Marvel’s Runaways is being made for TV, specifically Hulu, and will probably be ready to watch at the end of this year or the beginning of next. The story is simple (at least for a Marvel comic series); a group of teenagers who get together once a year at their parent’s annual party discover one year their parents are actually running a massive criminal organization. They all run away together, vowing to bring that organization down. I love that James Marsters gets to play Victor Stein, the mad scientist (or a scientist who gets really mad sometimes, at least). So they have now announced the cast members playing the Runnaways: Rhenzy Feliz, Lyrica Okano, Virginia Gardner, Ariela Barer, Gregg Sulkin and Allegra Acosta. And the latest announcement (at the initial link) gives us The Pride, the parental bad guys of the series: Brigid Brannagh, Ever Carradine, Brittany Ishibashi, James Marsters, Angel Parker, Kip Pardue, Ryan Sands, Annie Wersching, Kevin Weisman, and James Yaegashi. I can’t wait to see this one come to the small screen!
On March 9th, for one night only, Sword Art Online The Movie -Ordinal Scale- will be on the big screen, this time with a story based on AR, rather than VR. This is another Fathom Events special transmitted digitally to theaters across North America, with the distribution rights going to Aniplex. It appears to be booked in more theaters than these things usually are, so there is a good chance it is somewhere nearby. The Anime are based on a series of light novels by the same name written by Reki Kawahara, who also had his Accel World series of books turned into Anime. Both series have also become Manga and Video Games, of course.
The LEGO Batman Movie should be the same silly fun as the last LEGO movie, and my choice for the one to see this weekend.
Correction: Justice League Dark and Dreamwork’s Trolls both come out this week rather than last. Anime has Young Black Jack: Complete Collection and the truly absurd (to the point I count it as a fantasy and therefore genre) Nichijou: My Ordinary Life Complete Collection coming out this week. In addition, the complete collections of both D-Frag! and Danganronpa are coming out in S.A.V.E editions.
With Scarlett Johansson, Beat Takeshi, and Pilou Asbæk heading up Section 9, the live action version of Ghost In The Shell is a movie I have been waiting roughly 25 years for someone to make. Only a few more months to go before we get to see it! The Super Bowl spot has some new footage we haven’t seen before.
As I am sure most of the folks who visit this blog know, for the first week of every month, TOR Books makes an ebook available as a free download. It is always an excellent book by a very good author, and this time they chose the first two volumes of The Merchant Princes series, The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross. This is a Paratime story about 3 different timelines and the families that can teleport between them, with criminal activities, social injustice, treachery, and revolution in the mix. The protagonist is smart and quick on the uptake as she literally falls into the middle of this while trying to learn a bit more about her birth mother. I couldn’t stop rooting for her through the entire series, and I really hope the author returns to that universe with more tales soon. The link at the top of the Tor page takes you to a place to buy the paperback version, so instead scroll down the page to get the link to sign up for the newsletter and claim your free ebook version.