Is May Parker the next Hannah Montana?

From Disney's perspective, the storylines that set so many fanboy hearts and message boards aflutter don't particularly matter. It's the properties (read: characters) they contain, and what Disney can do with those properties, that count.

Because Disney's real business is the business of Doing Things With Properties. This deal is about what will get made from the raw material those characters represent, through licensing: toys, TV, movies, games, sleepwear and thrill rides.
- Glen Weldon, NPR

Even if the coverage of the Marvel/Disney deal focuses on how Marvel can help Disney market itself better to young men - and, man, is it creepy to read professionals talk about Disney's "Boy Problem" - I can't help but think of that as too narrow a strategy. Because Marvel has too many characters who could also hook Disney's existing female viewership.

Let's not forget, the Distinguished Competition has dominated the TV/DVD animated boys' market for years, arguably from the moment any of us watched the opening of Batman: The Animated Series. From there we got the Justice League series, more straight-to-video Bat-flicks, and recent stories featuring Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, and the adaptation of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier. That's a sizable head start, even if Marvel's recent animated fare hasn't been bad.

But, should Marvel and Disney decide to give girls a wider range of heroine than usual, that could shift the balance of power on the DVD racks. Consider Spider-Girl up there: a character with an existing fanbase - one that had saved her book from cancellation several times, and perhaps best of all, a character with a more malleable continuity to work with, since she's an "alternate-future" character. One good animated film or TV series and voila! Mayday backpacks fit in perfectly alongside their plain ol' "Princesses."

As if by coincidence - or was it? OMG CONSPIRACY! - Marvel offered up another prime candidate for multimedia exposure in the X-Men's Pixie, who's slated to get her own mini-series later this year. The X-Franchise, in fact, could yield a treasure-trove of "new" stars: Kitty Pryde, Storm, Illyana Rasputin, and even Wolfsbane come to mind right off the bat. Outside of Xavier's School, you've got Araña; Ms. Marvel, the Runaways and She-Hulk potentially waiting in the wings.

So while we've been assured that "sparks will fly" after the initial meetings between Marvel and Pixar, as a fan, I'm hoping we get more than the umpteenth animated Wolverine or Iron Man - hell, Logan and Tony are already going to be in anime, so we're good. As a fan, and a consumer, I want to see innovation, I want to see diversity, I want to see Pixar finally listen to Linda Holmes. I want this deal to result in more work for male and female voice-actors and animators. I want this deal to kick DC in the ass enough to give me a Blue Beetle animated film. I want this to really, truly change the game beyond the boardroom. And, hell, even if I'm an old fanboy, I want my friends who have daughters and sons to see that the little girls don't have to look up only to the girl with the glass shoe, or the blonde wig - the one with the web-shooters can make just as good of a heroine.

Shanks For Nothing: Arturo v. X-Men Origins: Wolverine!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the movie of the year! ... if the year were 1995.

Give Hugh Jackman credit for putting his money where his mouth is -- he's listed as a producer on this flick, and his affection for the title character seems genuine. Unfortunately for him, this movie was more like Van Helsing than X-Men 2. Hell, there were moments when the movie felt like a slightly-better-written episode of Smallville.

Part of the problem is, because the film is a prequel (in film canon, it takes place more than a decade before the X-series opens), there's too many limits going in. You know Jimmy/Logan/Wolverine is gonna make it through; it's just a matter of how the dots get connected.

And to be fair, the script by David Benioff and Skip Wells does that well enough. Yes, a young Cyclops is featured in the film, but there's not enough contact between himself and Logan to mess with the timeline established in the rest of the movies. There's even a scene thrown in for the Scott/Emma Frost 'shippers among us. (One wish for the planned First Class film: a triangle between Scott, Emma and a young Jean Grey. Fanservice and soap opera all in one!)

The brightest spots amidst all the angst (more on that later) are, not surprisingly, Ryan Reynolds stealing the movie as Wade Wilson in the course of one monologue; and, somewhat surprisingly, Taylor Kitsch giving us a Gambit who is refreshingly long on swagger and short on the Pepe Le Pew-like pronouncements he's prone to in the comics. Both are one-note characters, to be sure, but they're entertaining one-note characters -- enough so that you actually want to see their roles being expanded if the series continues.

As Duncan MacLeod, Logan himself, Hugh Jackman again brings his best t-shirts to the proceedings. But the character is undercut from the get-go. First off, as we've all known since his first solo mini-series, a good Wolverine story should not be PG-13. You can't do the grim without doing the gritty. As he tells his girlfriend, "What I do isn't very nice," so to put it bluntly, this story needed blood. Maybe not Eli Roth-levels of gore, but enough to hammer home the nastiness of the circles he runs in when he's not in Westchester County.

The toning-down of the story also leaves Liev Schrieber with precious little to do as Sabretooth, who is further neutered by being portrayed as Logan's half-brother, something which Wolvie's proper origin didn't cover. The "my brother is my enemy" subplot, spread out over what felt like 200 fights between the two, took Wolverine from retro to outright dated. Not bad, per se; hindsight being what it is, if this were the first X-movie we'd ever gotten back in the day, it would be a good warm-up for whatever was to come. But by now, it's just another comic-book movie -- hardly the best at what it's trying to do.