you have felt the most genuine emotional connection to since the first time you picked up an issue off the spinner rack all those years ago?

Now we know this isn’t going to apply to everyone. Some readers may have shared a similar tragedy or suffered a similar injustice to a particular character. But, for the most part, a character that has shared more moments with the reader than any other is Spider-Man. But why is that?

For older readers, Peter Parker is one of the most identifiable because we have grown up with him. Whether you started reading Spider-Man in high school days, his Empire State University days, or his young adulthood, writers have given us the chance to see a character grow and mature as he comes of age. Thor has always been an ageless god.

Captain America has always been the guy who was from World War II who just hasn’t physically aged. But not Peter Parker. Peter had to balance a social and scholastic life in addition to being a hero. He had to worry about finding a job and paying rent. He didn’t get to just sit back in a mansion with the Avengers in the early part of his career.

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It is really hard to take a franchise away from what made it a success, especially when most people consider the lead actor the pivotal piece of the franchise. Yet that was the task of The Bourne Legacy, which was comfortable swapping lead actors, but not in giving that actor billing in the title.

From the Box Office perspective the risk paid-off as the Damonless sequel managed a very respectable $40+ Million in its opening weekend. The Bourne Legacy actually preformed on par with the first two Bourne films, it fell way off the heights of the last film, but with all the factors playing against the movie that has to be considered a major win.

Coming in third was, the also strong performing, The Campaign which pulled in $27 Million. The number looks small for a Will Ferrell summer comedy, but when you take into consideration the film is R-rated and it has a political subject matter, the film did really well. Most of the time R-rated comedies do not do Ted numbers, and political campaign films rarely make much money, so again context makes this weekend look like a win for the studio.

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Ten years ago if you told me the Avengers would be one of the highest grossing films of all time, I don’t think I would have believed you. Even when Marvel Studios started pushing out the solo films that would introduce the cast of the Avengers, most people would ask me (being their “comic book” friend) who Captain America, Thor and Iron Man were. For the most part, people knew who the Hulk was because of the cheesy television series and on occasion had at least heard of one of the other members of the team, but if you had asked them if it was a film they were going to be excited to see, most would probably have passed at the opportunity.

Conversely, a decade ago if you had talked to people about a Justice League movie, you probably would have gotten a much higher positive response rate. Just from DC’s Big 3 of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman (even before the Christopher Nolan series of films), people would have cared about the series. Fond memories of Christopher Reeves as the Man of Steel and any of the previous Batman movies were still acceptable enough to get people behind the idea of seeing them all together in one movie. But now, it’s a very different story if someone was going to try to put together a Justice League team movie.

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In its third week of release The Dark Knight Rises once again trumps all competition to reign supreme in the Box Office battlefield. Honestly, I could have written that sentence two years ago it was such a forgone conclusion.

Bringing in another $36 Million over the weekend, the final Nolan Batman film managed to ease a soft 41% after last week’s rather steep decline. The solid hold helps establish the film third on many of the all time box office speed records.

Unfortunately for the movie, almost across the board it is third to the only two films people want to compare it to, The Avengers and The Dark Knight. It is possible that the movie can climb into the top seven or eight all time and still have a tiny shade of disappointment. Thus is the magic of context.

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You may have noticed that there was not a Box Office Report last week. Due to the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado the major studios made a choice to not announce any returns during the weekend, in tribute to the victims. A classy gesture that we at The Flickcast were all to willing to follow.

In any event there was a rather large Box Office event that happened last weekend, so it bears some discussion this week. The Dark Knight Rises debuted to fantastic numbers that fell short of the lofty expectations of we the prognosticators. Still, it managed to break a couple of records and come out the end of a difficult weekend with $160+ Million dollars in the bank.

Naturally people will compare this opening with that of The Avengers and The Dark Knight, and while it is in the same ball park of those two phenomenons, it failed to capture the cultural zeitgeist that propelled them to the next level.

Take this weekend’s returns as an example. The Dark Knight Rises took in another strong $64+ Million to stand number one for a second weekend, however it dropped over 60% in business from its debut frame. A number that is actually solid for a front loaded comic-book film, but is a deeper percentage dip than The Avengers or The Dark Knight ever took at any point in their respective runs.

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As is the case in Hollywod, remakes, reboots and whatnot are always in style. We’re experiencing that right now with the new Spider-Man movie, a reboot of a Spider-Man movie released only ten years ago which spun two sequels.

Another, perhaps somewhat less well-known reboot was The Punisher, which was brought to life by actor Thomas Jane in a 2004 movie and featured John Travolta as the bad guy. That movie was rebooted only a few years later starring the equally awesome Ray Stevenson. Let’s just try to forget the Dolph Lundgren version, shall we?

Since his time as The Punisher, Jane has always maintained he would love to return as the character in a new movie. Trouble is, nobody seems to want to make a movie with him as The Punisher. So, undaunted, he decided to make one himself.

You have to admire the man’s dedication to a role. Check out Thomas Jane as The Punisher after the break.

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