Whenever you look at a casting list for “genre” projects, including comic book movies, the same handful of names seem to come up. Until recently, when we started to get more and more “serious” actors playing in movies like this (thanks, Chris Nolan!), it was a fairly rare breed of stars whose name was big enough to sell a movie on the budget and scale of a Star Wars or Avengers and who were also interested in playing those roles.Now, though, we’ve started to see something we’ve never really seen before: actors who play major roles in major franchises with decades of history–and fandoms who are intensely competitive with one another. The announcement earlier today that Benedict Cumberbatch is apparently headed to the Star Wars universe is a bit like the Red Sox trading their best player to the Yankees, and every bit as likely to get a certain kind of fan worked into a lather.Cumberbatch isn’t the first time it’s happened, though, and not even the first time the star was a big enough name, or the franchise a big enough jewel in its owner’s crown, to set off some alarms among the fans.And, jeez–these things generally turned out a lot better for Marvel than for DC…!
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James Marsden: X-Men to Superman
This one’s a bit on the inexplicable side, other than the fact that he’s clearly friendly with director Bryan Singer. Having played a major role in X-Men, Marsden came over to Superman Returns and played a role that cast him as basically a nonentity. “Lois Lane’s boyfriend” is the closest thing I could come to name for the character before going to IMDb and realizing that it’s Richard White, and also that he’s her (extremely understanding, considering she has a terrifying alien lovechild) husband.Bonus points, though: Marsden also appeared in this year’s 2 Guns, an adaptation of the BOOM! Studios comic book.
