Marvel's Post-Avengers Slate Getting Strange
Posted 06.22.10 by Ryan
Marvel Entertainment struck gold with 2008's Iron Man, even though the character initially lacked the same popularity as other Spider-Man or Wolverine. With Thor and The First Avenger: Captain America slated for the summer of 2011, and The Avengers following in 2012, Marvel has a busy couple years ahead of them, and has no plans of stopping.
In April, a report stated that Marvel and parent company Disney were planning movies for their secondary, less recognizable characters in the lower-budget (for Hollywood, anyway) range of $20-40 million dollars to be shot post-Avengers. Marvel may be altering that plan with another strategy.
Latino Review reports that Marvel intends to make movie shorts, in the range of 5 to 10 minutes, in an effort to popularize characters like Dr. Strange, Luke Cage and Black Panther before giving them their own movies. It is assumed that these shorts will appear before one of the Avengers-related movies.
One of the characters that Marvel is targeting is Dr. Strange, the surgeon turned sorcerer created by Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko in 1963. Deadline reports that Marvel Studios have hired Conan reboot screenwriters Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer to write Dr. Strange, likely the first Marvel movie to be officially distributed by Disney since purchasing Marvel last year. If Marvel can prove audiences will back a Dr. Strange movie, they will be more likely to make it with a larger budget, since the mystical worlds that Dr. Strange inhabits would be harder to produce on a smaller scale.
Marvel also has an Ant-Man movie in the works, with writer/director Edgar Wright set to work on a second draft after his Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opens in August. An adaptation of teenage super-group Runaways is also in the works, with Marvel hiring British TV writer Drew Pearce to write the screenplay in May, and attaching director Peter Sollett in April.