With Suicide Squad director David Ayer signed on to direct the female-driven Gotham City Sirens, there’s been a whole host of speculation on who will helm the already-announced Suicide Squad sequel. While Mel Gibson was at one point the frontrunner for the gig, now comes a new update that puts a new name in the frame.

As per Deadline, it’s believed that Orphan and The Shallows’ Jaume Collet-Serra is now the frontrunner to take the director’s chair for Task Force X’s next outing. A script is currently being worked on by Zak Penn, with the current plan being to start shooting next year.

It’s not known just which characters will be returning for the Suicide Squad follow-up, although it’s presumed that the majority of the cast will be back to reprise their villainous roles.

As well as Gibson, other notable names linked to the gig have been Ruben Fleischer, Jonathan Levine, and Daniel Espinosa. Now, though, it appears that Warner Brothers have decided that Collet-Serra is their man.

Expect more on this as we get it.

With Bumblebee currently seen battling alongside his fellow Robots-in-Disguise in Transformers: The Last Knight, his upcoming solo spinoff picture has moved to bring in a new cast addition.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., recently seen briefly in Spider-Man: Homecoming, has joined the film. The only other confirmed cast member at this early stage is Hailee Steinfeld, with Kubo and the Two Strings’ Travis Knight on board to direct.

Recent details on Bumblebee suggest that it will actually be a prequel of sorts that will be set in the 1980s, and the only other concrete details we know at this stage is that the film is booked in for a June 8th, 2018 release.

In some slightly surprising (or outright bizarre) news, it’s being reported that Venom and Carnage won’t be the only symbiote-infused sorts featured in Sony’s Tom Hardy-headlined Venom.

As per the Hashtag Show, it’s believed that the ‘Bride of Venom’ will be making an appearance in the movie. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this particular character, Ann Weying is the ex-wife of Eddie Brock and she’s someone who at one stage acts as a temporary host for the alien symbiote and takes on the loose moniker of She-Venom. This all happened after she was shot by the Sin-Eater, with the alien goo bonding to her and actually saving her life… well, until she later committed suicide. Additionally, the outlet reports that Sony are currently looking to cast an actress in the 25-32 age bracket for the gig.

Already confirmed to be the villain of the piece is longtime Spider-Man foe Carnage, aka Cletus Kasady. Nobody has been cast in that role yet, but Carnage is a huge favourite of many comic book fans. Initially spawning from Venom and bonding with bona fide psychotic maniac Kasady, Carnage has both teamed up with and butted heads with Venom over the decades.

In another piece of new information, it’s also believed that Venom will pull its inspiration from the Ultimate line of comics when it comes to the symbiote itself – meaning that it will be a creation of the fathers of Eddie Brock and Peter Parker as opposed to coming directly from the stars.

At this stage, after several different lines being fed out, Venom will not be a part of the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe which Tom Holland’s Web-head inhabits, although it’s being said that the film will take place in the same “reality” as Spider-Man: Homecoming and the MCU. So, yeah, make of that what you will.

In addition to Venom, Sony are also developing a Silver Sable and Black Cat team-up dubbed Silver and Black, and then there’s supposedly plans to give solo pictures to both Kraven and Mysterio. Given that Tom Holland’s six-picture Spidey contract only involves five MCU movies, if you ask us it looks as if things are being set up for Sony to establish a cinematic realm of villains for Holland’s Wall-crawler to swing straight in to for the sixth and final movie of the actor’s current deal.

Already being described as an R-rated horror movie in tone, and to be directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, Venom is currently set for an October 5th, 2018 release.

With Godzilla: King of the Monsters currently assembling its key players, the sequel to Gareth Edwards’ 2014 movie has moved to bring in another new cast addition in the form of Elizabeth Ludlow.

As per Deadline, the actress – best known to genre fans as one of Negan’s Saviors in The Walking Dead – has joined the film in an unknown role. In King of the Monsters, she joins a cast that currently includes Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Bradley Whitford, Zhang Ziyi, and the returning duo of Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins.

In terms of plot, the early synopsis reads:

The new story follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species – thought to be mere myths – rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity’s very existence hanging in the balance.

To be directed by Trick ‘r Treat’s Michael Dougherty, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is currently set for March 22nd, 2019. After that, of course, we’ve got the huge crossover picture Godzilla vs. Kong set for 2020.

With Spider-Man: Homecoming having now swung in to cinemas and wowed us all – you can find our review here – there were several reveals during the movie that had us all pondering what the ramifications of these would be going forward. Well, some of the powers that be have been addressing said reveals and what they mean for ol’ Web-head and his world.

First and foremost, it’s only fair that we give you a heads-up that there be spoilers up ahead. So, if you’re yet to see Homecoming, we’d advise turning back now before it’s too late. Don’t say we didn’t warn you…

SPOILERS

Still with us? Good.

Right, the big reveals we’re talking about are Michelle dropping in the MJ nickname, Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes holding on to Spidey’s secret identity during the post-credits scene, and Aunt May seemingly finding out that Peter Parker is actually the Wall-crawler seen cracking skulls in Queens.

If you remember, the final shot of Homecoming sees Aunt May open Peter’s bedroom door to find him standing there in his Spider-duds. A perfectly-timed “What the f…” would follow before the film cut to a close. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the decision to have May find out Peter’s secret, screenwriter Jonathan Goldstein explained, “It just sort of diminishes what is often the most trivial part of superhero worlds, which is finding your secret. It takes the emphasis off that, lets her become part of what’s really his life, so it’s not cloak-and-dagger stuff. It’s how does he best use these powers to help the world, help himself and his family, and act responsibly. What’s funny is, when we first went in to Marvel, we said we were imagining that Aunt May would be a Marisa Tomei type, and they kind of exchanged a look, because they were already secretly in negotiations with her. So things worked out well; we were all on the same page.”

Fellow screenwriter John Daley added, “It sets up a fun storyline of having this maternal figure who is supposed to protect this kid, but also knowing this kid is so much stronger than she is, and in fact his job is going to be to protect her, presumably.”

Moving on to the post-credits scene, we saw Adrian Toomes approached by Mac Gargan (a character comic book fans will know better as the villainous Scorpion) and asked about whether he knew Spider-Man’s identity. Of course, we all know that Toomes does know that Peter Parker is the one under the mask, but he chooses to keep this intel to himself. Many took this as meaning that the Vulture was holding on to the information so that he could personally get revenge on Spidey, but director Jon Watts has said that that’s not actually the case. Speaking to EW, Watts clarified, “He gets a moment of redemption and he gets to protect Peter, even though Peter would never know. It’s his way of saying thank you. You couldn’t just rely on the tropes of the villain being a murderer and killing a bunch of people. He had to be redeemable in some capacity in the end and that he believes everything he said, especially about his family. So it was a really fine walk to create a villain that still has that moment of redemption in the end. Those scenes with him and Peter in the house, where he’s driving Peter to the dance – that right there is the reason for doing the movie. That, more than anything else, is what I was looking forward to, and I got to have a lot of fun shooting that stuff.”

Next, there’s the MJ issue. As Homecoming came to a close, one of the final scenes saw Zendaya’s Michelle reveal that her friends call her MJ for short. Previously, it had been rumoured that Zendaya’s mystery role in the film was actually that of Mary Jane Watson, although those stories were constantly debunked. And now, Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige has again moved to reiterate that the MJ line doesn’t mean that Michelle is actually a new spin on Peter Parker’s comic book wife (well, until he scrapped his marriage after making a deal with the devil in the awful One More Day storyline). Feige told IGN, “We never even looked at it as a big reveal necessarily, but more of just a fun homage to his past adventures and his past love. She’s not Mary Jane Watson. She never was Mary Jane Watson. She was always this new high school character, Michelle, who we know there’s an M in Michelle and an M in Mary. So we’re so clever and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if her initials were MJ?’ And then I think it leaked that she would be playing MJ and then it became a whole headache for Zendaya to have to navigate. It was never a big, ‘Oh my God, it’s a big reveal!’ There are big reveals in the movie. That’s not one of them. She’s not Mary Jane Watson. Is she going to date Peter? Are they going to fall in love? She seems to be intrigued with him. There’s a nice chemistry there. Who knows what will happen in the future films.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, was that. Obviously, if you’ve made it this far and haven’t seen Spider-Man: Homecoming yet, we did warn you about a bucketload of spoilers. For the rest of you who’ve taken in the fist-pumping awesomeness of Homecoming, at least you’ve now had a little more background and information on how the film’s big reveals will affect things moving forward. And moving forward they are, with a Homecoming sequel already booked in for July 5th, 2019 in addition to appearances for Tom Holland’s Spidey in next May’s Avengers: Infinity War and its to-be-titled 2019 follow-up.