Here’s what we came up with:

10. X-men meet the Seven Dwarfs

The X-men have always lacked just a little something, but by adding Dopey, Sleepy Grumpy and the gang they pick up seven little somethings in one fell swoop. And if you don’t think the dwarfs are mutants, you haven’t seen Grumpy eat soup.

9. Sub-Mariner meets The Little Mermaid

A couple of nights with Namor and Ariel would never pine for the surface world again.

Do you get the metaphor?

8. Donald Duck meets Howard the Duck

Oh, the (in)humanity!

You have heard of Howard the Duck, right?

7. Bambi meets The Incredible Hulk

Each an orphan in his own way, the purple panted one and the world’s most beloved deer would get along famously — at least, a helluva lot better than Bambi and Godzilla did!

6. Beauty & the Beast meet Wolverine

The two beastie boys battling over Belle? Put some protective covering on the furniture and an extra coat of scratch-resistant polish on the floors!

5. Deadpool meets Dumbo

Teleportation is so overdone. What better way to strike terror in the hearts of your enemies than to come swooping in on a flying baby elephant who cries if you criticize his ears?

4. Spider-man meets Aladdin

You gotta believe smart-alec Spidey and the jovial blue Genie would get along famously. Although with skyscrapers hard to find in the ancient middle east, the magic carpet could get a bit crowded!

3. Iron Man meets Wall-E

I’m sure each has a few spare parts the other would love to accessorize, and imagine the epic quests across the galaxy looking for a 220-volt outlet!

2. Daredevil meets Goofy

The blind leading the congenitally idiotic! At least Goofy could lighten the mood during some of those tense courtroom battles..

1. Captain America meets Toy Story

Could there be two more pompous crimefighters than Cap and Buzz Lightyear? By the time the two of them decide on a rallying cry/motto, all the super villains will have retired.

“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and … unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, president and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company, in a statement. “We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney.”

Under the deal, Marvel shareholders will receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.

The gives Disney more than 5,000 new characters to work with.

It also gives Marvel a cash influx.

“This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world,” said Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s chief executive officer.

In 2006, Disney bought Pixar Animation Studios, the creator of “Toy Story” and “Cars,” for $7.4-billion.

Both companies’ boards of directors approved the deal, which is pending governmental antitrust review.

ENFIELD, Conn. — My feeling is this: the only possible way that “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” could have been spawned is if the following conversation took place, in some undisclosed location with a pair of undisclosed Fox studio executives. Let’s call them Character and Assassination.

Character: Hey, even though the third X-Men was a pile of cow dung, everybody still likes Wolverine, right?

Assassination: Please. The better question is, who doesn’t like Hugh Jackman? That guy’s awesome.

Character: So let’s make a movie about him, throw in a lot of gratuitous cameos of other mutants — but let’s twist their personalities and abilities to the point where they are unrecognizable.

Assassination: Great idea! And let’s the film the entire thing on green screens! Think Lucas will give us a hand? He’s an expert at ruining franchises.

Character: Pshaw, think about how much that’ll cost? Instead, let’s blow our whole FX budget showing Sabretooth’s fingernails growing in extreme closeup, accompanied by Liev Schreiber’s sardonic smirk.

Assassination: I like the way you think. Maybe we could add a couple unfunny pithy one-liners. But what happens besides that?

Character: Doesn’t really matter. We could just have Wolverine get into a lot of pointless fights that don’t advance the plot at all. And he could growl a lot, sort of like Darth Vader in “Revenge of the Sith.” That was the best part, am I right?

Assassination: Totally. But what other mutants should we include?

Character: Well, the fans have been asking for Gambit.

Assassination: The only way I’ll allow that is if he drops his Cajun accent five minutes into the film, and also appears out of nowhere several times.

Character: It’s a deal. Also, let’s cast Van Wilder and Charlie from “Lost” somehow. And that guy from the Yes We Can video. I’m thinking we could tell them they’ll play cool mutants from the comics and then make their characters about a hundred times more stupid.

Assassination: With pleasure! And let’s abuse Cyclops again. I really just can’t stand that guy.

Character: How will we keep continuity with the other movies? For that matter, Liev Schreiber doesn’t look anything like the guy who played Sabretooth the first time, does he?

Assassination: Don’t worry about it. Just call him “Victor” the entire time and give him less hair. The audience won’t even know he’s supposed to be Sabretooth.

Character: Genius. You ready to film this thing, then?

Assassination: Yeah. But should we worry about the plot at all?

Character: Are you kidding? We’ll have as many plot holes as the amount of bloodless stab wounds. Gotta keep it PG-13.

Assassination: Let’s do this thing!

There you have it, folks. Now, that might come off as the bitter ranting of a disappointed geek — which I admittedly am — but the truth of the matter is that this was a bad, bad film regardless of geek affiliation or lack thereof.

The production values were uneven at best and laughable at worst; there are scenes where I had to fight not to laugh, both at the bad CGI and painful dialogue. It was like watching the part in “Return of the King” where the hobbits are frolicking in bed together.

The plot was disjointed and frankly made very little sense. All the themes and questions that Bryan Singer and company developed in the first two X-Men films — and yes, even the abominable Brett Ratner contributed to those in the third X-Men — are completely absent here. Yes, it’s intended to be a different franchise, I understand that, but it is also supposedly set in the same universe. But no, the only continuity in this film was Jackman himself.

Ah! There it is: the film’s sole redeeming quality! Hugh Jackman is again excellent in the role, balancing the fan favorite “best at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice” aspect of Wolverine with the human side. Jackman clearly has a love for this role and this character, and he played the different sides of the Wolverine beautifully. One such moment was near the end of the film, when Logan loses his memories. The change in attitude, in voice, was so perfectly on par with the Logan we see in X-Men 1 and 2 that I could only smile.

But unfortunately, one good performance doesn’t save a film riddled with inconsistency, stupidity, absurdity, and a lot of other nouns that end in “Y,” nor does that performance render the film watchable.

It’s a shame, really — and I do hate to say it — but the bottom line here is to stay away from “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”

Stay far, far away.

BLAST: You said you first came across the story of the [Bielski] brothers 12 years ago.

ED ZWICK: Yes.

BLAST: What was the process between then and now in creating the movie?

EZ: Well, we optioned the book, and then we, on our own, worked on a story from the book. An adaptation. We go a studio to pay us to write a script, and they then abandoned the process. We worked on it ourselves but, inevitably, life intercedes and making a living and the other things that catch your imagination. That included several other movies over those years. But each time, we would go back to it, think about it, try to find financing, not necessarily be able to, work on it. There was a significant amount of work that happened about three years ago when it occurred to me that there was a central flaw in what we were doing in the telling that involved trying to tell too much an it was about telescoping the beginning significantly and telescoping the end so as to intensify the fabric of it. That really helped. It sort of took on a new life and it somehow galvanized me to rededicate myself to trying to get it done. And I had gotten Daniel Craig. He had wanted to do “Blood Diamond” at a certain moment, and the studio was not interested in that. But I had met him and really liked him. I had liked his work before I had seen him in “Layer Cake” and “The Mother” and I had seen “Infamous;” these great roles. And it was only a matter of time before his gift became known, so that when I finished this draft, he was the first person I sent it to. And he read it and said he wanted to meet and we got together in London and had a six hour conversation that was terrific and really, by the end of which, it was clear to both of us that we wanted to do this thing. I had to secure the financing then. We had been rejected by every conventional means and again, with Daniel’s participation, were rejected again. So I found an independent financier who was willing to put up the money who then pre-sold some of the foreign rights to mitigate his own investment. And then we got a domestic distributor, which was Paramount Vantage, to distribute it.

BLAST: And that’s where we are today.

EZ: And, well, there was four months in Lithuania and some post-production.

BLAST: ["Defiance"] is very different than other World War II and Holocaust movies that are out there, just in the fact that you think “World War II” you think “D-Day” and you think of “The Holocaust” you think “concentration camps.” Was there a conscious decision to keep those aspects out of it?

EZ: They were not intrinsic to the experience of the story. I wanted the story to be very subjective: from the experience of these people, which means that the Germans themselves were at a distance. If they were close to you, it meant that you were dead. So therefore, they had to be at removed. Similarly the camps were, at that moment, nothing but a rumor, if that, so they couldn’t figure in the story. I really wanted to remain true to the circumstances and to their experience, and that defined the telling. It was about “the forest” and what happened in that forest became, metaphorically, a place of change and transformation, as it has been in literature from the Brothers Grimm to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It’s a place where people go to seek refuge but are changed by it.

BLAST: Did you ever meet with any of the [Bielski] brothers or any of the families?

EZ: The three oldest brothers in the story are dead, and were when we began. But their sons became very important to us and told the stories their father gave us, videotapes of their fathers that they had collected. We met others who had been in the brigade. They came to visit us. It turns out that they gave us access to an autobiography that Tuvia had written.

BLAST: Has that been published?

EZ: No, it is unpublished and it’s literarily very odd and stilted but it’s very interesting as a document. It has some of the Soviet party nomenclature in it. It has a very casual attitude toward violence. It contradicts itself at certain times. It’s very interesting.

BLAST: Not personally having known the story [of the Bielskis] before this movie, were there any creative liberties taken?

EZ: Definitely, in the composite of the other characters, and in the imagined dialogues between people. I mean, who knew what happened there really? And these conversations? There was a dialectic in the Nechama Tec book about the decision to seek revenge and the impulse to save others. That found its expression in these two characters [Tuvia and Zus Bielski], and that becomes the central metaphor of the story.

BLAST: There are a lot of metaphors in the whole Passover idea of [Tuvia] coming through as Moses and splitting the sea. What was the basis behind that decision, other than the obvious?

EZ: Besides my own artistic so-called interpretation, I felt that the metaphor was implicit. These two brothers, it evoked Moses and Aaron. These people wandering from one place to the next, it evoked the wilderness and the diaspora. I just thought that there was a real value to its epic nature to find those metaphorical parallels. When they were passing through the water [at the end of the film], that happens to be true but it’s remarkable.

BLAST: Was it true that [the passing through the water] occurred at Passover or was that a creative liberty?

EZ: No, I believe that the big attack did take place during Passover. I could be wrong, but I think that’s true. What’s surprising is that people who [don't get the metaphors] go along anyway. We screened the movie in Westminster, Colorado where they may have heard of Jews but never seen one, and it played wonderfully, and people got it. They related to it as a story; a story of survival and of community and all the other parts of it. I mean, there is a special relationship that one has with a story if you imagine your relatives or yourself in that situation, so how could it not but be that? But it’s not necessary I hope.

BLAST: How was working with Daniel [Craig] and Liev [Schreiber]?

EZ: We had a great experience together. We really did. They’re both from theater. Daniel is a working-class British actor from theater, and Liev is one of the great lights of the American stage right now and has been for the past 15 years. So at some times they’re very similar, even though one of them has just happened to be vaulted into mega-stardom suddenly.

BLAST: Well, [Liev] is going to be the next Sabretooth.

EZ: Well he is in fact. I wanted him to send me a picture of himself wearing some big cat suit with whiskers or something like that, but he said they managed to avoid that. I said I wanted to see him in spandex.

BLAST: You should have managed to incorporate that into ["Defiance"] at some point.

EZ: It would have been good, don’t you think? At some point just a kind of a “Rawr.”

BLAST: Have the hair and the nails; I think it would have gone with the theme of the movie.

EZ: Well there was a whole Holocaust theme in the first X-men [comic books]. The genocide of the mutants and all of that. There was Jews, homosexuals, and mutants. That’s who was sent to the camps.

BLAST: So basically, “Defiance” is just a big metaphor for “X-men.”

EZ: [laughter] You’re right, it’s in reverse.

BLAST: Tell me a little bit about your background. Obviously you’ve been a big player in [Hollywood]. Tell me a bit about your history and where you started.

EZ: I started directing the theater when I went to college. I did not study theater. I directed in the theater because it was a great opportunity to direct. I studied literature and history and anthropology and science and everything but theater, and I think that was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. I wrote journalism while I was in school and for a year or so thereafter. Somehow both of those things found their expression in these movies: the theater and the journalism; the research of a subject or the immersion in a subject.

BLAST: Do you think that’s more important to being a director than necessarily going and studying for eight years?

EZ: In film? I do. I do. I mean, otherwise you’re just making movies about other movies, as opposed to knowing how to learn about the world or going out in the world and actually seeing what the world has to tell you and to holding the mirror up to the world.

BLAST: Your stories tell about aspect of history, like with “Glory” or with “Defiance” and “The Last Samurai.” They’re aspects of history that people might not necessarily have known about beforehand. Do you set out, when you make these movies, to educate people, or is it just topics that you find interesting?

EZ: First I find them interesting, and I do want to suit myself because, I can’t keep myself interested for two years, how can I expect people interested for two hours? I think that’s for sure. But, there’s nothing wrong with people learning something while they’re being entertained. I think that’s one of the ways we actually learn most of what we learn. Even this presidential election, you saw both candidates trying to present themselves as a narrative. They understood that that was the way of communicating their story; their beliefs were somehow tied up in their narrative. And I think narrative is the way that people open themselves to learning as opposed to through the more rigorous, clearly academic process.

BLAST: What do you have next in line? Are you going to keep with the theme of “Blood Diamond” and “Defiance,” or are you going to make the next “Superbad”?

EZ: Well that would be good. Yeah, I liked “Superbad.” I wonder, what would it become? “Super…..”

BLAST: An adult version.

EZ: Yeah, I waited and I missed it. [laughter] I never really can predict. I just really tend to immerse myself. And then it’s done. And then I look around and I’m convinced I’ll never think of anything else and I’ll never get to make another movie.

BLAST: Which clearly is what’s been happening to you for a while ago.

EZ: It’s going to happen someday. [laughter]

BLAST: Nothing’s got your mind?

EZ: It’s a lot of head scratching, yeah.

BLAST: How long did it take you to film the movie, when you were in Lithuania?

EZ: Pretty fast: 60 shooting days. That’s about 12 weeks, or 10 weeks with six day weeks. It was a tough schedule and we were very far north and it was very cold and very wet. It didn’t get light until 7:30 in the morning and then it got dark by 4:30. It was a hard thing.

BLAST: Did you actually manage to film during winter?

EZ: Oh sure. We went all the way into real snow. Sometimes we filled it in with fake, but when you’re trying to load an automatic weapon in freezing conditions [...] you’re just trying to get it done, and it looks great on film. The breath is real, and the shivering is real, and the faces are blue and the teeth are chattering. That’s a good thing. By the way, people suggested we film [in America], but those faces, the faces of the extras, you just can’t find them. They’re from Eastern Europe. That’s who they are.

BLAST: What kind of preparation did the actors have to go through for the film?

EZ: Weapons training, certainly. Dialect work. A lot of research. Russian. Daniel and Liev had to really learn how to speak Russian.

BLAST: The movie is obviously a very sensitive and emotional subject. Was that hard at all on the set for actors to cope with it or for you to cope with it?

EZ: You know, you’d think that, but in fact, when you’re doing something that you believe in or that has meaning, it never feels hard. I think what’s hard is when you’re doing something that’s cynical and you feel a little shabby and that you’re giving yourself away. I think that’s much harder.

SAN DIEGO — It’s coming out on DVD in January, but we got the chance to screen the upcoming Marvel/Lionsgate animated feature “Hulk vs. Wolverine” on Thursday.

Fans of the animated series will appreciate the spirit of the yellow-clad, “bub” shouting, canine-familiar superhero and the transformation between a meek Dr. Banner and a monstrous Hulk calling Wolverine “little man.”

The 40-minute movie opens true to the pair’s first comic book meeting, with The Incredible Hulk tearing up Canada and the military calling on Wolverine to put a stop to him. They square off before the story pans to some of Logan’s past and the origins of the Weapon X program, nicely paying tribute to the comic book roots.

The Weapon X program and its maniacle “Professor” are back, and they want Wolverine and the Hulk as weapons for themselves. The Weapon X crew includes Sabretooth, Omega Red, Lady Deathstrike and a hilarious Deadpool who steals the show.

It’s a bloody, limb-ripping feature that will surely please X-Men fans come January. It ship on one disc with Hulk vs. Thor.

In a surprise appearance at today’s Comic-con Fox event, Hugh Jackman arrived, “directly off the plane” from the set of Wolverine after the cast and crew finished filming the final scenes. He brought with him a first look at the film, which Jackman assured the crowd he taped together himself on his plane ride.

From what the reel showed, it seems like the film will follow a Wolverine (Jackman) /Sabertooth (Liev Schrieber) friendship-to-mortal-enemies-type plot line, from their first meeting in a prison cell, through their training in Weapon X under the tutelage of William Stryker (Danny Huston). And yes, from the reel of footage, their was visual proof of a Gambit in the upcoming movie, being played by Taylor Kitsch.

Hugh Jackman seemed just as excited as we all are after the resounding applause for Gambit.