The Screengrab

As everyone with a pulse and the patience to sit through endless special effects credits knows by now, both Iron Man  and The Incredible Hulk have featured in-continuity teasers at the end which are meant to prepare audiences for Marvel Studios' upcoming Avengers movie, in which the characters (as well as those from yet-to-be-released Marvel projects like The Mighty Thor, Captain America and Ant-Man) will all come together as Earth's mightiest super-team.  It's still unclear whether or not the Hulk will be a hero in the film or the villain, but it's sure that Marvel will continute to take the same intertwined, big-event approach to their movies that they did (with great success) with their comics.    All of which begs the question  what does Stan Lee think of all this?

Stan "The Man", editor-in-chief, head writer, and co-creator of the lion's share of Marvel titles during their most productive (and profitable) period, has always been an enthusiastic interview and an outspoken character with lots to say about how his characters are handled onscreen.  Now 83 years old, he's clearly looking forward to at least another two decades of goofy cameos in Marvel films, and he even drops some amusing anecdotes in this USA Todayinterview about the Avengers project.   There's the news that romance novel cover boy Fabio once auditioned for the role of Thor; the oft-told genesis of the Astonishing Ant-Man; and how Nick Fury owes his existence to Stan's low boredom threshhold.

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You'd think that Hollywood would have learned its lesson by now, but no:  another major release starring Edward Norton, another script controversy.  

As Anne Thompson reports in Variety, during the pre-production stages of the new Incredible Hulk movie, the fledgling Marvel Studios made the mistake of letting time slip away from them until they were put in the position of offering Norton a screenwriting credit (as well as an unbilled producer's role) in order to get him on board.  Unfortunately for everyone within a gamma bomb blast radius of the film, the movie already had a screenwriter (Zak Penn) and a producer/director (Louis Leterrier) with ideas of their own, and by the time the movie finally opened, we were treated to the hauntingly familiar sight of Norton appearing on talk shows to complain about how his vision for the movie was bastardized by studio hacks.

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Recently, our own Phil Nugent took a look at the debut of Marvel Studios, the big-screen production arm of the comics company behind Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.  While Marvel's been taking a critical beating lately with its flagship comics, losing retail ground to longtime rival DC, the opposite has been the case in the multiplex:  Marvel's aggressive approach and multifaceted marketing has proven to be a success at the box office, and as a rule, Marvel's properties have outperformed DC's and brought in piles of cash for the company.   

One of the reasons that Marvel became such a hit amongst comics fans in the 1960s was its 'multiverse' approach; unlike DC, which at the time told all their stories in a disconnected, separate manner, Marvel ran with the pretense that all their stories were taking place in the same world, at the same time, and pushed the idea that any one of their characters could show up in any of their titles.  Fans took to the idea that all the stories were connected, that all the pieces mattered, and that what happened in one book made a difference in other books.  The idea that the world of the Marvel Universe was unified and that the storytellers were actually creating pieces of a whole was so appealing that DC was forced to adopt it as an editorial policy for their own characters.  

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If you're one of the many ticketbuyers who saw Iron Man this past weekend, Marvel Studios thanks you: you helped get the comic-book company's plans to produce its own line of self-generating comic-book movies off to a soaring start. (The name "Marvel Studios" has appeared in each of the movies based on Marvel's licensed characters going back to the 1998 Blade, but Iron Man is the first that wasn't a "co-production" basically funded by a major studio.) But those who declined to stay until the end of the voluminous closing credits missed Iron Man's final scene, which is not so much a revelation as a marketing tie-in. As seen in this YouTube-posted video, which judging from the crowd noise on the soundtrack may not be entirely copyright-protected, Iron Man ends with Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark, who is already known to make a drop-in appearance in the forthcoming The Hulk, receiving a visit from Colonel Nick Fury, played by one the few living American actors who might convincingly chew nails, who seems to be out on a late-night recruiting drive for the Avengers. The Avengers, the ever-shifting superhero team whose core membership has included Iron Man, the Hulk, the mighty Thor, and that dipshit Hawkeye, have been slated for their own movie next year; Iron Man's Jon Favreau has expressed an interest in directing.

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