‘Chi­naseller’ over at TFW2005 has posted a pre­vi­ously unseen Revenge of the Fallen repaint of the first movie’s Brawl toy, here be some pics, more in the orig­i­nal post:

The New Trans­form­ers Archive have posted pic­tures of:

Scout Dirt Boss
Scout Dead End
Scout Knock Out
Scout Roll­bar
Deluxe Sound­wave
Deluxe Side­swipe
Deluxe Side­ways
Deluxe Ram­page
Voy­ager Demolisher

We get an espe­cially good look at the Deluxe Ram­page toy, in alt mode and both robot modes (i.e. as a Jackhammer):

Para­mount Pic­tures and Mar­vel Stu­dios plan to release the much antic­i­pated Avengers movie on May 4th, 2012 — a delay of twelve months on the orig­i­nal 2011 date. Zak Penn, co-writer of The Incred­i­ble Hulk, is pen­ning the movie with inspi­ra­tion taken from Mark Mil­lar and Bryan Hitch’s Ulti­mates ver­sion of the team. Iron man direc­tor Jon Favreau is set to exec­u­tive pro­duce and there have been rumors that this delay may also put him inline to direct:

–Avengers is delayed a year because of financ­ing issues but also because the plan is for Favreau to helm it. Every­body here loves the guy and he wants to do it, but it would have been impos­si­ble for him to do before the date change given his Iron Man 2 com­mit­ments. Also partly the rea­son why he agreed to do the Stark sequel on such an accel­er­ated sched­ule was so he could get given first dibs on this. It would still be a pun­ish­ing sched­ule for him, so hes not firmly con­firmed yet, but he is cer­tainly the pre­sump­tive direc­tor at this point.

Marvel’s offi­cial word on which super­heros will appear in The Avengers is cur­rently lim­ited to a small blurb on a press release:

In a movie event, THE AVENGERS will bring together the super hero team of Mar­vel Comics char­ac­ters for the first time ever, includ­ing Iron Man, Cap­tain Amer­ica, Thor, the Hulk and more, as they are forced to band together to bat­tle the biggest foe they’ve ever faced.

Notably the words ‘includ­ing’ and ‘more’ are there, so we can be ready for fur­ther super hero announce­ments in the future as devel­op­ment continues.

Who’s in?

Iron Man — played by Robert Downey Jr.
Hulk, pre­sum­ably played by Ed Nor­ton though this is only rumored
Thor, cast­ing unknown
Cap­tain Amer­ica, cast­ing unknown
Nick Fury — played by Samuel L. Jackson

From Iron Man:
War Machine — played by Don Chea­dle
Black Widow — played by Scar­lett Johansson

Mar­vel press release about Iron Man 2 and The Avengers

ROBERT DOWNEY JR. AND JON FAVREAU SUIT UP FOR MARVEL STUDIOS’ THE AVENGERS AND IRON MAN 2

As part of his four pic­ture deal with Mar­vel Stu­dios, Robert Downey Jr. is appear­ing as Tony Stark in THE AVENGERS motion pic­ture, as well as repris­ing his star­ring role as the larger-than-life lead­ing char­ac­ter in IRON MAN 2. Jon Favreau will return to direct the sequel to the block­buster IRON MAN, which to date has grossed over $578 mil­lion world­wide, as well as exec­u­tive pro­duce THE AVENGERS.

DON CHEADLE WILL STAR AS RHODEY IN IRON MAN 2

Mar­vel Stu­dios is pleased today to con­firm that an agree­ment has been final­ized with award-winning actor Don Chea­dle to take on the role of Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes in Marvel’s IRON MAN 2 due in the­aters on May 7, 2010. In cast­ing Chea­dle, Mar­vel replaces Ter­rence Howard who appeared in the role of Rhodey in IRON MAN.

Chea­dle is also signed on to per­form the same role in THE AVENGERS and sub­se­quent install­ments of the IRON MAN franchise.

“We are very excited about work­ing with the extra­or­di­nar­ily tal­ented Don Chea­dle as we expand the role of Rhodey in Iron Man 2. It has already become appar­ent as we prep the movie for pro­duc­tion, that the dynamic between Robert and Don will take Iron Man 2 to new heights,” said Kevin Feige, Pres­i­dent of Mar­vel Stu­dios.

Insider Nikki Finke and her site Dead­line Hol­ly­wood Daily has spec­u­lated about the pos­si­ble cast­ing for Thor.

She com­ments that there is a big push to cast Josh Hart­nett as either Thor or the antag­o­nist Loki; whether this turns out to be the case is ques­tion­able, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing Hartnett’s pre­vi­ous refusal to play Super­man. There is also an equal force want­ing a rel­a­tively unknown actor to play the role; other actors inline include brits Char­lie Hun­nam and Tom Hid­dle­ston, Alexan­dar Skars­gard, Liam Hemsworth and Joel Kin­na­man.

Mean­while, quite sur­pris­ingly, Natalie Port­man is the cur­rent top choice as the female lead. /Film spec­u­late that this could be either of:

1. Amora the Enchantress, Thor’s Asgard love-interest and antag­o­nist.
2. Sif, Thor’s wife who is also a God­dess in Asgard.
3. Jane Fos­ter, Don­ald Blake’s nurse who even­tu­ally devel­ops feel­ings for him, with­out know­ing that Blake is Thor

Do you see Port­man as a God­dess or Enchantress?

The Thor movie adap­ta­tion has been penned by screen­writer Mark Pro­to­se­vich (I Am Leg­end, The Cell). In 2007, whilst on strike, he com­mented on his plans for Thor with the Daily Her­ald:

“I loved Thor! […] He was my favorite comic book char­ac­ter when I was grow­ing up. When I moved out to L.A. I sold a pretty sub­stan­tial comic book col­lec­tion to finance the trip. But I kept all my old Thors.“
[…] “It’s going to be like a super hero ori­gin story, but not one about a human gain­ing super pow­ers, but of a god real­iz­ing his true poten­tial. It’s the story of a Old Tes­ta­ment god who becomes a new Tes­ta­ment god.“
It will be mythic, but also bear the unmis­tak­able qual­i­ties of a Mar­vel movie, an epic fan­tasy adven­ture.
“I think it’s going to sur­prise a lot of people”

In Decem­ber 2008, actor and direc­tor Ken­neth Branagh was con­firmed as the direct­ing choice for the Thor movie (MTV):

“I am direct­ing “Thor” or “The Mighty Thor’ as you might like to call it,” he said with a smile before clar­i­fy­ing what the title of the film will be. “I think it will be ‘Thor.’”
ortu­nity to hear from Branagh about what appealed to him about the project. So what’s the appeal of “Thor,” Ken­neth? “To work on a story about one of the immor­tals, Gods, extra­or­di­nary beings, inter-dimensional crea­tures,” he enthused.

He con­tin­ued excit­edly, “There’s sci­ence fic­tion and sci­ence fact and fan­tasy all woven into one. It’s based on Norse leg­ends which Mar­vel sort of raided in a bril­liant way.”

When ques­tioned about cast­ing and the then rumors sur­round­ing Kevin McKidd:

“There’s been lots of talk [about cast­ing] — I sound like a politi­cian — but we are too early at this stage. We’re get­ting the story and the visual effects together and all of that is very excit­ing. Some­one sen­sa­tional is going to play the part but it is early days.”

“It’s a chance to tell a big story on a big scale,” said Branagh. “It’s a human story right in the cen­ter of a big epic scenario.”

The cur­rent release date is set to May 20th 2011, orig­i­nally brought for­ward from a June release.

As part of Marvel’s efforts for a com­bined super-hero Avengers movie, there have been sub­tle ref­er­ences to Cap­tain Amer­ica in the two most recent releases, Iron Man and The Incred­i­ble Hulk:

Iron Man

When Pep­per Potts walks in on Tony Stark being undressed by JARVIS’ robot arms, at around the 1h30 mark, in the back­ground you can see a half com­plete shield that matches Cap­tain America’s red, white and blue design. Accord­ing to the exclu­sive Wal­mart comic book that came with the Iron Man DVD, Howard Stark (now rumored to appear in Iron Man 2) cre­ated the shield’s tech­nol­ogy and Tony is using an old dis­carded pro­to­type to cre­ate an alloy for his suit’s armor. This implies that, rather than cre­at­ing the shield, Tony Stark is tak­ing it apart, as pre­vi­ously rumored when the shield was first spotted.

The Incred­i­ble Hulk

On the 3-disc spe­cial edi­tion DVD there is a cut scene set in the snowy north where Bruce Ban­ner goes to com­mit sui­cide, before turn­ing into The Hulk and start­ing an avalanche. As the snow crum­bles you can just about make out the out­line of a human body and shield, meant to be Steve Rogers frozen in sus­pended ani­ma­tion, first spot­ted by Film School Rejects.

Other hat tips to Cap­tain Amer­ica include men­tion of the WWII ‘super­sol­dier serum’ cre­ated by Dr. Rein­stein, as injected into Emil Blon­sky. Incred­i­ble Hulk direc­tor Louis Leter­rier com­ments on this (IGN):

I wanted to address because I thought it was fun. But like Dr. Rein­stein and Vita Rays, that actu­ally was done on the day because we wanted the super serum. And the prop mas­ter said, “What do you want me to do with this?” And I said, “OK. Give me the serum.” And he said, “What color should the serum be?” I said, “Blue like Cap­tain Amer­ica and I want the cap for the vile to be red like Cap­tain Amer­ica.” And he said, “What do you want me to put on the sticker?” And I gave him Dr. Rein­stein and Vita Rays;

The appear­ance is at 2:25 in this video, not that you can really see it in this qual­ity:

Nego­ti­a­tions for a Cap­tain Amer­ica movie adap­ta­tion orig­i­nally started in 1997, Mark Gor­don and Gary Levin­sohn were set to pro­duce with Larry Wil­son (“The Addams Fam­ily”) and Les Bohem (“Dante’s Peak”) pen­ning the script, with financ­ing help from Arti­san in May 2000. (Vari­ety)

How­ever a law­suit between Mar­vel Comics and Cap­tain Amer­ica co-creator Joe Simon halted the pro­ceed­ings, a set­tle­ment was agreed upon in Sep­tem­ber 2003 (Vari­ety) but by this time the orig­i­nal plans had been scrapped.

The project kick-started again in 2005 with Mer­rill Lynch’s $500m invest­ment and a new plan to cre­ate 10 movies, one of those being Cap­tain Amer­ica, with dis­tri­b­u­tion by Para­mount Pictures.

In 2005 then pro­ducer Avi Arad com­mented on the plans (MTV), with a pro­jected 2008 release date and Jon Favreau at the helm.

“Cap­tain Amer­ica is the most famous char­ac­ter out there, by name. The biggest oppor­tu­nity with him is as a man ‘out of time,’ com­ing back today — look­ing at our world through the eyes of some­one who thought the per­fect world was small-town Amer­ica. Sixty years go by, and who are we today? Are we better?

“I have a writer,” he says. “And I have some­one in mind to be the star, and I def­i­nitely have some­one in mind to be the direc­tor. This script is going to take a lit­tle bit of time, because it has to be a mas­ter­piece. It’s ‘Back to the Future’ kind of stuff.”

Favreau ulti­mately decided to take on the Iron Man and Iron Man 2 projects instead and he explained his choice in an inter­view with Super­hero Hype:

SHH!: So why did you decide to do an Iron Man movie?
Favreau: […] I’d always [Avi Arad] about “Cap­tain Amer­ica,” this was long before Mar­vel broke off and became its own stu­dio, so that was the one I was inter­ested in, because I thought there were a lot of comedic pos­si­bil­i­ties with a guy who got frozen and then turned around and now is fight­ing for Amer­ica. “Iron Man” has always been the flip­side of “Cap­tain Amer­ica,” rep­re­sent­ing maybe more prag­matic, darker aspects of Amer­ica. When we first talked about the notion of doing “Iron Man,” I felt excited because it lends itself, very eas­ily, to the tech­nol­ogy that is avail­able today. Where as an organic super­hero, you know any­body who is a guy in tights is a lit­tle scary in CGI, but a robot-based guy is really a mar­riage made in heaven, so I’m explor­ing what the tech­nol­ogy has to offer. To me, with the polit­i­cal cli­mate what it is now, it’s such a com­plex char­ac­ter and these times are so com­plex, mir­ror­ing in a lot of ways, his incep­tion in the 60’s when on the cusp of Viet­nam, it was just as unpop­u­lar to have an arms man­u­fac­turer as your hero. I really wanted to explore that so it’s very excit­ing to me in that way. It’s also excit­ing because it’s Marvel’s first movie on its own.

Then in 2007 cur­rent pro­ducer Kevin Feige reported a 2009 release with David Self writ­ing (hired in 2006) (IGN),

“I have a writer on Cap­tain Amer­ica right now. […] I’m hop­ing to get a direc­tor on that very soon, to get that into the pipeline in the next year or so. David Self is writ­ing Cap­tain America.”

The movie would be split half and half between present day and World War II. Feige also com­mented on the polit­i­cal cli­mate and the strongly Amer­i­can themed hero:

“I cer­tainly think we’ll have to play with that. Play with Cap­tain Amer­ica being this patri­otic pro­pa­ganda machine on one hand, but being a very human Steve Rogers, inter­est­ing, fas­ci­nat­ing hero in his own right,” Feige says. “The good news is Mar­vel is per­ceived pretty well around the world right now, and I think putting another über-Marvel hero into the world­wide box office would be a good thing. The script David Self is writ­ing [and] the direc­tor that we end up hir­ing… we cer­tainly are going into it with our eyes open that these are all things that we have to deal with much the same way that Cap­tain Amer­ica, when thawed from the Arc­tic ice entered a world that he didn’t rec­og­nize, and had to sort of deal with the changes, whether it was when Stan [Lee] did it in the ‘60s and that world Steve Rogers was com­ing into, or the world of 2009.”

Self also com­ments,

“He’s a Nor­man Rock­well char­ac­ter who is faced with today’s Amer­ica and is forced to look at his own past, things in the ‘40s that weren’t nec­es­sar­ily what they were cracked up to be, and also how today’s coun­try may be dif­fer­ent than it looks,”

The movie’s pro­duc­tion was put on hold by the 2007–2008 Writer’s Guild of Amer­ica strikes, with pro­duc­tion start­ing up again in Jan­u­ary ’08. On May 5th 2008 the film’s release date was set at May 6th, 2011. Joe John­ston (Jumanji, Juras­sic Park III) offi­cially signed on to direct in Novem­ber 2008 with Christo­pher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia) hired to re-write the script.

With Barack Obama’s elec­tion, inter­na­tional opin­ion on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics has had an up surge in pop­u­lar­ity lead­ing to changes in the movie, Kevin Feige (EW):

“The idea of change and hope has per­me­ated the coun­try, regard­less of pol­i­tics, and that includes Hol­ly­wood. Dis­cus­sions in all our devel­op­ment meet­ings include the zeit­geist and how it’s changed in the last two weeks. Things are being adjusted.

The pro­duc­tion release date has since been pushed back slightly, to July 22nd 2011.

Harold Ramis sat down with MTV to talk about his lat­est project, “The Year One”, but — much to our sat­is­fac­tion, the con­ver­sa­tion also turned to Ghost­busters 3. Ramis con­firmed that all of the orig­i­nal Ghost­busters would have an appear­ance in the movie in some regard, includ­ing Bill Mur­ray as Peter Venkman:

“We’re all going to be in it in dif­fer­ent kinds of roles. […] We’re going to be the sage men­tors. There are going to be young Ghostbusters.”

I am a lit­tle appre­hen­sive about the term ‘young’ rather than ‘new’, I see child ghost-busting char­ac­ters and teen hero­ics — rem­i­nis­cent of the appalling Thun­der­birds movie adap­ta­tion. Cur­rently the rumors sur­round actors such as Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, which is more the age I would expect.

As for the progress of the script being penned by Eisen­berg and Stup­nit­sky (The Office):

“Gene and Lee, both of whom I men­tored, are now writ­ing the new ‘Ghost­busters,’ […] I’m con­sult­ing with them, as is Dan Aykroyd and [orig­i­nal direc­tor] Ivan Reitman.

Nei­ther Ramis or Reit­man are expect­ing to direct GB3 which raises the next big ques­tion, who will?

“I’m sure we’re all hop­ing some­one else will do it,” the 64-year-old Ramis said. “It’s a lot of work!”