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20 Feb

Why Must a Marvel Movie Be “Good”?

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This article contains one Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania spoiler No one’s giving out cool points for liking a Marvel movie. The MCU remains incredibly popular and the highest-grossing film franchise of all time, making over $28.5 billion at the global box office and counting. We’re currently 31 films deep in Marvel Studios’ sprawling cinematic universe, where no less than three Ant-Man projects now exist after the release of this month’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Go back in time and tell that to someone who just watched Howard the Duck; they’d laugh in your face. The MCU has become…

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20 Feb

Jennifer’s Body Star Slams the Movie’s Marketing

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If you were a straight guy in the late 2000s, you probably thought Jennifer’s Body was made for you. The movie’s poster featured Megan Fox, established by Transformers and numerous magazines as the “hot girl” of the moment, kicking back atop a school desk wearing a miniskirt and high heels. Shots of a nude Fox emerging from the water filled the tv spots and trailers, as did double-entendres about how Jennifer “goes both ways.” If you were a straight guy who watched Jennifer’s Body in the late 2000s, you saw that the movie wasn’t about you at all. Yes, it…

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20 Feb

The Flash Movie Moment That Brings Back Michael Keaton’s Original Idea for ‘Batman 3’

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Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Batman is in The Flash movie. Although the film stars Ezra Miller as the Barry Allen of two worlds, the movie also features not only Ben Affleck’s Batman of the Snyderverse but the return of Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight. With his appearance in the canceled Batgirl movie all but buried, The Flash will mark the first time Keaton has donned the cape and cowl since 1992’s Batman Returns. But a Batcave shot included in a recent TV spot for the film hints at a longer legacy for Keaton’s Batman, one that we…

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20 Feb

Leprechaun: How Jennifer Aniston, Halloween, and Wayne’s World Led to a Box Office Hit

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. Get your copy here. In 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween ushered in the era of the slasher movie. The film was responsible for something else, too. Over the next 15 years, any number of weird and wonderful horror movies popped up inspired by notable dates in the calendar. Friday the 13th, Mother’s Day, My Bloody Valentine, and April Fool’s Day all cashed in on the concept. It was against this backdrop that TV writer Mark Jones came up with the most brilliantly bizarre entry of them all: Leprechaun. “Back in the 1980s,…

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20 Feb

Every Time We Got the ‘Scariest Movie Ever’ (By Year)

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We are only a matter of weeks into 2023, but a strong contender for the title of “scariest movie” in some folks’ minds has already emerged in Skinamarink. The idea of the “scariest movie ever,” i.e. a horror film that generates word-of-mouth buzz, might seem like a modern concept but it actually goes back nearly a century. One of the first examples can be traced back to 1932 and the tastefully titled Freaks, a movie centered around a beautiful trapeze artist who schemes to steal a side-show performer’s inheritance only to be thwarted by his deformed cohorts. Featuring real life…

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19 Feb

How Quantumania Sets Up Ant-Man 4 and Young Avengers

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This article contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. By the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and his superhero family have defeated Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors)—this version of him, anyway—restored freedom to the denizens of the Quantum Realm, and returned home safe and sound. But while Scott has learned that a superhero can never rest on their laurels, and that there are always more battles to be fought, he also expresses unease about the future, a future in which Kang warned him that terrible things are coming. The end credits scenes certainly…

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18 Feb

Remembering When Raquel Welch Elevated The Three Musketeers

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Later in life, Raquel Welch would occasionally acknowledge that Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) provided her with the best reviews of her career. And it’s hard to argue. Prior to those successful, and slyly subversive, reworkings of Alexandre Dumas’ most famous novel, Welch was known as the sex symbol of the ’60s. She was the redhead in the fur bikini of One Million Years B.C. (1966); the poster image that was so iconic her figure became the primary sales pitch for a movie about dinosaurs! The bombshell persona opened the doors of Hollywood, but…

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17 Feb

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Ending Explained

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This article contains heavy spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania “Without the me, without the TVA… everything burns.” With those chilling words from the finale of Loki season one, He Who Remains set the new stakes of the MCU. The multiverse was held in tenuous balance by He Who Remains, and when a vengeful Sylvie killed him, she exposed the multiverse to its greatest threat: his own Variant, Kang the Conquerer.  Given He Who Remain’s grandiloquence, it’s more than a little surprising that the first line of defense against Kang’s incursion would be Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne,…

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17 Feb

Scream 6 Team Is ‘Relieved’ Franchise Returns to Numeral Titles

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The Scream franchise is an anomaly in the realm of horror. Despite being so long in the tooth that it can now claim six movies to its name—plus an MTV television show—the series has remained remarkably consistent. The original four movies were all directed by the same genre maestro, Wes Craven, and the new 2020s iterations, overseen by the creative collective Radio Silence, have carried on Craven’s tradition, right down to including the screenwriter of three of the four original movies, Kevin Williamson, as an executive producer and featuring all of the main protagonists from 1996 in at least one…

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17 Feb

Quantumania’s Kang the Conqueror Will ‘Affect Every Corner of the MCU’

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This article contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. “I have so many names…” Yes, that’s Al Pacino speaking as the titular fallen angel in The Devil’s Advocate. But the line may apply just as well to Kang the Conqueror, the new supervillain played by Jonathan Majors in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, who’s poised to menace the Avengers and the MCU from now until at least 2026—when some kind of massive showdown will take place in Avengers: Secret Wars. Of course regular MCU viewers have already met one version of Kang previously thanks to the last episode of…

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17 Feb

Marvel’s Thunderbolts Team Will Have a Surprising Leader

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This article contains MCU spoilers. James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has gone through a lot in the MCU. He was captured and tortured by Hydra before falling off a train in Captain America: The First Avenger. He was presumed dead for decades before he was revealed to be the Winter Soldier, a brainwashed Hydra assassin in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He was framed for the murder of T’Challa’s (Chadwick Boseman) father and the bombing of the U.N. in Captain America: Civil War. He was forced into couples therapy with Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) in The Falcon and the…

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17 Feb

The Star Wars and Sci-Fi Influences of Marvel’s Quantumania

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Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but Ant-Man’s raised the ante by leaving behind his first two movies there. Aside from a brief opening sequence in the Bay Area, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania takes place wholly in the Quantum Realm, the mysterious subatomic universe that lies beneath our reality—and a whole lot of others, as it turns out. As a result, Quantumania looks and feels nothing like 2015’s Ant-Man or 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, which take place almost entirely in and around the streets of San Francisco (old-school TV fans will see what we…

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17 Feb

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey Director Wants to Make Evil Superman Movie Next

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Regardless of your interest in a movie about Pooh Bear and Piglet slaughtering scantily-clad hot tub enjoyers, there’s no denying that Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey offers a compelling look at the future of storytelling. For decades, the Walt Disney Corporation has controlled stories about Pooh and the gang from the Hundred Acre Wood, overtaking in the public consciousness even depictions by the characters’ creators A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard.  But when their 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain in 2022, creatives like Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield got the chance to put their own spin on the willy…

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17 Feb

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Post-Credits Scenes Explained

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This post contains heavy spoilers for Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania Despite some worries that Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania would abandon the laid-back attitude of the previous two movies starring Scott Lang, the latest MCU entry managed to be a pretty light adventure. Until the mid-credit scene, that is. That’s where we learn that Kang isn’t really gone and that the heroes of Earth will need to assemble a lot more than an army of ants.  The Kang that battles Ant-Man and the Wasp comes to the Quantum Realm after being exiled by some mysterious group who he only…

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16 Feb

The Marvels Will Feature Callback to Big Avengers Moment

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The first Avengers movie may feel like small potatoes now compared to the increasing scope of the MCU’s Multiverse Saga. But even as we see more and more heroes team-up to fight against forces that seek to control the multiverse, there’s no denying the impact that The Avengers still has on fans to this day. Maybe it’s because I was fourteen when I saw it for the first time, but the now iconic shot of the original six Avengers standing together during the Battle of New York is seared in my memory to this day as one of the coolest…

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16 Feb

Ant-Man 3 Star Kathryn Newton on “Messy” Cassie Lang and What’s Next After Marvel

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. Get your copy here. Kathryn Newton is having the opposite of a quarter-life crisis. Never one to shy away from setting ambitious goals, she told herself that “if you don’t get to be a Marvel superhero by the age of 25, get something else going—don’t quit acting, but find something else, go back to college.” So what a birthday gift it is to hit that career milestone right under the wire: The actress, who has been working in Hollywood almost her entire life, will turn 26 while jetting between premieres…

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16 Feb

Shazam! Fury of the Gods Brings Back the “Shazamily”: Inside DC’s New Superhero Adventure

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. Get your copy here. It was just four years ago when DC‘s youngest superhero burst onto the screen in David F. Sandberg’s delightful Shazam! Since then, the world has changed in unimaginable ways. But when Den of Geek magazine speaks to the director of the comedic superhero romp and its upcoming sequel, he shares that the story of Billy Batson and his superheroic adult alter ego has been his one constant. “It’s kind of weird because I haven’t done anything else in between. I did Shazam and then [the sequel]…

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16 Feb

Ant-Man 3: What Marvel Movies and TV Shows Do You Need to Watch Before Quantumania

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You’ve all heard the complaint. Hell, some of you have probably even voiced it (maybe even in our comments). The continuity of the MCU is getting too tricky to keep up with, especially since they’ve started releasing something like four TV shows a year on Disney+ in addition to multiple big screen movies. Add that to the fact that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is the third flick in the Ant-Man series alone, not to mention the 30-something chapter of the MCU as a whole (if you count the TV shows), well, we get it. And we want to help.…

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16 Feb

Scream 6’s Brutal NYC Trip: “You Can’t Trust Anyone” This Time

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This article appears in the next issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. Get your copy here. A little over a year ago, an old friend to horror fans (and a scourge to their onscreen counterparts) returned to cinemas in a big way. After being gone for more than a decade, Ghostface slayed again in Scream (or “Scream 5,” as everyone, including its directors, calls it). And the fiend really did make a killing: at the box office, with fans, and with a majority of critics. Curiously, there is something comforting about seeing the same Edvard Munch-inspired Halloween mask and hearing the familiar voice…

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16 Feb

How the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey Horror Movie Even Exists

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“I loved Winnie the Pooh as a kid!” exclaims Rhys Frake-Waterfield. “I think everybody does.” Indeed, most people would agree with that statement about the guileless toy bear who embarked on imaginary adventures with his fellow plush animals and human pal Christopher Robin.  But then again, not everybody is making their feature film debut with Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. The movie stars Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell as Pooh and Piglet, who are now all grown up and bent on revenge against Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) after he left them to starve in the Hundred Acre Wood. Fueled with…

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