Marvel: Tales To Astonish Documentary Series Announced

Marvel has made headlines today because they have announced a new documentary series they are currently developing. The new documentary series is titled Tales to Astonish. The documentary is a series of 13 minute films that will focus on Marvel’s best known comics. To start off the series they are using Marvel’s most notable story arc Civil War. Civil War was created by Mark Millar and Steve Mcnieven. Marvel is bringing in Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Eric Drath to direct the documentary.

Marvel’s Vice President of Digital Content and Programming spoke about Eric Drath,

” To him Civil War was interesting, because you had two of Marvel’s most major characters squaring off against each other”

” All of us who grew up reading comic books, especially Marvel, we all know that our heroes beat the crap out of each other. But this was interesting to him, and one of the things that led him to this. We started telling him more about the story, and why they were squaring off against each other, and the concept of what the Superhuman Registration Act really meant to the real world that we live in.”

“When I saw Drath’s first cut of the film, I was blown away, Cerilli says. ” When I spoke with Eric about my vision of this, I had certain beats I wanted to hit through the film and he just kind of went with it. I don’t want to reveal everyone he spoke to for this Marvel’s Tales To Astonish short film, but it’s kind of fun the various people who pop up, and start talking about Marvel”

For the Civil War documentary Drath will be interviewing popular Marvel faces such as Joss Whedon and Stan Lee.

The whole point of Marvel’s documentary series is to discuss real life topics, but in Marvel’s own metaphoric way. John Cerli said that the Civil War is actually inspired by the Patriot act. What made Marvel’s Civil War so popular was that it split up two different sides in order to argue about government privacy and intrusion on people’s lives, but in Marvel’s universe its based upon how the superheroes are forced to reveal their identities to the government and work for them, or if they choose not to work with the government they would be branded criminals. Marvel’s Civil war story arc was definitely one of their best.

Marvel is definitely expanding their brand in new ways.

[ Image Via marvel.wikia.com ]