Remember when Tim Blake Nelson‘s noggin started looking all funky in The Incredible Hulk? Well, if you don’t, it happened around the point where the Hulk and the Abomination starting ripping each other apart. While those two worked out their problems, Dr. Samuel Sterns was having a makeover. Before the finale, we saw Sterns crack a smile while making his transformation into The Leader, the brilliant green-skinned Marvel baddie. He’s a villain favorite for some, possibly even the makers of The Amazing Spider-Man, who used one of his more famous schemes for The Lizard’s grand plan. The Leader is a very comic book-y type of villain, one that could have been too much for Marvel’s Phase I, but now that the studio has pushed the boundaries of its scientific status, bringing back actor Tim Blake Nelson to terrorize The Hulk or The Avengers is a solid idea. Louis Leterrier would seem to agree. Speaking with him recently, I asked whether there was ever serious talk over using The Leader in future films.

What is Casting Couch? Casting news. Today we’ve got updates on new roles for people like Michelle Williams, Laurence Fishburne, and—what the heck—let’s stick in a rumor about who might play the Scarlet Witch in Avengers 2 as well. It looks like Owen Wilson might be taking a trip back to the ’70s. The Wrap reports that he’s the latest name in negotiations to join Paul Thomas Anderson’s next film, his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Never ones to let a good PTA rumor go uncommented on, Cigarettes & Red Vines then took this story and ran with it, contacting their own sources and discovering that the role Wilson is in talks for is that of Coy Harlingen, who’s described as being a surf-saxophone player and a heroin addict, and who may be the most Owen Wilson-y role ever written.

As we entered the month of May this week, we’ve now officially entered the summer movie season. Never mind the attempt by Oblivion to up the frame a bit with its grand sci-fi mash-up. Maybe if it had been better, a surprise knockout hit, we’d be calling it the head start of the blockbuster season, but there’s really just no overshadowing an Avengers movie, especially one from the original franchise sub-franchise, Iron Man. To be frank, it’s also going to be a hard movie to follow, too. Not necessarily in quality but in box office. Because it’s the start of May, we not only previewed the summer season but also the month itself. And we continued to cover a few film festivals, including Tribeca, Hot Docs, San Francisco and the new Stanley Film Fest, which will be a big part of our content the next few days. As always, the Reject Recap highlights the biggest movie news and features of the week and this time we have one selection not originally posted to FSR. If you see any interesting features we should include, email us. Start your weekend right after the jump.

Now that Joss Whedon’s superhero team-up movie, The Avengers, made well over a billion dollars worldwide, and Marvel’s next step in their ongoing saga, Iron Man 3, has opened overseas with numbers that put the film on track to make the studio gazillions more, it’s probably safe to say that there’s a lot of public interest concerning which direction things are going heading into The Avengers 2. And, lucky for us, Whedon has been pretty generous when it comes to answering questions. When he talked to Collider on the red carpet of the Iron Man 3 premier, he hinted at the fact that he might be adding Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch to the Avengers roster in his upcoming sequel, and it seems that when Desde Hollywood talked to him at the same event, he even talked a bit about his plans for the Avengers’ arch-villain, Thanos, who made his appearance in the after-credits sequence of the first film.

Given the relative obscurity of the characters that regularly get featured in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” title, it’s always been something of a curiosity as to why they’re the next priority when it comes to the movies Marvel Studios is making. Couldn’t they be spending their time and resources introducing characters that have a little bit more mainstream recognition into their film world? The logical answer to this question has been that, seeing as The Avengers are likely to be going up against the intergalactic conqueror Thanos in The Avengers 2, Guardians of the Galaxy will be the vehicle through which Marvel’s extended cosmic universe gets introduced. Just imagine if The Avengers 2 had to do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to who Thanos is, why he’s such a threat, and what exactly he’s been getting up to across the entire universe for all these years. The movie would be completely bogged down with exposition and unable to enjoy all of the brevity in storytelling that being a Part 2 usually affords a film. But introduce a number of alien worlds in this Guardians of the Galaxy movie, have Thanos lurking in the background as an unspeakable threat, and suddenly a lot of the narrative load is taken off of The Avengers 2’s shoulder. Plus, you might create a bankable new film franchise to boot.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly column dedicated to the cool, the weird, the entertaining, the brief, the good, the bad and the ugly of the entertainment news world. Also, there’s some philosophical talk about Sharktopus, because that’s just how the Internet rolls. We begin this evening with an image of a handmade Game of Thrones board game that is absolutely fabulous. Created by Fay Helfer, it’s basically a Risk board in the shape and detail of Westeros. And it’s brilliant.

Coming off yesterday’s announcement that Marvel has tapped Joss Whedon to return to their Avengers cash cow for another round of writing and directing on the currently-simply-titled The Avengers 2 comes further clarification on Whedon’s role in the Marvel universe. In short, it’s a big one. The LA Times reports that, in addition to yesterday’s report that Whedon was set to get back into the Avengers world while also helping to develop Marvel’s live-action series for ABC, the filmmaker has also “signed an exclusive deal with Marvel Studios for film and television through the end of June 2015.” Beyond just his work on the Avengers sequel and his development of the new TV series, Whedon will also “contribute creatively to the next phase of Marvel’s cinematic universe,” so expect the next round of Marvel’s films to have some Whedonesque fingerprints all over them (a good thing no matter how you slice it).

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s just as movie-obsessed as you are, which is why it continues to give you all this fun and fancy content on a nightly basis. Every weeknight at 10p Central, 11p Eastern and 6a in Istanbul (which, depending on the season, is still during a dark time of day). We begin tonight with the most adorable promotional photo for a hardline sci-fi movie ever. Prometheus stars Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Noomi Rapace aren’t doing service to the seriousness of Ridley Scott’s upcoming epic, but they sure are having fun.

Let’s all step back from Deadline Wherever‘s splashy headline “Disney Announces ‘Avengers 2′ In Development” to properly contextualize just what it is that Disney CEO Bob Iger has announced today. While Deadline’s story reads (for now, at least), “Disney CEO Bob Iger just announced that the company is developing a sequel” to box office smash The Avengers, that information comes without an official announcement from Disney or credit to the original source. So, yes, let’s take a moment. ComingSoon has posted the real meat of the story, an interview that Iger did today with CNBC. While you can watch that interview for yourself, CS has lifted out the relevant quotes from Iger: “The Avengers isn’t just a film. It’s a franchise from our perspective. Obviously, it was helped a lot by the success of the Iron Man movies and of Thor and Captain America. From The Avengers we get a chance to make Thor 2 and Captain America 2 and Iron Man 3 and hopefully another Avengers movie. So this one film that is immensely successful…is going to get a number of other films and franchises.”