Here’s a text message I got last night from Marvel Comics friend Julian: “I read your review. I’m still seeing Wolverine, and it’s still going to suck.”

Ok, I’ve been piling a lot of industry crap on Wolverine recently, and now that you too can spend your hard earned money watching Wolverine, I thought I’d take a step back from my usual bitching.

Wolverine is what this franchise needed to survive. I might have made a big deal about that when I said that they might as well have made an ashcan version of an X-Men movie, but since they didn’t go that route, Wolverine is the best they could have done.

Gavin Hood is no Sam Raimi or Bryan Singer. He’s not establishing ownership over the property. He’s much more akin to a Bret Ratner, who was brought on X-Men: The Last Stand after a story had been developed, populated by new mutants via committee. Though I’m not going to put Ratner on any best director lists in the future, X-Men: The Last Stand was not his fault, it was Fox’s fault, as any movie that is given over to a director in the middle of pre-production with an immovable release date is the studio’s responsibility.

Hood’s occasional fights with Fox CEO Tom Rothman over Wolverine were probably about tone and possibly about characters and story, but they were had. The idea that Gavin Hood wanted some artistic integrity is interesting and, depending on your opinion of the film, a boone to the man’s patience for futility.

The question remains, what did Wolverine do right? And here are you answers…

Frequent reader/contributor WeaponXQc (previously called Reader Jay, I believe) sent me his review of the Wolverine workprint literally hours after the leak was announced. I told him that officially I was not going to print reviews of the workprint until the film came out and thought to myself that it wouldn’t matter because the movie would be different…

…which it wasn’t.

I thought I’d resurrect this review because it takes the fanboy route as opposed to my recent “F*ck Fox” route. It’s worth a look, inside…

Arnold Schwarzenegger will be in Terminator Salvation, but in a way that didn’t require him to do any filming (despite that on set picture)…

I’ve been getting in quite a few side-conversations about the marketing of Star Trek recently, both with hard core Trek fans and with people who are more interested in seeing what JJ Abrams plans to bring to the series.

There was a discussion on Twitter between movie bloggers last week about The Enterprise Project, where certain artists and celebrities were given the opportunity to paint/modify a model of the Abrams-era starship however they liked. Some on Twitter said this was somehow a “cheapening” of Trek.

Meanwhile, the tracking for Star Trek’s opening weekend is still putting it in the ’round $40 million mark, about half of what X-Men Origins: Wolverine is tracking at.

As a Star Trek fan who was raised on a steady diet of TOS and TNG, I have this to say: The JJ Abrams movie existing and being sold as well as it is alrewady means that what you are seeing is probably not going to be what you consider to be Star Trek. JJ Abrams has made an action movie with enough nods to the original series (*cough*Timeline A*cough*) that those of us who go to Memory Alpha instead of Wikipedia will feel involved, but what your watching is NOT TREK. Here’s the cool part, though: It might be just as good.

We live in a time when studios aren’t going to go out an blow millions of dollars on something that doesn’t have an audience. That’s why we’ve become accustomed to this wheel of re-makes, prequels, re-launches, re-imaginings and adaptations. JJ Abrams might have Lost, Alia and Cloverfield under his belt (three original franchise stories), but he also had to jump in and try saving the Mission Impossible franchise just to earn some cred around the system.

The only way we’re going to get original content in this new day and age is to let people take our dead franchises and run amok with them. Like, beyond turning a dead Sci-Fi franchise (killed by Nemisis and Enterprise) that was based on simple morality plays into a whizz-bang summer tent-pole. We need to go beyond making Sherlock Holmes a boxer and taking away his iconic pipe. The story smiths of the A-List must have good stuff in their noggins, because these subtle transformations (like, say, making Transformers - on the surface - about a boy and his first car instead of an inter-galactic robot war) have been breathing new life into films that have little relation to the source material, but still draw on that materials’ audience.

Star Trek is going to be a space action film. The budget (currently being lo-balled around Hollywood) is all going to show up on screen. I’m fine with that.

The problem is thinking that gimmicks like painting an Enterprise somehow cheapens a brand. What Star Trek fans need to realize is this: without the current Paramount marketing team there would be no more Star Trek brand. The formula was played out.

Or, as Greg at HitFix points out in his excellent post called “Why Star Trek Fans Have To Stop Worrying About The Box Office:”

Do you know how hard it is to make something that’s not inherently cool, cool as a marketer? If you get a chance, go back and look at the final trailer for “Nemesis.” It’s 10 times better than the movie itself. Perhaps the poster wasn’t as slick as it could have been, but I know the website (cough, Hollywood Key Art Nominee 2003) made the picture look like a true Sci-Fi flick (which it wasn’t). So, taking into account the stigma the franchise has faced from the mainstream media and moviegoers, a few departments at the Melrose studio deserve pats on their back for the work they’ve accomplished so far. Those trailers and TV spots? Absolutely superb. The daring avant-garde poster and outdoor? Risky, but cleverly out of the box (although the 60’s era logo is still a mistake). And how about that publicity campaign? Somehow, the studio has convinced media outlets across the world that Chris Pine is a real star and, oh yeah, he’s never opened a movie. A photo shoot in Vanity Fair and the cover of Men’s Health? Sure the magazine business is dying and desperate, but put “Star Trek” in the same sentence as those two publications. Do it again. Out loud. No, hell hasn’t frozen over, it’s just a publicity team pulling miracles out of their, um, hats.

My 8th, guys, it’s a whole new Trek. Which is EXACTLY what we needed.

I’ve occasionally mentioned Dragonball: Evolution, the low-budget film adaptation of the popular anime cartoon that is about some magical balls, something something. Honestly, if you want to know anything about Dragonball, I’d avoid both me and the film Dragonball: Evolution. It was released on April 10th, still hasn’t made $8 million dollars and has a pathetic 14% fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating.

It pissed off French Dragonball Z fans so bad that they had a funeral for Goku, the character slaughtered by Justin Chatwin in the above photo:

If you were Summit Entertainment, and you had Brothers Bloom on your hands, the heist flick from Rian Johnson, the guy who brought you Brick the noir-set-in-High-School film. It’s a quirky, fun, summer flick, and I’m glad it’s going into theaters on May 15th. That’s a good place for it, where people who want to see Wolverine again can see Wolverine again, but for those of us that could use some well-constructed and executed film before plunging into the blow-em-up summer season can go check out Bloom.

The problem with the whole thing is Summit’s marketing of the film. I’m telling you it’s good, my REVIEW tells you I liked it and tries to explain why it’s good, but the only thing anyone unfamiliar with the movie is going to see on this new poster and in the new trailer is that a lot of critics liked it.

WHO CARES?

That poster is so damn boring and the film is NOT. The film is quirky fun heist mixed with Wes Anderson-like drama. But how is anyone supposed to be prepared for what they are seeing if all they know is that these other people also like it? Not to bash AICN, but putting one of their quotes on a poster always brings to mind that Harry Knowles sometimes likes movies that aren’t that good AND that AICN has enough reviewers that someone will have something nice to say about virtually any movie.

Is there a single critic you trust enough that if you saw his/her quote on a movie poster, you’d think: Yeah, I’ll see that? There better not be, otherwise - guess what - you’re not thinking for yourself.

The worst thing is that Rian Johnson and his cousin are still actively promoting this movie in a GOOD WAY, but Summit isn’t making a big deal out of it…

Gahan Wilson does some of the weirdest, most odd cartoons for publications like the New Yorker, and in honor of the upcoming documentary, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe, the New Yorker website has posted a short cartoon drawn by Gahan, directed by Jaffe and written by Coraline writer and Newberry Award winner Neil Gaiman.

Check out “It Was A Dark And Silly Night” below the cut…