Avengers and X-Men to share the silver screen?

Since the days of the Justice Society of America, the concept of the superhero team has been a successful one. Two of the biggest superhero teams in comics today recently squared off in print over the course of 6 months in Avengers Vs. X-Men. With the revival of X-Men and the record-breaking sales of the Avengers in film, why not have the same thing happen on the big screen?

Just imagine Hugh Jackman squaring off against Robert Downey Jr. or Patrick Stewart meeting Samuel L. Jackson… the possibility is there for a motion picture that could set the entertainment world on fire… except that the film rights to these two properties are split between Disney and 20th Century Fox.

But, just as Spider-Man was rumored to be in the running to join the Avengers on film, we may see a few more familiar faces in the next Avengers movie. Given that the threat is so cosmic, it’s not out of the question that we could see glimpses of Wolverine, Professor X and Spider-Man as readers often do whenever an event is so huge that it impacts the entire Marvel Universe.

Or could the X-Men and Avengers actually meet? If so, how would that go?

Via Moviepilot:

What do you get if you cross mutants with superheroes? Joss Whedon’s The Avengers 2? Surely not, I hear you cry. What, Wolverine, Prof X and Storm alongside Cap, Iron Man and Hulk in one movie? Pah! Nothing more than wishful thinking…

Maybe not. X-Men producer Lauren Shuler Donner has said she is more than interested in the idea of having mutant fighters join ranks with the Avengers in the next movie. ‘I would love it,’ she revealed in an interview with Crave, continuing:

I personally have close ties to Marvel because of [The Avengers producer] Kevin Feige. Kevin worked for me. But to take our characters and mingle them in the way that they were written… yeah, absolutely.

It’s no surprise, really. Rumors that Spider-Man (owned by Sony) might have shown up in The Avengers (2012) never came to fruition, but apparently, with the movie’s commercial success, Sony and Fox (who owns X-Men) are now jostling elbows to jump on the bandwagon.

So what does this mean? Could we see the return of Jean Grey and Magneto as bad guys opposite the Avengers? Does Wolverine finally show up to join the New Avengers? Or will this be based on Avengers vs. X-Men where the two superhuman teams are drawn into a war against each other? Also, when in the current X-Men movie continuity would this happen? By the end of X-Men 3, Professor X is dead (or is he?), Magneto is demagnetized (or is he?) and Jean Grey is batshit crazy (yes she is).

Of course, it’s all a guessing game right now. Who knows what kind of complicated legal issues are involved in forcing Fox’s X-Men and Marvel’s Avengers to go on an awkward — yet awesome — two-hour date at the movie theater. But, if Lauren Shuler Donner is to be trusted and they can sort out some kind of studio coalition… We can only dream.

The Avengers 2 is lined up for release in 2015, so plenty could happen until then. Keep your eyes here, people!

Avengers Battle the X-Men in 2012

Official press release below:

This April, The Avengers and the X-Men—the two most popular franchises in comics history—go to war! Marvel is proud to announce AVENGERS VS X-MEN, a landmark 12-issue pop culture event bringing together the world’s greatest super heroes—Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Magneto and more—for an unforgettable battle beginning in April 2012.

AVENGERS VS X-MEN is written by a team of the top-selling authors in the comic book industry today: Brian Michael Bendis, Jason Aaron, Jonathan Hickman, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction. This unprecedented assembly of acclaimed writers is joined by a trio of the industry’s superstar artists: John Romita Jr., Olivier Coipel and Adam Kubert.

The Avengers and X-Men have learned that the all-powerful embodiment of both death and rebirth known as the Phoenix Force is on a crash course for Earth…and it needs a new host to unleash its immeasurable power. But what is the shocking decision tied to the Phoenix’s return that will pit the Avengers against the X-Men? And when good friends become bitter enemies, what does this mean for the future of the Marvel Universe?

“AVENGERS VS X-MEN brings together the most powerful forces in comics for a super hero war like you’ve never seen before and will never see again. We all want to see the best of the best go against each other—Lakers & Celtics; Ali & Frazier; Yankees & Red Sox; and in comics it’s the Avengers fighting the X-Men, ” said Axel Alonso, Editor in Chief, Marvel Entertainment. “We’ve brought together the biggest writers, biggest artists and biggest characters for the biggest story we’ve ever told. This is the kind of high-octane action-packed story that fans demand while also having a profound effect on every character involved—and reshaping the Marvel Universe in its wake.”

Shipping twice monthly, this epic 12-issue limited series will be available in comic stores and on the Marvel Comics app on the same day—additionally, each print issue of AVENGERS VS X-MEN includes a code for a free digital copy of the issue on the Marvel Comics app at no additional cost to fans or retailers.

Plus, for the first time ever, fans can watch and take part in the groundbreaking AVENGERS VS X-MEN Live Kickoff beginning at 3:00pm ET, Wednesday, December 7, on Marvel.com and http://new.livestream.com/marveluniverse. A unique event produced in collaboration with Livestream.com’s cutting edge streaming services and the Hangout functionality provided by Google+, we’re bringing the writers and editors of AvX directly to the fans. Make sure to follow Marvel on Google+ as five lucky fans will be chosen to join in on the AvX hangout with their favorite writers and editors! Even if you’re not part of the Hangout, your questions can still be answered via Facebook and Twitter. using hashtag #AvX—just make sure to send in your questions before the event ends!

You’ve heard It’s Coming—and this April the War Is Here in AVENGERS VS X-MEN #1! All your favorite super heroes enter—and only one team will emerge victorious!

For more on AVENGERS VS X-MEN, please visit http://avx.marvel.com

More on Marvel.com: http://marvel.com/news/story/17810/avengers_vs_x-men#ixzz1fnZFR3JR

The X-Men will be facing off with the Avengers next year in a 12 part max-series conceived by Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman. The major event will serve as the spearhead of Marvel’s same-day digital release schedule starting in April 2012.

The most popular superhero teams of Marvel Comics, the X-Men and Avengers have tangled several times over the years from the 60’s when the classic teams clashed to the 90’s when they fought on several occasions. This raises the stakes for the event as it requires not only a unique and clever set up but also some mind-blowing visuals and action sequences. With the high quality of the creators attached, I have high hopes… but will readers be interested in a 12 part event book?

Writer Matt Fraction, though, sees it more as a World Series throwdown between the Yankees and the Chicago Cubs: “The Avengers as the most storied franchise in baseball vs. the perennial underdog that commands ferocious loyalty.
“It’s crazy to be a part of something this ridiculously ‘hugeungus.’ ”
Yes, Avengers vs. X-Men is such a big deal that its creators have to come up with new words to describe its size.

Fittingly, this war between Marvel’s two biggest super-teams has made the comic-book publisher up its game in the digital space. Each of the 12 Avengers vs. X-Men issues will be available in comics shops and digitally on the same day beginning in April, with each print issue including a free copy for download on the Marvel app.

In addition, Marvel.com will host a live news conference at 3 p.m. ET Wednesday for fans via Livestream featuring Fraction and fellow writers Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, the five Marvel writers behind the series. Marvel will also use Google+ to allow its readers to interact with Avengers vs. X-Men creators and the hashtag “#AvX” for fans to converse about the event on Twitter and Facebook.

Avengers vs. X-Men is a social experiment for its creators, too. A departure from recent Marvel events such as Fear Itself,Secret Invasion and Civil War, the series is scripted by a different writer from issue to issue, and artists John Romita Jr., Olivier Coipel and Adam Kubert will each illustrate one four-issue “act.”

“It’s interesting to see each guy bringing his best to the table,” Aaron says. “You don’t want to be the weak link who lets the team down. Each issue, every guy’s trying to throw down the gauntlet and one-up the guy who came before him.”

The event is the “area of critical mass” that Marvel books have been building toward for a while, according to Marvel editor in chief Axel Alonso. And the prologue issue, drawn by Frank Cho, features stories starring two pivotal characters in Avengers vs. X-Men.

Bendis takes on the Scarlet Witch, and for good reason: He was the Avengers writer when the mutant heroine, after being driven insane and thinking that her fellow Avengers took her children, lost control of her magical powers. She became responsible for one of the group’s darkest days, when Avengers Mansion fell to its doom along with some of her teammates.

She’s been off the table for the last few years — “I’m primarily to blame for that,” Bendis quips — but Scarlet Witch came back in a big way in the recent Avengers: The Children’s Crusade miniseries.
“She’s been on a road of almost impossible-to-perceive redemption over the last few years and now is going to come face-to-face with the Avengers,” Bendis says.

Aaron pens the other story in the prologue focusing on Hope Summers, the first mutant born after the Scarlet Witch de-powered all but 198 members of the mutant population worldwide.

Fraction likens her to John Connor from The Terminator: Hope’s been told her entire life that she’s very important to the future by people who think she’s more than just a little girl. “Some people treat her as though she’s a messiah, some people treat her as though she’s a monster, and really she’s just like any 17-year-old kid.”

The prevailing theory among mutants is that she will be the next host of the Phoenix Force when it comes, and the fact that she has green eyes and red hair like the most famous Phoenix of them all, the late X-Man Jean Grey, causes some to feel she may even be Jean Grey reincarnated.

Hope and the Scarlet Witch will finally cross paths, though, because the Phoenix Force is coming and it’s what kicks off the conflict in the first issue of Avengers vs. X-Men.

“The Phoenix Force is the spirit of destruction and rebirth,” Alonso says. “It razes worlds to create something new. It’s bad news if you happen to be living on the world about to be razed. It’s great news if you’re what’s going to be the outcome of that world.”

The X-Men want to protect Hope, and the Avengers want to retrieve her before the Phoenix arrives, but neither group is in a great place when the series starts.

Aaron’s Schism miniseries broke the X-Men in half, with Cyclops and his team in San Francisco preparing young mutants for battle, and Wolverine and his group setting up a school on the East Coast to educate kids about their powers.

The Avengers are not doing much better. They were beaten down in Fraction’s Fear Itself event book, only saving the day when Thor sacrificed his life, and are still feeling the resonant damage. Now, Fraction says, they’re facing a crisis of confidence.

Naturally, the groups’ field generals — the X-Men’s Cyclops and the Avengers’ Captain America— are key to what will happen in the new comic. “Here are two leaders of men with a very specific world view who have been through an awful lot,” Bendis says. “Now they find themselves face-to-face on a very earth-shattering issue that neither of them feels that they can back down from.”

Cyclops has been on a pretty militant stance for a while because of humanity’s hatred for mutants, Aaron says, and part of that is training Hope for the day when the Phoenix may come for her as its host. “If suddenly he’s got Captain America and the Avengers butting their heads into what he considers X-Men business, he’s not necessarily going to take kindly to that.”

The situation also puts the head Avenger in a pickle, says Brubaker, writer of the Captain America series. “How do you be the good guy while also getting into basically a war with a whole race of people?”

The scale of Avengers vs. X-Men also allows the writers to give meaty parts to non-marquee characters such as Black Widow, Nova and Iron Fist. And there are a lot of split allegiances among those who are both Avengers and X-Men, including Beast, Storm and the fan-favorite clawed antihero Wolverine, who — like Cyclops — had a strong emotional connection to Jean Grey. “And he loves beer, which is what I latched on to as a fellow connoisseur of the brew,” Hickman says.

All that internal conflict and external strife is a home run for Avengers vs. X-Men’s creative collective, Fraction says.

“You crush these characters again and again through various different crucibles, and you see what’s left of them at the end. You see if they can still stand up when it’s all said and done. That’s drama.”

Via US Today

Bendis on Secret Invasion

Now that I look at him… he does actually look a lot like a Skrull, doesn’t he? Maybe another writer replaced Bendis after his work on AKA Gokdfish and Sam and Twitch (I know it certainly seems that way to me when I read Mighty Avengers!).

Once a highly respected comic book store employee turned independent comic creator (I truly miss his drawing), Brian Michael Bendis signed a contract with Marvel to develop their ‘Ultimate‘ line of comics in an attempt to drag the company out of impending bankruptcy. The ploy worked with Ultimate Spider-Man, a retelling of the web-spinning wonder told in an entirely new fashion to appeal to new readers, and Bendis went on to destroy and rebuild the Avengers, the cornerstone of the Marvel Universe.

Since that time, his name has evoked both excitement and deridement as his stories either please or anger his readers. It’s a tough gig, make no mistake. The man is writing two of the most high-profile team books in the industry (New Avengers and The Mighty Avengers).

The big B talked to Entertainment Weekly who made him out to be a luminary of the  comics world. It cannot be argued that he is a major pull in comics. He made a major splash with Ultimate Spider-Man (largely rewrites of classic Lee and Ditko material) and his work on Daredevil ranks up with the run by Frank Miller. Yet he does have his detractors. At a comic convention last year a fan asked Editor in Chief Quesada why he gave Bendis a free hand in creating terrible stories, which according to reports was met with more than a little hand-wringing. Bendis himself is aware that his approach to the Avengers is hit and miss with readers, leading to the creation of The Mighty Avengers monthly title to appeal to those who want an old-fashioned team book.

The idea of The Mighty Avengers was sound (if a little suspicious… I mean why not just ‘fix’ New Avengers if there’s a problem?), but while the title started off strong and delivered on its promise of an ‘old fashioned team book,’ now the title is mired with unfunny jokes and his collaborator from Ultimate Spider-Man Mark Bagley turning in some truly bad art (sorry Mark. I love your art, I’m just telling it like it is). Also, whose brilliant idea was it to have pale green text on lemon yellow background as narrative boxes?

It’s not that his bad comics are that bad, really. It’s that his great comics (Daredevil, AKA Goldfish, Torso, Jinx) are so fantastic. But when you write as many comics as Bendis does (currently he writes two Avengers comics, his long-running creator-owned series Powers, Ultimate Spider-Man and now Secret Invasion), it should come as no surprise if the quality of the material suffers.

But I think his heart is in the right place. And he is the first comic book writer to use the David Mamet-style of dialog in his comics, which is a milestone. Let’s just hope his head is in the right place as well and this year’s mega event cross-over proves to be worth the time, money and effort put into it.

(excerpts below)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Nick Fury, a decorated spy working for the counterterrorism group S.H.I.E.L.D. has come back from hiding. Why bring him back?
BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS: I’m really excited about this. We actually took Fury off the table years ago. He was our James Bond. He was our superspy. Our big plot-starter. Why he bailed was as interesting as him bailing. Where did he go? Why did he leave? Did he know this Skrull thing was happening? Did he figure it out? And if he did, is he doing anything about it? So [I address] where he’s been and what he’s been doing. We have two issues that show exactly how the Skrulls went after him. And what Nick Fury does is he comes back, but he comes back with a pile of brand new Marvel characters that we’ve invented. Because if you can’t trust — what’s that line from the Untouchables? — ”If you can’t trust the apples, you don’t pick them off the ground, you pick them off the tree.” So he has brand-new young characters that he’s been training that he can trust, knowing that he can’t trust his old friends [who could actually be Skrulls in disguise].

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How much input did you have in this event, and what kind of directives did Marvel give you?
BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS: I was writing both Avengers books [the New Avengers] and [Mighty Avengers], so I was pretty much there for everything…. I’m also part of that room [in a Marvel retreat that takes place in New York City each year] that decides those things. Me and Jeph Loeb [DC’s Batman: Hush] and Ed Brubaker [Captain America] and Mark Millar [Civil War] are there. We scream and yell at each other — it’s hilarious. You’d literally think that real political agendas that affect the world were being [debated]. In fact, me and Loeb were having at it just at the last retreat.

What were you fighting over?
Skrulls. But that’s what you want. If the idea can survive the room, it can survive the Internet. I’ve got a wife and a mom and people who can be nice to me every day. You need these people to come in and tell you if it sucks.

You’re actually working on some non-comic book projects now, right?
I’m writing a pilot for HBO that’s non-comic book-related that I’m really excited about. It’s crime-y. It’s in the genre. It’s con artists. It goes back to my Goldfish days. You know that movie out now, 21? The MIT kids who figure out how to play blackjack mathematically? This is a college show about Mike Aponte [who’s depicted in the film]. He’s now the No. 1 ranking blackjack guy in the world. I’m also writing a movie for Fox/ New Regency that Zak Penn [who scripted X-Men the Last Stand] is producing. Like a summer thriller thing that matches in tone with Secret Invasion a bit. It’s an original script about the Bermuda Triangle. People haven’t really dealt with this before. It’s got a great history. It’s about the genuine mystery behind it — all the conspiracies. And something bigger happens.

What about your comic-book properties?
Not to be bragging, but I can’t help it — just last week I had lunch with David Fincher, who is my hero. He gave me the update on Torso [which Fincher is directing]. They’ve already done location scouting. It’s heading towards production. They’re negotiating right now with a big movie star. And I don’t know what’s going on with Jinx. I turned in a draft [to Universal a while ago], and they liked it. Small rewrite. Wasn’t bad. It was one of those great experiences. There are directors hovering, and I don’t even know if Charlize Theron [is still attached]. Listen, if she told me to f— myself today, that’s okay. She’s stood around and sold that project for us. It was really cool of her. She cashed in her Oscar golden ticket for us.

Read the entire interview here.