As much as I love art-house cinema and foreign language films, I also do love comic book movies, and it’s no secret that I am highly anticipating Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger. the studio is going to show the first footage from the movie during the Super Bowl on Sunday, and now Empire Magazine, has released a few new images of Chris Evans (Captain America), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Richard Armitage (Heinz Kruger), Natalie Dormer (Private Lorraine), and Tommy Lee Jones. (Col. Chester Phillips). You can see the images spread out within the post.
In other news, Samuel L. Jackson revealed news of the appearance of his character Nick Fury in the Captain America film while on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon saying, “In the next month or so, I have to do one day on Thor, and I gotta do another day on Captain America, and in April we start The Avengers — the big deal with everybody. Thor and Captain America are pretty much done, but I haven’t done my part in them yet. I’m just connective tissue for them to join The Avengers”.
Samuel Jackson went on to hint that Nick Fury will apparently have a female companion of sorts saying, “I gotta screen test like five actresses on Friday. They have this new character that’s my sidekick or something, that’s with me all the time”.
The Avengers originally consisted of Ant-Man (Dr. Hank Pym), Wasp (Janet Van Dyne), Thor, Iron Man (Tony Stark), and the Hulk while the original Captain America was only discovered by the team in issue #4. The movie however is called Captain America: The First Avenger, so clearly they filmmakers aren’t following the actual origin story, but it’s safe to bet that if there would be an appearance of a female character, it is most likely to be The Wasp.
Marvel has been trying to tie together each of the stand alone superhero outings to lead up to The Avengers movie in the future. So far Nick Fury has a surprise cameo at the end of Iron Man, and Tony Stark mentioned the “Avengers Initiative” in The Incredible Hulk. We’ve also seen hints Captain America’s shield in Iron Man 2 and the locating of Thor’s hammer after the credits.
But where does that leave Dr. Hank Pym? Well we know Edgar Wright’s next project is the Ant Man movie, but considering he hasn’t started any pre-production we can only assume his character won’t appear in any of the pervious Marvel films until they figure out who exactly they are casting. Wright spoke to Superherohype a while back and had this to say about the project:
“the idea that we have for the adaptation is to have a film that basically is about Henry Pym and Scott Lang, so you actually do a prologue where you see Pym as Ant-Man in action in the 60’s, in sort of “Tales to Astonish” mode basically, and then the contemporary, sort of flash-forward, is Scott Lang’s story, and how he comes to acquire the suit, how he crosses paths with Henry Pym, and then, in an interesting sort of Machiavellian way, teams up with him. So it’s like an interesting thing, like the “Marvel Premiere” one that I read which is Scott Lang’s origin, it’s very brief like a lot of those origin comics are, and in a way, the details that are skipped through in the panels and the kind of thing we’d spend half an hour on”.
Captain America: The First Avenger opens on July 22, 2011 in both 2D and 3D. Here is the video from NBC featuring Samuel Jackson. Enjoy.
Images via Empire Magazine and The Collider