Skimming close to a billion dollars worldwide after a mere 14 days, Marvel, Disney and Paramount are proving that you can indeed make a movie mashup with other characters and pull it off. With that in mind, and that massive payroll coming into the Marvel Studios bank account, you had better believe there are already plans for a sequel to The Avengers.

Deadline has the official quote:

Disney CEO Bob Iger just announced that the company is developing a sequel. The film’s success “is a great illustration of why we like Marvel so much.” Demand for Avengers merchandise has been strong, he added.

While there is no official word, you can expect that Disney is courting Joss Whedon to return to the pen and/or direct for the second film, but we all know it’s going to be a bit far out. The next batch of sequels you can expect to take off will be Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, Thor 2, and the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger.

While Marvel may be raking it in and giving every other alien invasion movie a run for their money, Fox is definitely turning the genre on his head by way of Jonah Hill, Ben Stiller, & Vince Vaughn in the upcoming comedy The Watch.

Originally titled Neighborhood Watch, now shortened to The Watch, the film accentuates the one thing that most other alien invasion films are missing: dick jokes. Here’s the premise, for those who need that sort of thing.

A group of friends (Stiller, Vaughn, Hill, and Ayoade) form a neighborhood watch group for their suburb to allow them time to bond and escape from their families. However, when the group discovers a plot that threatens the entire world, they are forced to confront it head on.

Take a look at the trailer after the jump, and catch The Watch in theaters on July 27th.

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First and foremost, we love Sean Bean here at The Flickcast. He’s a great actor who, unfortunately, doesn’t always seem to make it all the way through most of the projects he appears in.

That unfortunate reality seems to be about to change as Bean has been cast in not one, but three movies based on the Devil’s Peak novel trilogy. The novels, written by South African Deon Meyer, focus on Benny Griessel, a detective with Cape Town’s Serious and Violent Crimes Unit.

Bean will play Griessel in the adaptations, who’s a recovering alcoholic with family issues and other demons who also happens to be very good at catching murderers. Sounds like a role tailor made for Bean — not that he’s got issues or is a recovering alcoholic, just that we see him able to pull it off. Anyway. . .

A September start date for the first film is planned, with shooting to take place in South Africa. We will be following this one closely.

At first, we were skeptical too. It didn’t seem like Ben Affleck would turn out to be a good director. However, surprisingly, he has.

His next film is the upcoming Argo, which features Affleck in the title role of CIA officer Tony Mendez, an “exfiltration” specialist, who develops a plan to free six Americans from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran while it was under attack from Iranian militants.

The first trailer for the film has arrived and in it we see some of Mendez’ plan forming and get more of a feel for the film itself. Gotta say it, this looks pretty good

Argo, which is set to release on October 12, also features Alan Arkin, Bryan Cranston, Kyle Chandler, Tate Donovan, Victor Garber, Scoot McNairy and John Goodman. Check out the trailer after the break.

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For all of you who have been buying into the ‘drama’ surrounding Prometheus’ ultimate rating, we have some good news for you. Fox has confirmed that the moody, dark and probably terrifying sci-fi film will indeed be rated R for sci-fi violence including intense images, and brief language.

Many people never believed that a PG-13 rating was possible for the subject matter, so when it took this long to get a confirmed rating people were getting nervous. It also didn’t help that Ridley Scott has been telling people conflicted things about the movie, the process and the rating for months now.

Speaking of which, Prometheus must be setting a new record for the most outright and open deception from a filmmaker to his audience. Scott has gone on record with several quotes that don’t seem to right based on the footage we are seeing. He already famously said the film would not be a prequel to Alien and only have a core DNA similarity with that franchise. Watching the trailer for 2 seconds pretty much disproves that concept.

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In salute of this weekend’s debut of Marvel Comic’s The Avengers, it’s time to rediscover another Marvel character who’s had three different film versions and hopefully one of these days, they’ll get it right. Dolph Lundgren stars in the first adaptation of The Punisher (1989).

The Punisher was always my favorite Marvel character because he didn’t have superhuman strength, he couldn’t shoot webs out of his wrists, or defeat evildoers with a metal alloy suit; he was nothing more than a badass vigilante who went out and wasted criminal scumbags left and right. He was one of the darkest characters that ever came out of the Marvel universe. So with this first film version, the writers decided to take some extra crappy liberties and change the story around.

In the comics, Captain Frank Castle was a decorated U.S. Marine whose family was killed by gangsters. Broken, disillusioned by the corrupt justice system, Castle decided to take the law into his own hands and became the Punisher who over the years forged some uneasy alliances with other Marvel heroes like Spiderman, Daredevil, and many others.

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Normally this is a report about the top 10 in the weekends Box Office, a celebration of the entire spectrum of the week’s best performing movies. That will not be the case this week as The Avengers just demolished even the most generous expectations and became the first film ever to rake in over $200 Million dollars in a debut weekend.

You read that correct, The Avengers made an estimated $200.3 Million this weekend at the Box Office. For reference the next closest film was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 which brought in over $169 Million in its opening frame. Kudos to me for the prediction last week.

There is a fitting symmetry for Marvel this week, as it was the original Spider-Man movie in 2001 that was the first to breach the $100 Million Dollar plateau. In the twelve years since that first triple digit weekend five of the films to achieve the mark were based on Marvel properties, the most of any single franchise.

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I feel bad being so late to this movie—granted this is the opening day, but it seems that for the past two weeks, everyone in the world has seen it already. And so, for the past two weeks, everyone’s been raving about it and saying that it’s the greatest superhero movie ever made; it’s the best movie of the summer; it’s better than a big sex sandwich, and so on.

The premise, if it weren’t already evident from the stingers Marvel’s added to the very end of every one of their movies for the past five years, is that a group of superheroes—Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), The Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)–need to recover the Tesseract, a glowing blue cube that generates unlimited energy and also, somehow, opens the portal to the realm of Asgard.

No sooner does S.H.I.E.L.D., a shadowy government agency overseen by a committee whose purpose in the film is somewhat tenuous, discover this than the Tesseract’s stolen by Thor’s adoptive brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who also hypnotizes Hawkeye and one of the scientists from Thor, Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) into doing his nefarious shenanigans, namely, opening a bigger portal to Asgard and invading earth.

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The films put out by Marvel Studios have been excellent in most ways possible. Really nailing the tones of a wide variety of Marvel superheroes. One thing these movies have been lacking, however, is a strong musical presence.

Going back to the original Iron Man, these films have not really had the same level of film score heights that we have come to expect from comic book movies in the last decade plus. The tide began to turn with the last released film, Captain America, which brought in the fantastic Alan Silvestri, but even that didn’t really live up to its potential.

Well Mr. Silvestri is back with the biggest and most epic Marvel film yet, so can he deliver on the promise his name and this property offers? In one word, yes. In seven words and three exclamation points, hell freaking yeah! he totally nailed it!!

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And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against a common threat. On that day, the Avengers were born—to fight the foes no single super hero could withstand! 

Yesterday in select cities nationwide, thousands of people were treated to a back-to-back marathon screening of all six Marvel Studios films. From Iron Man all the way to the midnight premiere of The Avengers, this epic, butt-busting extravaganza was sold as THE best way to celebrate the arrival of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

The roster of films was impressive, but the time commitment was daunting. For true Marvel movie fans was this celebration a good thing? Is the act of subjecting yourself to hours upon hours watching these films worthwhile? Does it diminish the quality or enhance the context when you watch them all back-to-back?

These were all questions I had to ask myself before settling in on my seventeen hour quest through the Marvel Movie-verse, and they were all questions that were answered quite emphatically by about the fifth hour.

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There are few stories that have a more interesting life span than Little Shop of Horrors. Beginning it’s life as a low-level B horror film in the 60′s it has managed to gain increasing popularity by bouncing back and forth between screen adaptations and broadway musicals ever since.

Considering the last popular version of the tale was a Broadway revival, it seems like it is time to bring it back to the big screen, and according to the LA Times, some people agree:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Warner Bros. are in talks for a movie remake of “Little Shop of Horrors”  — with the help of some Broadway heavyweights behind the scenes. In addition to developing the film, Gordon-Levitt could star as Seymour, the lonely, lovable florist’s assistant who raises a giant alien plant motivated by sarcasm, song and human blood.

Now most of you probably hold the 80′s film starting Rick Moranis and Steve Martin in high regard, and think that this is just another in a long line of needless re-makes. For this particular tale I have to disagree, a new telling with an actor as talented as Joseph Gorodn-Levitt is exactly the next logical step for this story.

Of course that said, we all should pray we get a mostly practical Audrey 2.

Previously, we brought you a teaser for the reboot of Total Recall, another big movie vying for your hard earned dollar this Summer. Now, the Internets have graced us with the international trailer for the movie and, of course, we’re gonna share.

For those of you new to the “new” Total Recall, here’s the synopsis:

For a factory worker named Douglas Quaid, even though he’s got a beautiful wife who he loves, the mind-trip sounds like the perfect vacation from his frustrating life – real memories of life as a super-spy might be just what he needs. But when the procedure goes horribly wrong, Quaid becomes a hunted man. Finding himself on the run from the police – controlled by Chancellor Cohaagen, the leader of the free world.

As our own Jonathan Weilbaecher put it previously: “This new version of Total Recall is exactly how you handle a modern remake. You taken the source material, and give your creative team’s the chance to adapted it in their own way, in their own style.”

Let’s hope he’s right. Check out the trailer after the break. Look for Total Recall to hit theaters on August 3.

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