Superhero films ignite rivalry among Marvel and DC comic fans
Whether it's the thrill of seeing the comic book superhero The Thing shout It's clobbering time! before throwing a punch or watching Superman and his faithful pup Krypto save the day, fans are heading to movie theaters to support their favorite films.
'Well, clearly I'm a Marvel fan,' Danielle Stroski, who was dressed as the shapeshifter character named Mystique from Marvel's X-Men comics, at the San Diego Comic-Con.
'But I have a little white dog at home, so I love me some 'Superman' as well. And I know the little white dog is stealing the show for Superman, so it's going to be close. But I got to go Marvel,' she added.
The 42-year-old from California predicted Fantastic Four would outperform Superman at the box office.
DC fan Lito Loza, dressed as Superboy, voiced his support for Superman.
'I've already seen Superman three times, and I'm very, very happy with what James Gunn did with it. It makes me feel hopeful,' he said, referring to the director.
The filmmakers, meanwhile, encourage fans to support both movies.
'I'm a huge Superman fan. I'm a huge James Gunn fan. I'm thrilled that both of us are coming out this month,' director Matt Shakman of Fantastic Four: First Steps told Reuters at the London premiere.
'I think we share a lot of similar optimism in our tone and our feeling in the worlds that we're building. And there's room for Superman, there's room for Fantastic Four. I'm thrilled. Go see both,' he added.
Superman director Gunn, who directed the Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy, said in an interview in Los Angeles that he grew up reading both Marvel and DC comic books, appreciating their distinct tones.
In theatres on July 11, Superman introduced David Corenswet as the Man of Steel. The movie grossed around US$173 million (RM730.3 million) globally and US$264 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
Warner Bros has heavily invested in Superman, aiming to launch a new era at DC Studios under Gunn, named co-CEO, alongside producer Peter Safran. Upcoming projects include a Supergirl film slated for June 2026, a film based on the character Swamp Thing as well as TV shows for HBO Max.
Disney said Fantastic Four, which stars Pedro Pascal, opened with US$24.4 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada on Thursday night while Daniel Loria, senior vice president at Boxoffice predicts that Fantastic Four: First Steps will open domestically at US$115 million to US$135 million.
While sales are currently around US$115 million to US$125 million, he said there was an increase in ticket purchases over the last week that will likely bring sales to the US$115 million to US$135 million range. — Reuters
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Malay Mail
16 hours ago
- Malay Mail
‘The Naked Gun' & ‘Happy Gilmore 2' – keeping the tradition of 80s/90s low-brow comedy alive in 2025
AUGUST 9 — The comedies I grew up watching – as a kid in the 1980s and as a teenager in the 1990s – can feel like they come from another planet when compared to what is being sold as comedies right now. There were no sacred cows back then, and people could make fun of anyone, even in the most tasteless and low-brow manner. Try doing that in this era of political correctness, woke and cancel culture, and I'm sure some internet outrage will be coming your way. I loved the movies by the ZAZ trio (which consisted of Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker) like Airplane, The Naked Gun and Top Secret, all of which can be clearly classified as low-brow or dumb comedies, but are no less funny for being so. The 90s saw the golden era of tasteless, provocative, low-brow comedies from the Farrelly brothers, who gave us gems like Dumb And Dumber, Kingpin and There's Something About Mary, and which also saw the rise of Adam Sandler as a comedy star with films like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. These are not films that most cinephiles would be proud to admit they loved, but I wouldn't have them any other way. If a movie is funny, then it is funny. It doesn't matter whether the jokes are high-brow or low-brow. All that matters is that you laugh yourself silly watching them. It's been a while since I last saw a good low-brow comedy, so it's quite a delight to find myself encountering two of these within the space of just a week, one in the comforts of home, courtesy of Netflix, and one in the great communal experience of the cinema. A YouTube screenshot of a scene from the Netflix official trailer of Happy Gilmore 2. Happy Gilmore 2 Sequels, especially those that are made for Netflix, can be a tricky proposition. Because there's no pressure to recoup the budget from ticket sales, filmmakers can sometimes take things for granted and make things on auto-pilot. I can definitely say the same for a lot of the previous Adam Sandler movies that were made for Netflix. Sometimes it even feels like making the movie was just an excuse for him to get his family and friends to holiday at a particular exotic or foreign location, which can even be felt in the slapdash and lazy writing and casual performances. But Happy Gilmore 2 is definitely not one of those movies. It's a movie that relies on a lot of the plot points (and even jokes) that made us fans of the first movie back then, because a much older Happy Gilmore here needs to start from the bottom again after a tragedy involving his wife and golf has resulted in him swearing never to play golf again. All that changes when he needs to come up with some serious money in order to realise his daughter's dreams of becoming a dancer and pay for her to study at the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet School. To do that, he needs to play golf again, and this is one of those feel-good comeback kid sports movies, but with plenty of toilet humour in between. I had a great time watching this, the jokes mostly land just fine, the dizzying number of cameos will really make you feel dizzy, but in a good way, and it's just such a fun, optimistic movie that I feel is something that we all need right now, especially considering the state of the world we're in now. The Naked Gun Considering how much I loved the nonsensical humour in the original The Naked Gun, it's quite scary to imagine how that would translate into a re-quel (a reboot cum sequel) in 2025, but the moment the movie opened with a bank heist in which the villain blasts open a safety deposit box to retrieve his target, an item labeled 'P.L.O.T. Device', I knew I was in safe comic hands. Director Akiva Schaffer (who previously did Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Stopping and plenty of The Lonely Island music videos) is quite simply the perfect candidate to revive this much beloved low-brow franchise, confidently handling the script's non-stop barrage of jokes, both verbally and visually, that it was such great fun laughing out loud in the cinema together with other people. Liam Neeson is perfect as Frank Drebin Jr. (in an inspired visual gag, almost everyone in the Police Squad here are descendants of characters from the original movie), bringing his tough guy persona from Taken to play things with such a poker face that one simply can't help but giggle (or howl with laughter) at the things that come out of his mouth like: 'Who's going to arrest me anyway? Cops? Cops don't arrest cops!' Watching Liam Neeson being dead serious and dead stupid at the same time throughout the movie, with able support from Pamela Anderson, is the main thing that will keep you glued to your seat, and will probably keep you coming back for more if this one becomes a hit, which will likely produce at least a sequel. A non-stop gag machine, not everything lands here, but there's so much being thrown at the audience that you might not even have time to think about a failed joke that you'd already be laughing at the next one. Simply wonderful.
Malay Mail
17 hours ago
- Malay Mail
Jim Lovell, astronaut who led Apollo 13 survival mission, dies at 97
WASHINGTON, Aug 9 — American astronaut Jim Lovell, commander of the failed 1970 mission to the moon that nearly ended in disaster but became an inspirational saga of survival and the basis for the hit movie Apollo 13, has died at the age of 97, Nasa said yesterday. Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks played Lovell in director Ron Howard's acclaimed 1995 film. It recounted Nasa's Apollo 13 mission, which was planned as humankind's third lunar landing but went horribly wrong when an onboard explosion on the way to the moon put the lives of the three astronauts in grave danger. Lovell and crew mates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise endured frigid, cramped conditions, dehydration and hunger for 3-1/2 days while concocting with Mission Control in Houston ingenious solutions to bring the crippled spacecraft safely back to Earth. 'A 'successful failure' describes exactly what (Apollo) 13 was — because it was a failure in its initial mission — nothing had really been accomplished,' Lovell told Reuters in 2010 in an interview marking the 40th anniversary of the flight. The outcome, the former Navy test pilot said, was 'a great success in the ability of people to take an almost-certain catastrophe and turn it into a successful recovery.' The Apollo 13 mission came nine months after Neil Armstrong had become the first person to walk on the moon when he took 'one giant leap for mankind' during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. There was drama even before Apollo 13's launch on April 11, 1970. Days earlier, the backup lunar module pilot inadvertently exposed the crew to German measles but Lovell and Haise were immune to it. Ken Mattingly, the command module pilot, had no immunity to measles and was replaced at the last minute by rookie astronaut Swigert. The mission generally went smoothly for its first two days. But moments after the crew finished a TV broadcast showing how they lived in space, an exposed wire in a command module oxygen tank sparked an explosion that badly damaged the spacecraft 200,000 miles (320,000 km) from Earth. The accident not only ruined their chances of landing on the moon but imperilled their lives. 'Suddenly there's a 'hiss-bang. And the spacecraft rocks back and forth,'' Lovell said in a 1999 Nasa oral history interview. 'The lights come on and jets fire. And I looked at Haise to see if he knew what caused it. He had no idea. Looked at Jack Swigert. He had no idea. And then, of course, things started to happen.' 'Houston, we have a problem' Swigert saw a warning light and told Mission Control: 'Houston, we've had a problem here.' In the movie, the line is instead attributed to Lovell and famously delivered by Hanks — slightly reworded — as: 'Houston, we have a problem.' With a dangerous loss of power, the three astronauts abandoned the command module and went to the lunar module - designed for two men to land on the moon. They used it as a lifeboat for a harrowing 3-1/2 day return to Earth. The astronauts and the US space agency experts in Houston scrambled to figure out how to get the crew safely home with a limited amount of equipment at their disposal. Electrical systems were turned off to save energy, sending temperatures plummeting to near freezing. Water was drastically rationed, food was short and sleep was nearly impossible. The crew had to contrive a filter system to remove high levels of carbon dioxide that could have proven deadly. 'The thought crossed our mind that we were in deep trouble. But we never dwelled on it,' Lovell said in the Nasa interview. 'We never admitted to ourselves that, 'Hey, we're not going to make it.' Well, only one time — when Fred looked at ... the lunar module and found out we had about 45 hours' worth of power and we were 90 hours from home.' People worldwide were captivated by the events unfolding in space — and got a happy ending. The astronauts altered course to fly a single time around the moon and back to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Samoa on April 17, 1970. Lovell never got another chance to walk on the moon after Apollo 13, which was his fourth and final space trip. His first trip had been the Gemini 7 mission in 1965, featuring the first link-up of two manned spacecraft. His second was Gemini 12 in 1966, the last of the programs that led to the Apollo moon missions. Lovell's third mission was Apollo 8 in December 1968, the first to orbit the moon. During a telecast to Earth from their spacecraft on Christmas Eve, Lovell and crew mates Frank Borman and William Anders read verses from the Bible's Book of Genesis. Lovell, who later had a moon crater named in his honour, retired as an astronaut in 1973, working first for a harbour towing company and then in telecommunications. He co-authored a 1994 book, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, that became the basis for Howard's film. Lovell recalled a meeting with Howard in which the director asked the astronaut which actor he would want to play him. 'I said, 'Kevin Costner,'' Lovell said. 'And Hanks never lets me forget that... But Hanks did a great job.' Yesterday, Hanks praised Lovell and his accomplishments. 'There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to the places we would not go on our own,' Hanks wrote on social media. Lovell, Hanks said, 'was that kind of guy.' 'His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive,' Hanks added. Lovell made a cameo appearance in Apollo 13 as the commander of the US Navy ship that retrieves the astronauts and shakes hands with Hanks. James Lovell was born in Cleveland on March 25, 1928. He was just 5 when his father died and his mother moved the family to Milwaukee. He became interested in space as a teenager. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1952 and became a test pilot before being selected as a Nasa astronaut in 1962. He had four children with his wife, Marilyn. — AFP
Malay Mail
2 days ago
- Malay Mail
Can't pay this: MC Hammer sued over unpaid US$76,000 luxury Land Rover car loan
LOS ANGELES, Aug 8 — Baggy pants-wearing rapper MC Hammer is being sued in a US court for allegedly failing to pay off a car loan. The man behind the 1990 megahit 'U Can't Touch This' is facing a lawsuit from JPMorgan Chase claiming he has stopped making payments on a luxury Land Rover. The suit, filed in a California court last week, names MC Hammer and U Can't Touch This LLC as defendants in the case, claiming the bank loaned them US$114,000 (RM482,000) to buy the vehicle in 2023. But after allegedly missing a number of monthly payments, the rapper and his company still owe more than US$76,000. Hammer, whose real name is Stanley Burrell, broke onto the rap scene in the 1980s, but became a global figure with 'U Can't Touch This.' The rapper's signature 'Hammer Pants,' coupled with his rapidly moving elastic legs, made for a dance move that was copied all over the world. Despite a tie-up Mattel figurine and the 'Hammerman' cartoon, his stardom waned and by the mid-1990s, Hammer was going through bankruptcy. — AFP
