I'm really not sure if I should be cringing at the news that Disney is buying Lucasfilm. Apparently, they have already started planning for "Episode 7" to be released in 2015, and for a new Star Wars film to be released every 2 or 3 years after (probably indefinitely, until they stop making money).

George Lucas is being retained as a "creative consultant", but it is yet to be revealed just how involved he will be.

This could be very good news or very bad news for Star Wars fans. On the one hand, Disney seems to be intent to milk the franchise for all its worth and could very likely drive it into the ground with the inevitable straight-to-dvd released (see Bambi, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast). This could be good news for the more feeble-minded fans who happily eat up anything with the words "Star" and "Wars" and the Lucasfilm logo on the box.

But can we really say for sure that Disney will further tarnish the franchise any more than Lucasfilm has already done with the prequel movies? After all, Disney has a track record of making pretty good movies. Their handling of the Marvel film licenses has been respectful at the very least. Sure Captain America and Thor didn't blow critics away, and Iron Man 2 received mixed opinions. But considering that all those movies were really just feature-length teasers for the exceptionally-well-executed Avengers movie, they turned out pretty well.

I have to say that I was impressed with how quick a 2 hour and 16 minute movie could feel. The Amazing Spider-Man is slightly shorter than The Avengers, but it is just about as well-paced. Despite being stuck with another telling of Spider-Man's origin, the movie manages to keep things moving along without getting boring. It does this by offering a very different version of the characters and events leading up to Peter's transformation into Spider-Man. But it lacks the same emotional impact that the first movie had and ends up feeling a bit more sloppy.

First and foremost, Andrew Garfield is not your father's Peter Parker. He's much more confident and outgoing, as well as being tall and handsome. I would even go so far as to say that he comes off as being cocky. As such, he doesn't quite live up to the socially-outcast-nerd identity that most fans assume. Garfield's Peter Parker does, however, express his techie, intellectual side much better than Tobey's previous interpretation of the character. Even before Peter is spider-bitten, we see him inventing unique tools and gadgets, manipulating photos for the school paper, and offering Uncle Ben suggestions for fixing a leaking washing machine.

A major point of the movie's early plot is the mysterious disappearance of Peter's parents. Richard Parker's work in genetics is something that apparently got him in trouble with some unreputable individuals, and he and his wife Mary had to leave Peter with Ben and May and run away. When Peter learns that his father used to work with Curtis Connors at Oscorp, he sneaks into Oscorp in order to find out what they were working on. It is here that he wanders into a room containing the experimental spiders that give him his powers. Despite his intelligence, and fondness for science and technology, he just starts playing around with stuff in the lab. You'd think a smart guy like him would know better, but whatever.

I'm a pretty big Spider-Man fan. As such, I tend to get pretty excited when a new Spider-Man game is announced. I was pretty impressed with some of the things Beenox accomplished with Shattered Dimensions, but still didn't feel like the game hit its potential. Last year's Edge of Time game was a monumental disaster, and kind of has me turned off a bit with regard to Beenox's approach to Spider-Man games.

Having been underwhelmed by Beenox's last attempt at a Spidey game, I was a bit disappointed that they were going to be handling the movie tie-in.

I haven't been keeping very well-informed about the game. I haven't watched any trailers or previews. Pretty much the only info that I've gotten for it have been a few previews in GameInformer. But I did finally watch some E3 footage:

UPDATE: June 17, 2012: Uncut gameplay video from GameInformer validates my complaints

Came across this preview of The Amazing Spider-Man game that was released yesterday on GameInformer's website. The video contains several minutes of uncut gameplay, which includes footage of Spider-Man webswinging well above the tallest buildings in the vicinity, making it all but impossible for his webs to actually be connecting to anything.

At ComicCon Wednesday, Sony and Marvel released the first trailer for the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man movie. Surprisingly, it is actually a full trailer with some vague plot details and showing many of the films characters, and not just a simple show-nothing teaser.

The teaser - in its entirety - is shown below:

Comic book fans have had a lot to be excited about these last ten years or so. After decades of mediocre-at-best comic book movies, and the one exceptional Tim Burton Batman movie, the onslaught of surprisingly good comic book movies in the early 2000’s has been a pleasant surprise. Excellent films such as Spider-Man 2, X-2: X-Men United, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Watchmen, and the underrated Edward Norton Incredible Hulk have been undercut by a relative minority of abysmal films such as X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3, and the crappy Eric Bana Hulk movie. But the turbulent up-and-down nature of comic book films makes it very hard to know what to expect when you buy that $10 movie ticket. Are you going to get Batman Begins? Or Superman 4? Iron Man 2? Or X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

Going into this summer, we have a handful of comic movies to look forward to with anticipation and anxiety. Thor, X-Men: First Class, The Green Lantern, and Captain America all debut this summer. So far, Marvel has done an outstanding job with the movies made by its relatively new in-house studio. Thor already turned out to be a good-but-not-great movie (in my opinion), and so I expect a lot with X-Men and Captain America.