Initial thoughts on a 'Gotham' TV series

News has recently broke about a Fox developed 'Gotham' TV series centred around the Batman character of Jim Gordon in his early days dealing with "the villains that made Gotham famous" before meeting Batman (who it appears may not play any part in the show).

This is particularly interesting for many reasons, being that Fox won it in a bidding war with Warner Bros. and are now unusually pushing it straight to a full season yet so many other recent comic book related TV series have had to pray to survive every challenge leading many to fall (The CW's Wonder Woman) before they may have even began. This is perhaps a sign of the changing times opening more opportunities for comic related properties to be explored in more TV based media. I feel there is no coincidence in the fact that the news appeared on the same day as the new Marvel TV Series - Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. As DC Entertainment have been trying to play catch-up with Marvel in recent years.

Observations on the Transformers: Age of Extinction Teaser Poster

Earlier in the month the first official teaser poster for the fourth instalment of the Transformers film series was revealed along with the subtitle. The Age of Extinction!

The film is to feature Mark Wahlberg instead of Shia Lebouf in order to advance Director Michael Bay's wishes to distance this new set of Transformers films from what will probably now be called the original Trilogy.

Overall, This poster does an adequate job. It fulfils its purpose in being a teaser poster by using simple imagery to let the audience know of the film's existence however like a majority of teaser posters nowadays in my opinion, it may be slightly too vague, as the imagery is arguably not very interesting simply depicting the Decepticon insignia buried in the sand shaped like a 4. From this we can extrapolate that the film's plot features some kind of ancient Decepticon, which if we base the storyline just from this poster it's little more than a retread of the second film - Revenge of the Fallen. Being a massive Transformers fan this news item has sadly provided little for me to be excited about and I'm going to have to wait for further promotional items to really gain a huge interest in seeing this.

My real problem with this whole Batman/Superman movie

A recent point of issue in the industry is the casting of Ben Affleck in the part of Batman in the upcoming Batman/Superman film. Personally having not seen many of Ben Affleck's performances after the mid-noughties I feel the logically choice is to remain open minded about what kind of portrayal he'll give to the character. As such this issue is fairly minor in my eyes. However I personally am more baffled at the decision to produce what is essentially a 'World's Finest' ( the comic book featuring Batman/Superman team-ups) before the premiere (or as it seems, even plan) of a new Batman film series. Many problems could occur from this such as a risk of Batman stealing the spotlight in this new film and much more. Also I feel it's still too early in this new Superman continuity for him to be having a crossover as not enough time and story elements centered around the character have been introduced due to the fact he has currently only had one movie.