Once upon a time, there was a sub-par action-comedy movie called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Based on a script by Joss Whedon, the movie is now known best for having served as a precursor to the television show of the same name. Now, the original Buffy movie’s director is planning a remake… without Joss Whedon or Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I have to say that I think this is a spectacularly stupid idea. The plan is to abandon the current canon and create an alternate universe for the story, much like Star Trek did earlier this year, and its original creator has been dead for quite a while. The problem is that Star Trek is now 40+ years old. Buffy has been off of television for barely more than six years. The original creator, whose writing is generally acknowledged as being the reason that Buffy was so beloved, is alive and well (and making Dollhouse).

Here’s the biggest problem, though — there’s no reason to remake Buffy, especially if one is planning to ignore the show’s storyline. Other Buffy fans may be annoyed by my saying this, but the basic Buffy mythology simply isn’t that special. The specifics of Buffy’s origins may be unique, but a super-human girl fighting vampires (which is, really, the only part of the mythology that the Kazuis really seem to want to harness)? I could go to the fantasy/science fiction section of any bookstore and find you a half dozen books and/or series that have almost exactly that premise.

It’s not even like they need the Buffy name to get people to buy tickets to the movie. There are enough people out there who’ll pay to see anything vampire related (see: Twilight) that the movie can be pretty successful without the Buffy name (and, honestly, enough of those might be turned off by the idea of Buffy without Joss (much less Buffy without Sarah Michelle Gellar) that they’d be better off without the name).

Of course, you could get all of those people at once. Get a budget together, let Joss write and direct, and create a Fray movie with the idea of creating a franchise in mind. That would be at least as good an idea as this stupid Buffy relaunch plan.

Last night, my wife and I did a bit of babysitting so that a couple of friends could have a date night. The older of the two boys we were watching has a huge collection of the Hasbro Super Hero Squad (and whatever the Star Wars line of those things are) toys. At one point, I noticed a Spider-Man toy sitting on the counter. Then, I noticed that Spider-Man’s webshooters were on the outside of his costume. Further examination revealed that this wasn’t Peter Parker, Spider-Man… it was Ben Reilly. My joy at this discovery was made even better when our charge for the night told me, “That’s Ben Reilly, Clone of Spider-Man. He saved Spider-Man’s life.” (His parents are definitely doing something right.)

Here’s a real quick aside for people who might stumble across this blog that don’t know comic book history (or those who don’t know me personally). Back in the ’90s, Marvel comics dredged up an old ’70s story in which a clone of Spider-Man was made. They brought back that clone, created him as a new hero (Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider), and then, in an exceptionally ill-advised move, decided to claim that the clone was actually the original Spider-Man. He even replaced Spider-Man for a little while, before they realized how ill-advised it was, and they brought back Peter Parker and killed off Ben when he saved Peter’s life. Ben, in his relatively short time in the comics, managed to somehow usurp Peter’s place as my favorite comic book character. I was very, very angry by his death, and even more so about the fact that Marvel seemed to have handed down an edict that no one could ever mention Ben Reilly again (as though the character himself, rather than their stupid decision to try to make him the original was the cause for the reaction of the fans).

Wow. That wasn’t as quick an aside as I thought.

Anyway, there’s been some sign in recent years that they’d softened their stance on Ben somewhat. A Ben Reilly (not a clone, just a lab assistant) showed up in the Ultimate Universe. Peter used the name Ben Reilly when trying to keep his job after unmasking during the Civil War debacle (was that really more than two years ago now?!). Now, there’s a Ben-as-Spider-Man toy… and, even better, a Ben-as-Scarlet-Spider (Oddly, that one’s also labelled “Ben Reilly Spider-Man”, but it’s the Scarlet Spider costume)!!!

I’ve mentioned, myself, that I hoped that Brand New Day could be used to bring back Ben to the comics, but in the meantime, I’m pretty happy to just have him show up in toys.

I had planned to let yesterday’s post be the last Star Trek post, but since it garnered an actual comment (two, technically, but both from the same person), I’ve decided to continue with the Star Trek posts for one more day.

According to MSN, Star Trek brought in about 50% more money opening weekend than Paramount had projected, coming in at $76.5 million. Unfortunately, that still puts it behind Wolverine‘s (*spit*) opening weekend of $87 million.

In the article above, I found this to be the most interesting point:

“It’s the same weekend drop as (‘X-Men: The Last Stand’), the last one. That tends to be what fan-based movies do,” said Chris Aronson, senior vice president of domestic distribution for 20th Century Fox. “To have $130 million in the first 10 days is sensational. We think we withstood the attack of ‘Star Trek,’ if you will, and will settle into a long, successful run.”

Here’s something else that The Last Stand had in common with Wolverine: it sucked (at least in comparison to the first two Xmen movies). The first X-men movie, which was very good, dropped 56.92% after the first week. The second X-men movie, which was excellent, dropped 53.21%. The Last Stand dropped 66.89%, and Wolverine dropped 68.26%. Note that those last two numbers are significantly higher than the first two. But, weren’t those as “fan-based” as the others? Why does Chris Aronson only compare Wolverine to The Last Stand? Could it be that he’s just trying to spin the drop in Wolverine‘s receipts?

Of course, I’m probably just reading more into this than I should; Star Trek is probably a big contributor to Wolverine’s drop, more so than the fact that Wolverine sucked.

My wife and I went to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine Saturday night, and I have to say that I was very disappointed. As I was walking out of the theater, my impression was that this movie did a bunch of things wrong, but it’s altogether possible that my disappointment was because I expected something that this movie was never intended to be.

If you’ve seen the commercials, you might be expecting something a little bit like the first three X-men movies (which, in truth, were pretty much just Wolverine movies with a more developed supporting cast), with Team X (including Deadpool?) standing in for the X-men. That’s not what you’re going to get. In truth, this is more like the Forrest Gump of superhero movies. Wolverine’s story briefly touches on the stories of the characters shown in the commercials, but only briefly, which makes their use in the commercials seem a bit… dishonest. Most of the other characters in the movie play very short roles, with the exceptions of the movie’s two main villains, Victor Creed (Sabretooth) and William Stryker^[a].

This movie was a huge disappointment, but I’m still cautiously optimistic about the proposed next installment in the X-men Origins series, Magneto.

One other quick note before I jump into spoilers. I wasn’t quite able to separate my disappointment in their treatment of the other characters from my appreciation of the movie’s other qualities, but my wife said it was a decent action movie. She did point out, however, that the fact that the hero and most of the other main characters in the movie can’t actually be hurt takes a lot of the dramatic tension away.

Now… spoilers.

More …

1. The next two largest roles are Kayla Silverfox and Gambit. Silverfox is believed to be dead for a major portion of the movie, and Gambit isn’t even introduced until pretty late in the game. Even then, Gambit’s biggest contribution (outside of the initial fight that any two superheroes must have on their first encounter) is flying Wolverine from New Orleans to Three-Mile Island. [↩]

As you may or may not be aware, Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada hates the Peter/Mary Jane marriage in Spider-Man comics. Under his reign, it has been “ended” a few times.

She was killed. Fans protested. She came back.
He forced the writers to then have her leave Peter. Fans protested. She came back.

Now, Quesada handed down from on high a new plan to get rid of the marriage. In One More Day, Peter and Mary Jane made a deal with the devil Mephisto that would essentially erase their marriage from history (though some part of their souls would remember, causing them agony for eternity, which is what he gets out of the deal).

Fans are, as you might have guessed (indeed, as anyone might’ve guessed, except, maybe Quesada), not happy. Eric Burns explains why:

The expectations for mainstream comics really aren’t that hard. We expect there to be attractive people with exaggerated physiques. We expect them to generally have bad fashion choices. We expect there to be a significant conflict, and we hope that will highlight an inner conflict. Some punching generally goes on. Our hero is put on the ropes. Terrible things happen to him. And then at the last possible moment he rallies, he finds a way, he pushes through and he wins. Good takes the gold. evil gets the silver at the most.

Seem overly simplistic? It is. But it’s also implicit. Read any DC or Marvel Comic from the thirties through to the nineties, and you’ll see those mechanisms in play. Even into the nineties, these were the guiding principles of the form. Horrible things happened, but ultimately, the hero wins and the villain loses. Luthor might become the President of the United States, but at the very end of the day he’s wearing a Kryptonian Battlesuit and trading punches with the Man of Steel, with Superman taking him down and breaking all his evil plots. At the end of the day, we expect the X-Men to leave the field with their heads held high. We expect the Green Goblin to go to prison (or worse). We expect the Red Skull to fail.

…

Only this time, they pushed the reset button. The Devil came, forced him to sacrifice his happiness and life, left his (now never-was) wife to suffer for it, restored his secret identity and wiped clean all the stuff that happened, and then oh hey, it’s a Brand New Day!

The covenant was broken. Terrible things happened, over and over and over, and finally the ultimate villain showed up, and he won. And because this was all out of editorial edict to erase something… well, something wildly popular. (Okay, I admit it, I don’t get that at all), Spider-Man loses. He loses everything. And all the crap that had become his life got washed away in the least satisfying way possible.

That’s all part of a rather large post about our expectations when we sit down to be entertained that I found pretty interesting, and the post before that one addresses retconning. That’s not really what I want to talk about, though. What I want to talk about is how Marvel can redeem itself.

You see, one of the features of the storyline following One More Day is that slightly more than the marriage has changed. For example, as this review of the first issue of Brand New Day points out, Harry Osborn, whose death has fed a lot of storylines in recent years (including the resurrection of Norman Osborne), is still alive.

Here’s the thing. Several years of storyline were written off as attempts by Norman Osborne to torture Spider-Man because (in part) Spider-Man had “killed” his son ^[a]. The end result of that torture was that Peter thought he was a clone for a while until the person he thought was the real Peter died and was himself revealed to be a clone.

If Harry didn’t die, there’s no reason for Norman to manipulate Seward Trainer into bringing Ben Reilly back to NYC (because that was all retconned into a plot by Norman to get his hands on Peter’s baby, even though the plot had started before said baby was even conceived, as I recall). If Seward didn’t bring Ben back to NYC, he never died. He’s still running around the country somewhere, doing his nomad thing.

This is the perfect opportunity for Marvel to get me buying comics again — bring back Ben! He could be a sort of nomad-superhero; I’d prefer he call himself the Scarlet Spider, but I’ll take what I can get. After a year or so of that book, the revived Ben could know something is wrong, sort of how the revived Hawkeye did in the House of M storyline. He’d come to NYC, visit Dr. Strange or Mr. Fantastic, they’d figure out what Mephisto did, and fix it. Ben could be revived as a hero in the Marvel Universe, and the marriage would be fixed.

Yeah, it’s just a pipe dream, but c’mon. It could happen.

1. No, he didn’t really kill him, but Norman’s not exactly sane [↩]