Hollywood Babble On & On #1201: Villains, Super-villains, and Superstars

Lots of big villain news this week, so let's jump in headfirst…

BOND 24 HAS A TITLE & A VILLAIN

Here's a video revealing the title for the next Bond movie…

The film will be shot in London, Rome, Mexico City, Tangier, Erfoud and the Austrian Alps, but that's not the big news.

The big news is confirmation that 2 time Oscar winning German character actor Christoph Waltz will be playing "Franz Oberhauser," who turns out to be notorious Bond baddie Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

You may recall that the Bond franchise had to give up using Blofeld because of a legal fight with the mysterious Kevin McClory that had been recently settled.

Personally, I hope they follow the great story arc the Bond/Blofeld relationship followed in the Bond novels. Starting out as a standard hero vs villain and becoming more violent and way more personal as it goes along, leaving both men physical and emotional wrecks. Only a handful of actors can pull off Blofeld, and Waltz is on the top of the list.

SUICIDE SQUAD IS GO!

DC/Warner Brothers have announced the cast list for the Suicide Squad movie, and it only took them five years to pull it together. If you live in a cave and don't know who the Suicide Squad is, I'll give you a rough summary.

In the DC Comics Universe the Suicide Squad or Task Force X is where the government drafts super villains for certain death missions where at least one of them will not survive, in exchange for time off their sentences.

So, it's The Dirty Dozen in tights.

The cast is:

Tom Hardy as Rick Flagg the non-villain military man who leads the team.

Will Smith as Deadshot, a master sniper/assassin who has taken on Batman, the Green Arrow, and other DC heroes.

Jared Leto as The Joker.

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joker's former psychiatrist turned psychotic lover and partner in crime.

Cara Delevigne as The Enchantress, an artist turned sorceress who started out as a hero, but either a lust for power, or a split personality caused her turn to villainy.

Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, a Flash rogue and boomerang tossing hitman.

And they're looking for a middle-aged African-American woman to play Amanda Waller, the bureaucrat who sends the team on their missions. One rumour said Oprah was taking the part, but I doubt she'd want to play a character whose callousness creeps out even professional killers.

Now I have an iffy feeling about this cast or the movie making it all the way to the premier in the originally intended form.

That iffiness lies with Will Smith.

Remember Smith passed on Django Unchained because he didn't want to be upstaged by Christoph Waltz.

I don't see him willingly be upstaged by the heroics of Flagg, or the psychotic scene-stealing of Joker and Harley, unless…he's pulling a Janet Leigh.

That means he's signed on to get killed off and shock the audience into realizing that this franchise is unlike the others, and will kill off major characters with the mad glee of The Walking Dead.

But that's a slim chance for someone who passed on a hit movie with some of the best people in the business to make After Earth.

Then again, maybe he's learned his lesson and realized that in order to stay a viable movie star he'll have to learn to share the spotlight without having to upstage everyone.

We'll have to see where this ends up.

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