Free Republic

Marvel is finally pushing ahead with the highly anticipated “Black Widow” standalone movie starring Scarlett Johansson, with Jac Schaeffer penning the script. Sources say this is still very early development, as the film has no greenlight, but naming a writer is the closest the studio has come to moving forward on a standalone pic. Marvel President Kevin Feige met with several candidates before tapping Schaeffer, and Marvel execs met with Johansson to discuss what they wanted from a “Black Widow” writer. Schaeffer is an up and coming scribe who broke out with her Black List script “The Shower,” a comedy...

In 2013, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predicted the film industry as we know it would "implode" if/when, in the near future, too many wildly expensive blockbuster movies flopped. And if ever there were a year for an implosion on that scale to occur it would be 2018, the year when there are nearly as many major studio tentpole releases as there are weeks in the year. Well, here's the thing ... Do you like big blockbuster movies? The kind that will make a billion dollars but will never be financially profitable, thanks to Hollywood's shady accounting practices? If so,...

A Hollywood film yet again finds itself responding to a social-media outcry over the casting of a white actor in a role that was originally Asian-American. British actor Ed Skrein earlier this week joined the cast of the “Hellboy” reboot “Rise of the Blood Queen,” which is to be the third film in the comic adaptation franchise previously helmed by Guillermo del Toro. The character, Ben Daimio, is Japanese-American in Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” comics and his heritage is central to his backstory. Daimio’s grandmother was a Japanese Imperial assassin in World War II. Many objected to the role not going...

Comic-book movies have had a woman problem for, oh, forever. But this past week has been a particularly notable low for Marvel, which seems incapable of understanding that its superhero movies are laughably sexist. Let’s take a look back at the week of the studio’s tone-deafness: Marvel released the sequel “Avengers: Age of Ultron” last Friday to criticism over its portrayal of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. She was seen by many as overly domesticated and feminized — and grossly underrepresented in the movie’s action figures, a fact noted by “Avengers” star Mark Ruffalo on Twitter. "@Marvel we need more #BlackWidow...