Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

San Diego is now roughly 800% less nerdy we have some actual Marvel news. And it’s… embroidered?! Alasdair’s pulling on the threads.

Let’s rip the ‘WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE THIS WAY DOOMSDAY?!’ plaster off first shall we? The cast showed up which was great. Ryan Reynolds showed up as Deadpool asking if there was room for anyone else in reshoots which was cute and the exact level of enormously irritating everything about this movie has been so far. Oh, and even better, you know how the trailer we got was mostly groups of people in circular rooms looking worried? Yeah, the SDCC crowd got a trailer with narrative stakes and actual emotion behind it. Great. Super. THANKS, LADS. Great work.

The single elaborately embroidered moment that didn’t mash the ‘OH COME ON’ button so hard the casing cracked was Robert Downey Jr’s jacket. It was covered un Latverian runes which, when translated, kick down to:

THERE IS NO PROMISE OF TOMORROW
REVENGE
JUSTICE
SXSW DOM LATVERIA COFFEE (Oh I’m annoyed again)

And on the cuffs

TO THE VICTOR
GO THE SPOILS

Outside the Doomsdy-a-thon, their other announcements were both very interesting. Black Panther III is confirmed, which is one of the worst kept secrets in the MCU but it’s nice to see it go public. And it stars David Jonsson!

Beloved in these parts for his work in Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus and The Long Walk, Jonsson has extraordinary physical presence, natural authority, enormous comic timing and can bring a determined sadness and authority to a role. He is perfect for the job and his announcement also indirectly confirms something about Doomsday. Jonsson will be playing Prince T’Challa, T’Challa’s son. We last saw him as a child a couple of years ago. The fact he’s now a full adult man suggests we’re getting some major timeline shifts in the wake of Latveria’s favourite multiversal mechanic messing around under the hood. We’ll find out in two years so they’re absolutely in preproduction now.

Then there’s Ghost Rider! Which means I get, at last, to link to this:

You know, looking back, one of my favourite songs from The Crow soundtrack being about a character The Crow is in no way related to feels like a meta-fictional omen for my life I did not see coming…

Anyway, Shawn Levy, responsible for all sorts of fun like The Adam Project, Deadpool & Wolverine and the upcoming Star Wars: Starfighter, is reuniting with world’s most employed Ryan, Ryan Gosling, to bring Ghost Rider to the MCU! Again! Sort of! Gabriel Luna was excellent in Agents of SHIELD as the Robbie Reyes incarnation of the character and with the slate wipe in Doomsday looking very likely I feel like the least we deserve is Agents of SHIELD coming in from the cold.

It’s excellent news, but like so much with Marvel, right now, it’s also frustrating. In the run up to SDCC, Kevin Feige shrugged and admitted that Blade was very likely to not happen. It got so close that a 1920s-set version had got to costume fittings and, rumour has, it set design before it pivoted away from that. The costumes ended up being used by Sinners by the way.

So while I’m always happy to see Ghost Rider, it’s a little difficult to not look at this news and the Blade non-news and, once again, get enormously frustrated. And also, a little doubtful. After all, this is exactly how Blade was announced, years ago…

Anyway, let’s assume it does land and I’m sure it’ll be fun when it does.