ChristopherGolden Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It seems the entire comic book and film world "misread" Warner Bros' announcement that they were angling to make Superman's reboot a gloomier one. No one seems to have read the original article slowly enough -- not even MTV, Kevin Smith, Christopher Golden, Jeph Loeb, Steven T. Seagle, or Mark Waid.

The wonderful geeks over on MTV's Splash Page chased down all the above, and asked them what they thought about the studio's latest plans for the Man of Steel. The funniest and most extreme reaction isn't Smith's, it's Golden's! "How stupid is that? That announcement made my head spin . . . Making a dark and gritty Superman movie because Dark Knight made a ton of money is incredibly stupid." Oddly, Smith is actually more tempered in his comments, and that he was all for a reboot. "You always have to always keep Superman very distinct from Batman ... Superman is about the hope in people, the good in people, whereas Batman is about the more driven, hungry for justice angry side of us. [So] I don't know if doing a dark Superman is the approach."

The lone dissenting voice is Seagle, not surprising from the man who penned It's a Bird ... and feels that Superman has always been a dark character. "Heroic struggles are basically all dark in tone. The idea of 'villains' implies something bad happening to good people most of the time, and that's dark. Heroes look brighter emerging from dire consequence successfully." Ultimately, I think Waid's the man who speaks for the majority of us in arguing that you can make Superman's world darker, but not the character, who's "a creature of hope." If Warner Bros goes in that direction, I can get behind it. A bright and shining Superman against a depraved and unjust world might be just what the reboot ordered.

Lately it seems that everyone loves a bloodsucker. Variety reports that David Goyer has signed to direct the adaptation of the graphic novel, Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. Phew, that title certainly is a mouthful. Baltimore was written by Hellboy creator, Mike Mignola (and finally after what seemed like an eternity to Hellboy fans; we are getting our sequel, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, this summer) and Christopher Golden. It looked like Goyer was going to take a break from comic books for a while when he was attached to The Invisible Man this summer, but it seems he just can't stay away.

The story centers on one Lord Henry Baltimore, turned into a vampire on the battlefields of Europe during WWII. The curse eventually causes the death of his loved ones and he assembles a team to hunt down and destroy evil. Both Golden and Mignola will be on hand to write the script for the big-screen version. This will be the third adaptation deal for Golden, according to Variety, who has some previous experience in scripting the undead after writing dialogue for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds video game back in 2003.

Regency Pictures brokered the deal for the adaptation as part of their new strategy to make films that will appeal "to a young male demographic" -- is there any other kind lately? Some of Regency's other titles this year will be the Virgin Comics title Virulents, directed by John Moore, and an action thriller titled The Darkest Hour. Goyer is set to start work on Magneto as soon as budgets and locations have been finalized (if you can't wait for 2008 though, there are always the spoilers that Chris reported on earlier this month). So, I'm guessing that production on Baltimore will probably be a long time coming.