Guardians-of-the-Galaxy

This week instead of an episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ABC aired a special about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Studios: Assembling a Universe was basically a documentary discussing the process that Marvel Studios went through to create their series of interconnected movies and at the end gave a few teases for upcoming projects. My friends and I, and according to the website Television by the Numbers more than four million other people all tuned in to watch. Four million viewers isn’t going to win any time slots but it was still good enough to give ABC third place for the hour and drew significantly more viewers than the rerun of S.H.I.E.L.D. they aired on February 20th. More interesting to me was the fact that ABC was willing to air it at all. They have enough faith in the popularity of comic book entertainment that they were willing to air a documentary primarily about movies that people have already seen during primetime. If that isn’t a sign that we are living in a new golden age for comic fans I don’t know what is. However, unlike the Golden Age of Comic Books this new golden age is on the big and small screen. In honor of this new era of superhero entertainment I thought I’d take a look at the current and upcoming live action superhero movies and tv shows from both Marvel and DC.

The first full-length trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy was released this week and it marks the tenth movie that will be released in the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe, joining the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Avengers movie franchises as well as The Incredible Hulk movie and the television show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Also coming from Marvel Studios this year is Captain America: The Winter Soldier which continues the Captain America franchise and seems to be tied very closely to the S.H.I.E.L.D. stories and characters that featured in Avengers. These will be the last two movies before all the interconnecting threads meet again in Avengers: Age of Ultron and I thought I’d do an early overview of them both.