Posts Tagged ‘television’

Wonder Woman TV show given another go

Posted in News and Editorials, tagged , , on September 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Bleeding Cool and other outlets are reporting that another Wonder Woman live action tv series is in the works after David E. Kelly’s NBC attempt ended in a no-go pilot.

This time CW is looking into it and going the Smallville and Arrow route of going with a young character rather than adult. This has a lot of potential, actually. CW did a good job with Smallville (though yes, it’s debatable on whether or not that show was any good after the first couple of series) and the jury is out on Arrow until it actually airs, but some of it looks promising.

Considering that Wonder Woman doesn’t have a really diverse and memorable rogue’s gallery so having this be a young WW means that they can explore a lot more than just “badguy of the week” and develop new enemies. And as a bonus, they can go the Smallville route and avoid the costume, at least for a bit, because, well, as they said about the X-Men in the movies… you can drawl that stuff on a character, but you can’t put it on a person.

I don’t really know a lot about WW, never really read her, but concept wise, I think this has a lot more promise than Kelly’s. We’ll have to see where they go with it in the next few months.

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Channel Surfing

Posted in Behind the Scenes, tagged , , , , on August 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday’s discussion of the new live-action tv series in the works at ABC made me rethink my idea to have this series ‘air’ on FOX. I’ve decided that my first instinct was correct, FOX is the most likely network station to pick up X-Men as a live action tv series (should the universe align to make it so).

The reason being is that we already know 20th Century Fox owns the rights for X-Men which is why they produce and distribute the movies and not Marvel Studios. This extends to television as Fox sued Marvel over Mutant X which was basically X-Men with a ‘government experimentation background’ ala Dark Angel which came out a year earlier. (Come to think of it, Max pretty much becomes a Rogue analogue but that’s another discussion).

Whedon’s show will be on ABC because ABC is owned by Disney and Disney owns Marvel Entertainment and in turn has distribution rights with Marvel for anything Marvel still has licensing rights to. But if Marvel wanted to create a live action X-Men series they would have to either get the rights back from Fox or make a deal with them.

With two more X-Men movies on the horizon, the rights aren’t going to revert any time soon. Also, Fox is not one to give up licensing lightly, the whole business with Daredevil not withstanding. If they even consider letting Marvel buy out the licensing agreement it probably won’t be worth it to Marvel to pay their price tag. But then, who knows.

So the final option left for Marvel is to make a deal with Fox to co-produce an X-Men series. Marvel Entertainment was involved in the production of X-Men: First Class so there is at least a working relationship there. Fox would obviously want it to be on one of their channels, so either FOX network or FX. Considering that X-Men would be more a mainstream and young adult friendly show their best bet is to put it on a network channel.

Now, this assumes that Marvel is involved with the tv series because since Fox has the licensing for X-Men they could go ahead with a tv show without Marvel’s input. Again, either FOX network or FX, network being the most viable choice.

So, here is the million dollar question: What is the likelihood of an actual X-Men live action tv-series?

Fox always has been more friendly to scifi and fantasy tv shows than other channels (not counting CW’s lineup of young adult emo fests). They know that Heroes was popular and Alphas is currently a hit… despite the fact that Alphas is Heroes without their budget and Heroes was Mutant X with a bigger budget and Mutant X was X-Men without the licensing… and where was I? Oh, yes, the audience is out there as long as they make good content which is accessible not only to fans but to newcomers as well.

Fox is still interested in the X-Men franchise with two movies on the way, so developing it further into a tv series is not a big stretch, esp since this new S.H.I.E.L.D. series is direct competition.

That being said, I think it’s unlikely at this point that Fox is even considering an X-Men tv series. With the movies coming out they’ll probably want to focus on the film franchise. If Days of Future Past and Wolverine do well then they’ll want to continue to work that way. If they don’t do well, then they probably won’t want to tie too much into an fx heavy, possibly costly, tv show like X-Men would be (though in my fan fic I attempt to take this into account and keep the fx budget down).

Maybe in ten years once the new set of movies have done their run, Marvel’s tv show and Phase Two and possible Phase Three have also ended, then Fox might look into developing a series.

Until then… well, that’s why we have fan fic.

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Speaking of live-action tv series…

Posted in News and Editorials, tagged , , , , on August 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Joss Whedon gets to write a live action fan fic tv series… cause seriously… once the comics moved away from their original creators, everything became fan fic, professional fan fic, but fan fic none the less. Doubly so when you get a writer who is obviously a fan of the original.

Deadline reports that the live-action tv series that’s been talked about since Avengers blew away the box office has been greenlighted and it will center around S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. This is smart because it fits in universe without actually needing to pay the big names for anything more than perhaps the occasional cameo.

Am I looking forward to this? Yes and no. For one, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in this show are going to be either brand new originals or minor ones from the comics which only diehards would know about. So Joss has the task of making characters that are going to have to be appealing to an audience who mostly only know S.H.I.E.L.D. from the movies and it didn’t exactly have a large role.

I say this because the tv audience is much larger than the movie audience and the movie audience is larger than the comic fan audience. It’s the same issue I have with my X-Men fan fic, if it where to be an actual tv series then the assumption has to be made that most of the target audience would be made up of people who don’t exactly know who the X-Men are (and a few will probably accuse them of being a Heroes or Alphas rip-off) and the other main group will only know X-Men from the movies.

So a line has to be drawn, Joss’ show has to appeal to a much wider audience than Avengers did while at the same time pleasing movie and comic fans alike. By being mostly (if not all) original characters then he doesn’t fall into the traps that come with re-introducing known characters. Such as Captain America, comic fans know all his back history, movie fans know the history shown in the movies, but you’d still have to go through that in a tv show. You’d have to make sure people understood his origin without a) skipping over it so much you confuse/piss off those who don’t know and b) annoy those who do because it makes them think you think they are idiots.

Joss has created plenty of characters that we all know and love, he’s given us a great film in Avengers, so I’m excited to see where he will go with this, but it won’t be easy for him because he’ll have to create characters that get me interested beyond just being S.H.I.E.L.D agents.

Until we get more information, I’m going to be neutral to cautiously optimistic on this new Marvel endeavour.

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