Marvel Releases Details On 2014 Blockbuster Movie Lineup
Marvel Comics’ parent company, Disney, is getting fans pumped up for 2014, releasing details of Marvel’s upcoming movie slate just in time for New Year’s Eve, highlighted by the much-anticipated superhero sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The three big Marvel movies on the 2014 Disney slate are the second entry in the Captain America series, the science-fiction adventure Guardians of the Galaxy, and the 3D animated epic, Big Hero 6, according to the comics news site Newsarama.
There will be at least one more big Marvel movie hitting screens in 2014. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the second installment in the rebooted series about Marvel’s beloved webslinger, is scheduled to hit your local multiplex on May 2. But that film comes under the auspices of Columbia Pictures, a subsidiary of Sony, due to a rights deal that existed before Disney bought out Marvel in 2009.
The rebooted Spider-Man follows three entries in Sony’s previous Marvel series, which starred Toby Maguire as Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man. The new version stars 30-year-old British actor Andrew Garfield as the teenage superhero.
The “Winter Soldier” of Captain America: The Winter Soldier is none other than Captain America’s World War II-era boy sidekick, Bucky. But, starting in 2004, comic book scribe Ed Brubaker, then writing Marvel Comics’ regular monthly Captain America comic book, reimagined Bucky as a shadowy, morally ambiguous secret agent.
The latter-day version of Bucky will be portrayed in the film by 30-year-old Romanian-born actor Sebastian Stan, best-known to the fan community for his role in the ABC TV fantasy drama, Once Upon A Time. ABC is also owned by Disney.
In the upcoming movie, to grace American movie screens starting April 4, “Winter Soldier” Bucky, as seen in the above photo, wears shaggy, long hair and a menacing mask over the lower part of his face — reminiscent of the villain Bane in 2012’s Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, from Marvel’s arch-rival DC Comics and its parent studio, Warner Bros.
Guardians of the Galaxy is a space epic which, Disney says in the information released this week, “expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt.”
The film is inspired by a Marvel series that began in 2008, which was itself a reboot of Marvel’s 1969 comic book of the same name. Fans will have to wait until August to catch the big screen version of the Guardians.
Finally, Marvel has brought on board one of the most prominent directors in animation to help guide the Big Hero 6 film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Chris Williams, the Oscar-nominated co-director and co-writer of the 2008 animated feature Bolt, will now co-direct the action-comedy about “robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, who must save the city of San Francisco from a criminal plot with the help of a robot, Baymax,” along with Disney veteran Don Hall.
Big Hero 6 has a scheduled release date from Marvel of November 7.
