Now that the long, hard slog of work on the troubled Wolfman remake is finally clawing to a close, Joe Johnston is turning his attention full time to working on Marvel's The First Avenger: Captain America. And he's finally able to say a bit more about it. Not much, mind...
"We're in prep," Johnston tells Film Journal (via the folks at Coming Soon).
"Rick Heinrichs is production-designing and we're set up down in Manhattan Beach, California." Looks like Kenneth Branagh's Thor is getting a studio stablemate.
Johnston seems to be enjoying this part of his job, and you can hardly blame him after the hell of Wolfman.
"It's the part of the process that I love the most. We have eight or 10 really talented artists, and we all just sit around all day and draw pictures and say, 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this?' It's that phase of the production where money doesn't matter: ‘Let's put all the greatest stuff up on the wall and then later see what we can afford.'"
And it looks like they'll be budgeting for some period work. "The film begins in 1942, 1943, during World War Two. The stuff in the ’60s and ’70s comic books we're sort of avoiding. We're going back to the ’40s, and then forward to what they're doing with Captain America now."
Could work. Would it work? Cap fans, the debate is over to you...