DC have hit back at Marvel at Comic-Con with the release of the second trailer for upcoming movie Red. The first trailer gave us a lot of Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren as ex-CIA agents, with a little splash of young enemy Karl Urban for good measure. With the second, we get a lot more of John Malkovich.

Willis, Mirren, Malkovich and Morgan Freeman are all old now. Past it. But soon they get labelled as Retired and Extremely Dangeous, so the old team get back together to stop the secret service's whippersnappers from wiping them out.

Expanded from a solo piece into an ensemble from Warren Ellis' graphic novel, it's a pretty simple and obvious idea - old people kick ass - but when your old people are "the queen and God" (as Mirren put it during the Comic-Con panel) you can't really argue. With stuff blowing up, Mirren shooting people, and Malkovich doing the crazies, Red is shaping up to be quite a lot of fun. Not least because it allows Karl Urban to get his geek on. Again. What with Star Trek, Priest, Judge Dredd and this, that guy is now a legend for all sci-fi comic book fans.

The trailer's online over at Apple.

Zack Snyder's Watchmen, love it or hate it, was a successful movie. It busted those blocks with financial precision. Now, since that caused Alan Moore's graphic novel to rocket to the top of the best-seller list, DC is considering making a sequel. Watchmen 2.

Paul Levitz, head of DC, always stuck by Moore's seminal work, stating that it should be left as is: that, as comic book blog Bleeding Cool puts it, "the comic is the comic is the comic". But they have now reported that, with Levitz having stepped down, DC's Senior Vice President, Dan DiDio, is keen on expanding the Watchmen universe.

Will Dave Gibbons be convinced to step in for more books, artwork and, eventually, movies? Will Alan Moore's vision, now disowned by him since it got the Hollywood treatment, be even further tainted? After all, the reason the graphic novel (and the faithful, if shallow, film) remains so good is that it's been unmolested for 20 years.

All that just might change. For the worse. It's not hard to see why they want to chase the money down the shithole, especially with such fasinating characters as Rorschach. Perhaps a spin-off just for him. In which he dons his mask, picks up a can of deodorant, and torches DC's offices. Something like that.