Well, this is turning out to be a big week for comic book movie news. Warner Bros announced that Wonder Woman will be in the Man of Steel sequel, Bryan Singer announced X-Men: Apocalypse for 2016, and we got this awesome trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

I quite liked the first Amazing Spider-Man movie. I was a fan of the first two Raimi films in the early 2000s, but always felt they were a little cheesy and I was never particularly fond of Toby Maguire or Kirsten Dunst. I felt like the reboot did a good job of reestablishing the Spidey universe and setting up sequels. I’ve been following the news about TASM2 for a while now, but this trailer kind of kicked my expectations up a few notches.

I’ll get to the rambling fanboy predictions in a minute, but first I want to just say that damn, that new Spidey costume is amazing. I think it’s the best incarnation that’s ever been put on film, and is so much closer to a comic book Spider-Man than we’ve seen before. In fact, it looks like the whole tone of this sequel is more comic book inspired and less ‘dark and gritty’, which is fine by me. I could do without Electro in a hoodie, but it beats lack leather.

The Sinister Six

I love how they’re setting up Oscorp as the center of the Spidey villain universe. It makes sense to have a central evil organization responsible for creating villains and teaming them up, instead of devoting a ton of screen time to individual villains’ origins. TASM2 is going to have at least Electro, Rhino, and some form of the Green Goblin. The fact that the trailer even teases more villains (Doc Ock and Vulture, plus they show that chamber with six cells), just goes to show that the filmmakers are going to throw everything at Spider-Man in the next few movies. I think that’s awesome.
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I’ve been wondering when Disney was going to turn Aladdin, aka My Favorite Freaking Disney Movie Ever™ into a Broadway musical. It’s so obvious. What I didn’t know is that there is a stage-show of Aladdin that has been turing around the country for a while now.

The version of “Aladdin” that hits Broadway next year will be substantially overhauled and will not be a transfer of the 5th Avenue production…That show was seen as a pilot production, designed to test the new book and additional score material. The Broadway production will involve a major new key player on the creative team, the individual said.

I’m sure Robin Williams had much to do with the awesomeness of Aladdin (especially the musical numbers), but don’t tell me this wouldn’t make a great Broadway show. I can’t believe it took this long.

Speaking of things taking forever, when is Aladdin coming to Blu-ray? Hmm Disney? When?!

Via SlashFilm

Last year I wrote about my favorite Christmas special, A Muppet Family Christmas, and it’s hard to not write an article about it every year. I love it so much I watch it about ten times each holiday, and it never gets old. It is full of charm, classic Muppet humor, plus Fraggles and Sesame Street characters. What’s not to like?

After watching it last night I realized that I would love to have all the songs from the hour-long special as a soundtrack in my iTunes library. I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I decided to remedy that.

I ripped the audio from the video file I have (which has some parts you may not remember), separated all the songs, tweaked the levels a bit, then made sure it had all the proper MP3 meta tags and threw it in an Amazon S3 folder.

It’s ten tracks of pure Muppety Christmas Joy™, and you can download it at the snazzy link below. This is probably not very legal, but seeing as how Disney will probably never be able to release this amazing special again due to the rights of certain songs and the inclusion of the Fraggles and Sesame Street characters, I think I’m doing a public service.

Download Album

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I’m the guy that always gets people movies for Christmas. I don’t really do it on purpose, it just happens. This year there are a ton of cool DVDs and Blu-rays for the movie buffs on your list, whether they like silly cartoons or classic cinema. Here are a few choices me and the rest of the team put together.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Classic Series Collection

If you haven’t pulled the trigger on any classic TMNT DVDs over the past decade or so they’ve been released, or you’re just a Turtle completist, this complete series set would be the perfect gift. 23 discs housed in a replica Party Wagon? I’ll take ten.
[Amazon]

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I haven’t talked much about The Lord of the Rings and my obsession love with Tolkien much on this site. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t running this blog in High School, because between those movies and the Star Wars prequels, it’s all I would have blogged about.

One of my favorite things about the LOTR movies was the score by Howard Shore, and it’s the thing I’m looking forward to the most about The Hobbit films. Now we can preview the first track, and after listening to it I’m even more excited. I was afraid it would just be more of the same music, but this sounds a lot different (but still awesome).
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