Logos Revealed For Spy Sequels

Early posters were revealed at last week's big Licensing International Expo for two of the biggest spy sequels on the horizon: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (aka Mission: Impossible IV) and The Bourne Legacy, both (oddly enough) starring Jeremy Renner.  The Daily Blam was there and snapped pictures of the posters hanging at the expo promoting both films.  Posters at the Licensing Expo are often slapped together well before the film in question has a real marketing plan, just to give it a presence on the floor, so these should not be taken for the official one-sheets.  When those finally appear, they'll presumably look much cooler.  But these banners do give us our first look at the title treatments the studios are currently using for these movies.  Interestingly, there is no colon, dash, or anything delineating the latest Mission: Impossible picture's awkward subtitle, "Ghost Protocol." It's just there, underneath the usual M:I logo. (On this blog, I will continue using the dash, because another colon would be one colon too many, and following the studio's lead and using nothing doesn't really work if you don't have different font styles on different lines like they do!) There's not much more to the posters than the logos you see here, but you can behold them in all their shabby glory at The Daily Blam. Meanwhile, the same expo also afforded fans a more revealing first look at the suddenly ubiquitous Renner's other big spy franchise movie, The Avengers (based on the Marvel comic, not the awesome TV show). That poster (viewable at AICN) shows his costume, and also gives us another look at Scarlett Johansson's sexy superspy Black Widow, a role she reprises from Iron Man 2.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is set to open on December 16, 2011... though Box Office Mojo has an interesting editorial advocating that the film switch dates to avoid directly competing with the Robert Downey Jr. sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.  It does seem odd that two big action tentpoles after the same audience would go up against each other on the same day like that, and I have to concede that BOM is probably correct in their supposition that the Sherlock Holmes franchise has more momentum at the moment, with the sequel coming just two years after a hit predecessor as opposed to five years after the weakest performer in the Mission: Impossible series (though the best movie to date). Of the dates they propose, personally I'd like to see it move up a week to December 9, because I'm dying to see this film and don't want to see it put off until next year! But the editorial does make a good case for April 2012. Read it and see what you think. Tony Gilroy's spin-off from the popular Matt Damon series, The Bourne Legacy, meanwhile, has been set by Universal for an August 3, 2012 debut, as you can see on the poster at The Daily Blam. As previously reported, the film follows an original story conceived by Gilroy (co-writer of the first three movies), and is not based on a Robert Ludlum novel nor the Eric Van Lustbader continuation novel whose title it shares.