SNEAK PEEK
"Without giving too much away, obviously there'll be a little bit of the origin and then we come into our real world," Marvel's Avi Arad recently said about the Marvel/Paramount big screen adaptation of Simon and Kirby's "Captain America".
"What makes 'Captain America' such a compelling character is that it allows you to judge history so you see where he came from and you see what he stood for."
Although the script is still in development, Arad doesn't anticipate the new "Captain America" movie to be ready for theatres until 2009.
"One of the things our movie is going to deal with is what happened in 60 years," says Arad.
"Which world was better? Sixty years ago or now? Within, obviously, a kick-ass plot and all the stuff that you've come to expect from a superhero movie."
December 7, 2005
Marvel Studios are in active development on the big screen feature "CAPTAIN AMERICA", based on the Marvel Comics' superhero character.
Brad "Fight Club" Pitt is interested in playing the lead role of 'Steve Rogers' aka 'Captain America'.
Created by writer Joe Simon, artist Jack "King" Kirby and publisher Martin Goodman, 'Captain America' debuted in Timely's "Captain America Comics" #1 (1941).
The premise focused on 'Steve Rogers', a frail child born during the Great Depression.
Attempting to enlist in the US Army during WW II, Rogers was rejected as being too sickly, but 'General Chester Phillips' offered him the opportunity to join the war effort via the 'Operation: Rebirth' program.
Rogers was taken to a secret lab in Washington, D.C. and introduced to 'Dr. Abraham Erskine' (aka 'Prof. Reinstein'), creator of an experimental 'super-soldier' formula.
Rogers is administered a serum, doused with a ray and pumped up into a perfect specimen. But an inflitrated saboteur kills Erskine who dies with the secret formula locked in his head.
Hustled into an intense physical training program, Rogers accepts his destiny and comes to grips with the fact that he is the only one of his kind.
Planted secretly as a potato-peeling private in the Army, Rogers first assignment is to stop the Axis agent "Red Skull". When company mascot 'Bucky Barnes' accidentally learns of Rogers alter ego, he joins 'Cap' on numerous missions behind enemy lines.
Towards the end of the war, Rogers tries to stop 'Baron Heinrich Zemo', from detonating a bomb-rigged drone, but the plane explodes, killing Bucky and throwing Cap into a cold ocean.
Cap's super metabolism freezes him into suspended animation, riveted into an ice-block, until he is revived, 20 years later by superhero team the "Avengers".
Cap's only weapon is his shield, a concave disk 2.5 feet in diameter, weighing 12 lbs and composed of a 'vibranium-adamantium' alloy, cast by metallurgist 'Dr. Myron MacLain'.
