Superhero Movie News! Gambit & Thor

Sorry for the several day hiatus movie mashers, I’ve been pretty busy and now I’ve gotta play a little catchup. But I’M BACK, so let’s get right to it. I reported last week that Fox is wasting no time in expanding a new, single franchise for everyone of the characters that appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. First it was Ryan Reynolds that got the immediate green light to return as the mercenary anti-hero Deadpool in his scheduled spin-off franchise. Now Gambit is getting the same treatment. Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Taylor Kitsch at Cannes and he apparently didn’t even know that his turn as Gambit had been green lit by Fox for a spin-off franchise:

“Man, good on Hugh for doing that to his body again,” he laughed as we told him about the film. “I hadn’t heard that was going to happen! You have my brain going now about what I’d love to do with Gambit!”

While this is probably expected, I still find it tough to swallow because 1) Of the horrible interpretation of Gambit and 2) Because of how awful Wolverine was in general. But with increasing lack of Hollywood creativity and the inevitable continued suckling of the Superhero teet, I think it would be safe to expect an announcement of X-Men spin-offs like this regularly. Hopefully the new directors will have had some time to soak up the first Origins’ stench to not repeat history.

Next up we have a great casting announcement for a very interesting project. Hollywood blogger extraordinaire Nikki Finke over at Deadline Hollywood Daily, has the scoop that Chris Hemsworth, fresh off his brief, but great performance as George Kirk in Star Trek, has been cast as Thor. I think this is genius casting. Hemsworth is fantastic for this role. He’s blonde first of all. He’s got very similar facial features to the Norse God of Thunder. He just played Jim Kirk’s heroic father in the best summer movie thus far Star Trek, which will gain him all sorts of nerd cred. However he’s also very unknown which automatically deletes and added potential A-lister baggage and pressure.

The movie has been through somewhat of a bumpy ride thus far, simply concerning it’s time frame of being made. Thor was originally supposed to have already begun filming with a summer release next year on July 16th 2010. Then Marvel decided to push back it’s original intended upcoming release lineup in order to chronologically build anticipation for the eventual motherload superhero masterpiece coming in 2012, The Avengers. That film will of course include: Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America and many more. This is good because Thor’s original release date would have gone toe-2-toe against Inception and I would have had to see that twice as many times to help Chris Nolan out at the box-office. So this new schedule eases my wallet much more.

So Marvel pushed back Thor almost a year exactly and it will now be released on June 17th 2011. Here’s a brief breakdown on how Marvel is setting up their Superhero franchises over the next couple years to create massive anticipation for The Avengers:

Iron Man 2: May 7th, 2010
Spider-Man 4: May 6th, 2011
Thor: June 17th, 2011
The First Avenger – Captain America: July 22nd, 2011
The Avengers: May 4th, 2012

Thor is being directed by the great British actor-director Kenneth Branagh. And while Mr. Brahagh is a very experienced filmmaker, it should be interesting to see how he approaches this because has never directed anything remotely action. But maybe that’s exactly what this movie needs. We shall have to wait and see.

What Do You Think? Discuss.