You wanna know which screenwriter has the most pressure when it comes to his next big work? Screenwriter Zak Penn has the weight of the world on his shoulder because if THE AVENGERS movie turns out to be less than satisfying to the fans, he might take the heat. It’s no wonder that we haven’t heard him say anything about this project all this time but sooner or later somebody’s bound to ask the big question and Sci-Fi Wire did.
He said he got in trouble with Fox a while back when writing the first two X-Men movies because he wanted to incorporate Fantastic Four into the storyline, but he won’t have Marvel honchos giving him similar grief about combining all of Marvel superheroes into one movie.
He just needs to figure out how to piece all the movies together. That’s why he’ll soon be meeting with the screenwriters of THOR, IRON MAN 2, CAPTAIN AMERICA so they can brainstorm on how each of those stories can overlap and meet for THE AVENGERS which is scheduled to hit theaters in the summer of 2012.
“It is a world of difference; it is a lot easier to do things like that, and they encourage it.”
“They’re doing Captain American and Thor first, and then Avengers is coming out,”
“They want to see that they’re all connected, not like the Fantastic Four can’t come into the X-Men world, like I was told. I’m taking a meeting next week with the Thor and Captain America people, and we are all going to get together, and I will see what is going to happen. I’ll see where they are leaving the characters; it’s pretty complicated. … There’s a board that is tracking what is happening. [We'll see] how this movie overlaps in that movie. … Marvel is autonomous now. It is night and day: Everyone has read every comic. They know how to make a cool movie.”
“It’s hard to make a good movie,”
“We all have the best intentions, and it still might suck.”
That’s comforting, there’s still no guarantee. But he did indicate that it’s a different era now, everybody involved has read the comic, these folks know what the fans want because they themselves are hardcore fans..so it’s not something that’s done by some douchebags who don’t know what they’re doing.. (cough!) G.I. JOE movie (cough!)
But what’s the worst that Marvel fans can do to a screenwriter anyway?! If the movie stinks.. all that Penn would get are probably thousands of hate e-mails on some forums… unless there are some violent geeks out there who’d go as far as leaving death threat phone calls and vandalizing his house.
