With warm wishes for our friends getting snowed upon in the Northeast, here’s a few items that have crossed the newswires this Monday morning:
– The Flash is, on balance, probably my most looked-forward to superhero series each week (give or take Agent Carter), but nothing about that show excites me more than the upcoming appearance of Gorilla Grodd. He’s an evil, psychic, talking gorilla for pete’s sake! We don’t know much about who is voicing him or how CW’s generally meager budget will be able to manage the villain, but yesterday Andrew Kreisberg tweeted out the following:
@armenvfx just showed us a little Grodd VFX in honor of @geoffjohns birthday and it blew our puny human minds! #groddlives#TheFlash
— Andrew Kreisberg (@AJKreisberg) January 25, 2015
Grodd is expected to appear this season. The high pierced squealing sound you hear upon his debut is probably me. Don’t mind it too much, okay?
– Gotham continues to build up Batman’s rogues gallery and their latest acquisition is veteran actor Colm Feore, who will be playing The Dollmaker. You’ll probably best recognize Feore as Laufey from Thor (a movie that continues to grow in my estimation over the years). Gotham‘s version of The Dollmaker has ties to Catwoman as he’s behind the kidnapping of Gotham’s street children. A nicely surprising casting coup for the series.
– MovieCastingCall.org has posted info regarding the upcoming shoot for Captain America: Civil War, which is filming not far from my home here in Atlanta. According to the write-up, Daniel Bruhl, who recently joined the cast of the upcoming Marvel film will be playing Baron Zemo. Additionally, here is their description of the plot:
In Captain America: Civil War, billionaire Tony Stark is pitted against Captain America aka Steve Rogers in an ethical face-off over the U.S. government’s Superhuman Registration Act, which requires all superpowered individuals register their powers and report to S.H.I.E.L.D.
I’d take this with a grain of salt right now, Baron Zemo is certainly the go-to guess regarding Bruhl’s role, but the site in question has been known to post potentially dubious info on occasion.
On that same subject matter, Robert Downey Jr. recently spoke with Empire regarding the third Captain America film and his upcoming appearance (via Collider):
They said to me, ‘If we have you, we can do this, or Cap 3 has to be something else.’ It’s nice to feel needed. And at this point it’s about helping each other, too. I look at it as a competition and I go, ‘Wow, maybe if these two franchises teamed up and I can take even a lesser position, with people I like and directors I respect, maybe we can keep things bumping along.’
And he also described some of the character evolution in Tony that will lead to this antagonism between he and Steve Rogers:
It’s natural to change your views…The main thing to me is, what sort of incident could occur, and what sort of framework could we find Tony in? The clues about where we might find him next are in Ultron. But what would it take for Tony to completely turn around everything he’s stood for? Joss brings this up all the time. It’s kind of weird that these guys would have all these throw downs all over planet Earth and yet when the movie’s over, nobody minds. What would the American government do if this were real? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see Tony doing something you wouldn’t imagine?