It looks like there will be a Man of Steel part two film after all with a Justice League film coming shortly thereafter. As reported by Forbes at the link below, Man of Steel has made over $125 million during its opening weekend, which was the required amount to get the ball rolling for the DC Comics series of films that have been much talked about.
Of a particular interest is the speculation that the Forbes article makes about the next Superman villain, Lex Luther:
The big question is of course which side of the critical divide audiences end up on, since the film doesn’t just need to make money but establish excitement for Man Of Steel 2 coming summer 2015 (starring… uh… Chiwetel Ejiofor as Lex Luthor?) and the eventual Justice Leaguefilm coming summer… 2018? But for the moment, Man Of Steelhas reaffirmed DC Comics as a viable brand for big-scale tent poles just as Marvel did with Iron Manfive years ago. So far, so good…
Chiwetel Ejiofor would be a good pick. For those who saw Man of Steel, did you notice the LexCorp vans being destroyed during the big climax?
Plus, I was looking at the Superman comic #703 yesterday………the one that takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio………………and took note that the story line between Batman and Superman was a compelling one. I would expect to see a film between those two characters just ahead of Justice League.
Every year I look forward to the Star Wars weekends at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It is one of the wonderful opportunities for philosophy, fantasy, ingenuity and the best aspects of human nature to converge at a palace of capitalism and celebrate the existence of one of the greatest stories of all time. I love the energy, optimism, and opportunity that Star Wars offers individuals and families everywhere. Many die-hard Star Wars fans converge every year in the middle of May to attend the fabulous Star WarsWeekend events. For those who cannot attend, I offer these clips from the spectacle taken during the opening day ceremonies on Friday, May 17, 2013.
Sit back, grab a snack and enjoy the fun and pleasure of entertainment shown in the videos below!
The Emperor is coming to the biggest Star Warsparty in Europe, July 26-28, 2013 in Essen, Germany.
Ian McDiarmid, the actor who unforgettably played the evil galactic mastermind and the ultimate villain of the Star Wars Saga, will make a rare convention appearance at Star Wars Celebration Europe, appearing on-stage and signing autographs.
This summer’s event will mark the first Celebration in Europe at which the highly sought-after actor will appear to sign autographs and chat on the Celebration Stage, offering attendees a rare opportunity to hear about the making of Star Wars from his perspective.
In 1983, McDiarmid embodied the full depth of the dark side as the Emperor in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, his face hidden under intensive makeup and his eyes concealed behind yellow contact lenses. When his true face was revealed as the apparently kind and helpful Senator Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999), he projected a different kind of evil – a subtle manipulator of galactic events, a villain hidden in plain sight. As the prequels progressed, so too did Palpatine’s plans until finally, in Revenge of the Sith (2005), McDiarmid got to play evil at its fullest, and revealed the true power of Darth Sidious.
Star Wars Celebrations bring fans of all ages together, from all points of the globe, to celebrate the pop-culture phenomenon that is Star Wars. From its young fans of Star Wars: The Clone Wars to die-hards fueled by the nostalgia for the original Star Wars trilogy; curious, casual followers; gamers, readers, costumers or collectors — there’s something for everyone at Celebration.
Now in hind sight The Avengers is one of the most successful movies of all time. It has generated over one and a half billion dollars in worldwide sales with a production budget of well over $200 million and an additional quarter million dollars in advertising. In total The Avengers as a film production cost a half a billion dollars to create, but it made more than double that in profits which is a wonderful business venture. It would seem unlikely that such a large production would come to little old Wilmington, Ohio, but when film scouts learned that the DHL facility had it’s own airport, a fenced in area great for security, huge buildings that could be converted over into film sets easily all set in a community where hotel rates were not through the roof, plenty of restaurants for the cast and crew to eat at, and the locals were polite and easy to work with, Wilmington, Ohio was suddenly a very attractive option. But even more attractive were the tax rates in Ohio which caused the production company of The Avengers to pull from their previous locations in Michigan and to replace them with sites in downtown Cleveland, the NASA facility in Sandusky, and of course Wilmington. The deal closer was tax rates, and because Ohio has one of the most attractive tax packages in the whole country currently thanks to the two Republican senators, Ohio is winning film development projects. The Avengers production alone poured over $2 million dollars into the local economy during their three-month lease of the largest DHL building and their stay in Wilmington.
Now, progressive leaning people will utter that The Avengers has made over a billion dollars in ticket sales and it hasn’t even been released to home video yet. The Disney Company who owns Marvel Comic Motion Picture division and the distributors in Paramount Pictures will make well over $2 billion dollars on just this one movie, so why was the production company of The Avengers worried about a few percentage points of tax shelter? Well, because you never know what will happen and when investors are required to spend over $200 million up front to produce a movie, it is important to keep the budget tight in case the film goes bust and nobody shows up to see the film. Not all movies make as much money as The Avengers which has decades of built up fan base to tap into in order to recover their investment.
When local Cincinnati native George Clooney brought his film Eyes of March to Ohio and filmed around Cincinnati and Miami University he did so not just because it was in his home town, but because he wanted to take advantage of the Ohio Tax Credit. Clooney politically is a progressive stuck to President Obama’s hip, but when it comes time to produce a film, he knows how to think like a businessman, so he brought his film to Ohio to keep the production costs down because films like that do not make billions of dollars. Most of the time production companies are happy if they break even on the initial investment. Just because a movie is made does not guarantee that it will be profitable.
The gigantic epic John Carter made by the Disney Company just a few months before the release of The Avengers cost well over $250 million to make but American audiences completely rejected it. The film only made $73 million domestically. Many people lost their jobs over that production, you can bet on that. Disney was not happy, and they had every right to be. Lucky for them foreign audiences liked the film giving it an additional world-wide take of $200 million, which just barely put Disney over the top on their front end investment. Disney needed desperately for The Avengers to do well, to make up for their profit forecasts in 2012 and John Carter did not get them anywhere close. Just because a film makes nearly half a billion dollars, that does not mean much. When you watch a movie, look at the credits that usually go on for over six minutes and contain tens of thousands of names. All those people were employed by the film and they all get paid from the money generated at the box office. When a studio like Disney makes a profit, it allows them to take chances on movies that are risky on their investment, and that really helps producers create films that benefit the unique tapestry of American culture that we broadcast to the rest of the world.
When The Avengers came to Ohio they spent $25 million dollars and employed 3,800 residents on the economy. If during the filming of the movie a stunt man died, or a law suit came up over intellectual rights, the production would be put on hold and the investment money spent would end up in limbo. In many cases the money for a film is financed two years before a film ever ends up on the big screen, so the invested money is tied up for a long time leaving investors on pins and needles until the box office receipts begin to roll in. So tax rates are a big deal in film production.
California has priced themselves right out of the film business. Production companies used to love to leave their homes in the morning work all day then go home at night. But due to the tax rates around Hollywood, it’s cheaper to leave town to make a film in a place like Ohio than to make it at the traditional sound stages in California. Dark Knight Rises is another 1 billion dollar world-wide moneymaker and was filmed in Pittsburg. In fact, Heinz Field was the football stadium that was blown up in that movie. The Midwest is learning that by lowering their tax rates, they are able to lure Hollywood to the Midwest which is great for the economy of the fly over states. Not good for California that has one of the largest economies in the world, due in part to the movie business.
But it is taxes that drive the economy, or rather the lack of them. As much as advocates on the political left beat on their chest for tax increases, businessmen who run the movie business are not willing to toss money into a black hole that will cost thousands of people their jobs. So they take the path of least resistance just like every businessman with any sense. The higher the taxes the lower the business activity, it’s a very simple formula.
The formula has worked so well in Ohio that legislators have now DOUBLED their tax incentive in the wake of the overwhelming success of The Avengers. Click the article below to read more.
Because of this movie The Avengers filmed in Ohio, there will be more high-profile films that will come and spend hundreds of millions of dollars they won’t be spending in high tax states and cities. That is a wonderful thing for places like the DHL facility in Wilmington who is likely to see a major increase in activity at their small, sleepy town. The DHL facility could easily become the new Elstree Studios in England where the remote location, tax rates and facility usage are heads and shoulders above other locations. Not many film studios have their own airport, and the DHL facility does, which is unprecedented. Wilmington, Ohio could easily become the new Hollywood because of the Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit, which would be far more valuable than the type of business that left the DHL facility in the first place and would restore to that town a greatness it has never known.
It was for reasons like that which drew Glenn Beck to Wilmington over two years ago, hoping that people who move money would take notice of the great attributes the small town in Ohio offered. What the production company making The Avengers was able to do within a week of filming at the DHL facility word will get out and many more films will follow. And that is the name of the game, where competition drives down the costs while productivity increases. Ohio is the example of how it’s done right, and the task for the rest of the world is to follow to the benefit of everyone else. And it all started with two Republican Senators who thought forward enough to offer the Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit to an industry in Hollywood that is desperate to reform its costs for a changing marketplace.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
Maturity is a word that was invented to keep the adult population dormant from the dreams of their youth. Maturity is designed to be a concession to mediocrity. When someone says that a person is mature, they mean it as an insult. They intend it to mean that one knows their place, takes orders well and won’t rock the boat. In essence, maturity is the bolts that hold machine politics together. When young people put away the things of childhood to embrace the realism of adulthood, we call them “mature,” or say that they have “grown up.”
Well, more than once, I have been referred to as “immature” by my peers because as a man in my 40’s I still love video games and comic books, just as I did when I was younger. I also still hold to an idealistic state of justice that only exists in the world of comic books. Contemporaries insist that my youthful views have no place in the political arena, and it is for that reason that I write books instead of hold any public office. The characters in my novels are often reflections of events I’ve personally witnessed in actual confrontations with members of the established political arena, and my reluctance to play ball the way they learned to play the game makes them very, very angry. That’s typically when the word “immature” is used.
I grew up with comic books, and I have never left them. Comic book stores were some of the first places I took my children and they learned to read by getting comic books and looking at the pictures and trying to figure out what the words meant. I see comic books as works of art that emit modern mythology that is very much needed. The definitions of right and wrong are very apparent in the comic book universe of youth, which the adult likes to call unrealistic. To the “mature” adult compromises must be made, and the world is shades of gray. That is in essence an incorrect view of life that opens the world to evil.
I can say such things about comic books because I have the context of advanced literature behind me. I have read and enjoyed many of the most complicated literary classics there are, particularly Shakespeare, and can report that the comic book wins over the characters of advanced literature in most every case. For instance, Bruce Wayne as a character is superior to Titus Andronicus because he does not collapse into madness finding himself a victim to a corrupt regime of Roman superiority as Titus did. Wayne took the fight to the corrupt instead of letting the corrupt bring the fight to him, leaving the only measure of redemption available in making a pie out of the dead bodies of the Empresses’ two sons who raped and maimed Titus’s daughter. Batman is better, by far than not only Titus, but Henry the Fifth, Hamlet, and Othello. That’s not to take anything away from Shakespeare but if he were alive today, he would probably write comic books.
I have been to live stage plays of Equus where the characters act with fully nudity on the stage and had sex in front of thousands of people, and I can say that the message of Captain America has more meaning, Superman is more profound, Iron Man is more realistic, and The Hulk much more sophisticated. In fact I thought of The Hulk while watching the nude woman on stage in Equus attempting to seduce the naked Alan Strang. Alan in his confused obsession with horses had nothing on Bruce Banner in fighting off the rage that dwells within him. The Hulk is far better theater than Equus, yet it is Equus that gets all the praise in our “mature” society. In fact when Daniel Radcliffe made famous by the Harry Potter films decided to play the part of Alan Strang in a London, and a Broadway rendition of Equus he received a lot of positive media attention because the hero of the Harry Potter films appeared nude, and vulnerable on stage, which was highly commended in the high brow society of maturity. Such performances say to the world that Radcliffe does not plan to be a superhuman hero in all his future acting roles, but is mature enough to play a “vulnerable” parasite who murders horses because he loves them. Natilie Portman received the same kind of praise for her role in The Black Swan for much the same reason. Anne Hathaway was very naked in Love and Other Drugs, which was designed to show she could be a sophisticated actress and not just a fairy princess. See Anne Hathaway very nude at the link below for context.
However the chances are, more people in society could name off their favorite comic book characters in their favorite Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics, or DC Comics than even know that their icon of fantasy in Harry Potter took off his cloths for a Broadway play at 17 years old. That is because it is more important to strive for perfection in the human heart than to yield to human weakness as Alan Strang did in Equus when he cut out the eyes of the horses that witnessed him having sex with a woman seeking to blind them so they couldn’t see his sins.
This comic book morality of mine is frowned down upon by those who give Equus favorable reviews. To me, Equus is just an excuse to get people naked on stage and call it art, when it’s simple pornography. The theme is one of human weakness and I instead find comic books much more honest emotionally. Over the years comic books have kept my moral compass pointed in the right direction. I have had many offers from machine politics in the realm of the “mature” to take bags of looted gold placed at my feet which I rejected many times over in favor of honesty which is the theme of many comic books. If I had taken the gold I may never have had to worry about money, I probably wouldn’t have had the fire to write novels and participate in political reforms. Instead I might be on a golf course patting myself on the back talking about the hot chick that was naked on stage in the Equus stage play and discouraging my children from buying comic books as symbols of childhood.
When I practice with whips in the yard and work to keep myself in shape I am working to give to the youth in my own family something to look up to, because young people need that. It is a sad situation when all they have to idolize are drawn characters on a printed page and stories told out of deep human desire not rooted in sexual tension, but in a sense of justice. The whips shown in the pictures here are the new whips that David Crain is making for me. At the heart of a lot of people who want lessons on how to crack a whip is a person enchanted by Zorro, Indiana Jones, or even the Jedi Knights of Star Wars. In fact David specializes in making very special whips that mimic the light sabers from Star Wars which allows handlers of those weapons to get the feel of using a weapon that is very similar to the sophisticated management of an art form of the Jedi against the Sith in a fight for philosophic control over an entire galaxy.
Comic books and the heroes that come from them are about big ideas, and for that they are called immature by the adult population that has already given up. Most people when gold is laid at their feet take it without question, even if the intention was to purchase their silence and cooperation. They yield to the hero that dwells within them nurtured by the fantasies of youth and justify their weakness by sophisticated stage plays like Equus, which confirms in their weakened state that they are not as corrupt as the poor, deranged Alan Strang. Those poor souls pulled into the depths of maturity would have seen the folly of their actions if they had only read more comic books and seen the intentions behind the bags of money contextually written by artists who still look forward to the greatness of man.
As for my favorite comic book character of all time, it is The Incredible Hulk. I have always identified most with The Hulk since my temper is legendary and has always been something I have had to work on to keep under control. Every now and then it is fun to let my inner Hulk go, but it always seems to get me into a lot of trouble. When they can’t beat you mentally, or physically, they simply call you “immature.” The cry for maturity comes from those who are too lazy to match the lofty minds that reach for the stars and have the muscle to get there. Rather, they hope to keep their enemies at stage plays kneeling before their nudity, their delusion, and their apathy.
Puny gods of theater and guardians of maturity. HULK SMASH!!!!!!
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
The Overmanwarrior 