Next year’s superhero super-sequel The Avengers has been filming for a little over six weeks now, but except for a tongue-in-cheek photo from the first day on the set, the film has pretty much moved into the media-blackout stage of production. So it’s not surprising that the fans are currently buzzing over an image, reportedly snapped at the Licensing International Expo in Las Vegas, of all the Avengers together: Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). While it looks like a poster for the film, according to a source close to the production, the image is not a poster, but a licensing guide — an image designed to give licensees a sense of how to design their Avengers products. So take the image (which you can view full-sized at Superhero Hype) with a grain of salt: Some of the characters’ looks may not perfectly match up to the film. Still, at this early stage, it’s worth examining the image as a very early indication of what Avengers may look like — especially in regards to some key costume tweaks.
The thing that instantly jumps out at you about the image is Captain America: READ FULL STORY »
Back when Entourage was still good, the show spent an entire episode brilliantly dissecting the curiously bi-polar phenomenon of Comic-Con. Invented by the lovable lunatic fringe of comic book nerds as a swap meet for true fans, Comic-Con spent most of this past decade slowly transforming into a corporate staging area, overrun by media conglomerates hawking films, TV shows, and videogames with gradually more ill-defined ties to the world of comic books. The Entourage Comic-Con episode aired in mid-2005, but it hasn’t aged a day: Visitors to the San Diego Convention Center this July will be faced with fading C-list TV stars rocking the autograph booth, strippers dressed like Rob Liefeld superheroines, and attractive Hollywood movie stars who will pretend to know about comic books. Well, maybe not so much the last one: According to a report by 
One of the main reasons that I’m hopeful about next month’s Captain America film is that the previews seem to indicate that the movie will feature a propaganda-perfect retro aesthetic: Rocketeer-brown military jackets, sci-fi apparatuses that look straight out off a pulp sci-fi book cover, and, best of all, Cap’s pouch-heavy costume. So I’m totally digging the special limited-edition poster that Marvel Studios printed for the film. Initially given only to the cast and crew, the poster was part of a giveaway at the 
Week one for EW’s 2011 Summer Movie Body Count begins with Marvel Studios’ Thor, starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, and Anthony Hopkins. 
This summer marks the beginning of the second phase of Marvel’s plan for complete cinematic domination, with the arrival of Thor and Captain America in the wake of two successful Iron Man movies. Next year’s Avengers will bring the three heroes together… and then, the real fun begins. At least that’s the message sent out by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who is quoted in the upcoming issue of Disney twenty-three, the quarterly magazine of the Disney fan club. (FYI: Marvel was 
