COMIC FILMS:

Following the acclaim of the Blade Runner Black Out 2022 shorts, Adult Swim and Crunchyroll announced a new Blade Runner anime series is in the works. Blade Runner — Black Lotus will be inspired by the recent Blade Runner 2049 starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford but is slated to take place 13 years after the original series in the year 2032.

The film will be set within the greater Blade Runner universe, but details on main characters have not been shared other than the fact a few returning faces will be featured. The series will contain fourteen 30-minute episodes that’ll air on Adult Swim’s Toonami block, but it’ll also be available to stream on Crunchyroll.

Rather than CygamesPictures, who produced the Blade Runner 2022 shorts, the series will be animated by studio Sola Digital Arts, who are responsible for the new Ultraman series hitting Netflix. It will also be directed by Shinji Aramaki (Appleseed Alpha) and Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), the same team behind Ultraman. 2022 director Shinichiro Watanabe will serve as the show’s executive producer.

In related anime news, a new trailer for Dragon Ball Super: Broly has arrived showcasing a previously unseen character.

The heavily casted Avengers: Infinity War almost had more characters slated to arrive, with directors Anthony and Joe Russo recently revealing they considered having Marvel’s Netflix heroes appear at some point in the film.

Following a screening of the film with Collider, The Russo Brothers held a Q&A where they were asked if they at least considered putting characters like Daredevil and Luke Cage in the third Avengers film, where they said it was too complicated to correlate the story between other Marvel films in production as well as schedule actors while the TV shows in production. The report comes via a Slashfilm editor in attendance.

They decided the best way to tell the story was to keep it strictly within the MCU. There was also the ending of Infinity War to consider and how the end of the film could impact over a year’s worth of storylines within the shows. And since it appears the Marvel Netflix shows are hanging by a thread what with the cancellations of Iron Fist and Luke Cage, it’s possible Marvel Studios is saving these crossovers for their superhero shows on the upcoming Disney+ service.