Welcome to Rumor Has It, Player Affinity’s weekly roundup of highly buzzed-about movie rumors circulating throughout Tinseltown. On this week’s docket, we have rumors about The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and The Flash.
How long will it take to watch The Dark Knight Rises?
In 2008, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight came along and took the critics and global movie-going community by storm. Four years later, Nolan’s returning with The Dark Knight Rises, the third and final chapter of his particular Batman saga. “Dark Knight” clocked in at about two and a half hours, but Stuart Oldham, new editor for Variety, tweeted that—according to unnamed sources—the “running time [for ‘Rises’] is just over 2 hours.”
It’s not as if we’d complain about sitting through 150 minutes of another Nolan-helmed Batman installment, but two hours does seem a bit short for such a highly anticipated project.
What can we expect in a sequel to The Avengers?
Marvel’s lavish unveiling of film properties leading up to The Avengers suggests a healthy cinematic future for the studio. Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 have already been set up for releases next year, but what about a follow-up to “Avengers?” After all, this is the property for which Marvel has appropriately high hopes.
It’s likely that “Avengers” will have no trouble breaking records faster than you can ask, “The Hunger What?”, but apparently Marvel has done little to no planning for a sequel. Deriving from Cine PREMIERE, Comic Book Movie relays that nothing’s set in stone in relation to an “Avengers” follow-up.
Here’s what Kevin Feige, head of Marvel Studios, had to say about a sequel:
"No plans for now and the advantage is that none of these characters are part of the core team. The contracts are very clear and there has been no pressure to get them back, but never say never, because four years ago this was a dream so who knows what might happen in the future."
The Flash movie might happen after all.
It feels like an eternity since we’ve heard any movement on a movie about DC Comics’ The Flash. Warner Bros. planned to make a cinematic world out of its properties much like Marvel has with Iron Man, Thor, and the aforementioned “Avengers,” but the dismal box-office returns for the Ryan Reynolds-led Green Lantern gave little hope to such a dream becoming a reality.
Even so, Wrath of the Titans co-writer Dan Mazeau, who penned a draft for The Flash, told Blastr that Warner Bros. still has interest in taking the light-footed superhero to the silver screen:
"I think Warner Bros. is finalizing their strategy of how they want to roll out their DC superheroes, and obviously they've got Batman in an incredibly great place, and Green Lantern, I think, performed okay. I think they probably would have liked it to have done better, but yeah, there is still a whole lot of excitement for the DC universe, and I know The Flash is very high on the list.
It's like anything, though. It has to come together with the right cast. It has to come together with the right director and sort of the right moment, and so they're trying to push the rock up the hill ... hopefully there will be some news soon, but right now I can't really say anything else."
