For all of those fans hoping to see Namor make his way onto the big screen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it looks like you may actually get your chance pretty soon.
On Thursday, Erick Weber attended an awards screening of Marvel’s Black Panther, and he had taken to Twitter ahead of the event to ask if anyone had questions for Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, who would be in attendance. When the screening had ended, Weber got back online to reveal a couple of the answers that he got from the producer.
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“OK, here we go, 3 quick questions, answers directly from Kevin Feige’s mouth,” Weber wrote in the tweet. “1) Avengers 4 trailer ‘before the end of the year’ 2) Namor COULD make an appearance, still deciding IF & when 3) Guardians 3 status ‘on hold.’”
OK, here we go, 3 quick questions, answers direct from Kevin Feige’s mouth
1) AVENGERS 4 trailer “before the end of the year”
โ ๐๐ช๐ฒ๐ฏ (@ErickWeber) October 26, 2018
2) Namor COULD make an appearance, still deciding IF & when
3) GUARDIANS 3 status “on hold”
Of course the new Avengers trailer arriving is big news, though many predicted that it would drop sometime in 2018. The comment about Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 being on hold also doesn’t come as much of a surprise, considering the absence of a director after James Gunn’s firing.
This Namor bit, though. That’s big news.
Namor the Sub-Mariner (basically Marvel’s Aquaman) has been absent from the studio’s big-screen plans. Plenty of fans love the character, but his complicated history with both mutants and Inhumans makes his situation a bit difficult. His rights have long belonged to Universal, just like Hulk’s.
Earlier this year, Feige addressed Namor’s rights, saying that they weren’t quite as easy to figure out than the other characters.
“I think there’s a way to probably figure it out but it does have โ it’s not as a clean or clear as the majority of the other characters,” Feige said.
The studio president brought up the issue of character rights at one point, saying that the majority of Marvel characters who didn’t already belong to Disney were either with Fox or Sony. However, there were still a couple of outliers that made things complicated.
“There are some with a couple of other players involved that would have to be negotiated with,” he explained. “Then, of course, Spider-Man is still with Sony, independent of our agreement to do the films together. But most of them are home now. If that Fox thing happens, yeah, that’ll be the majority.”
With the purchase of Fox, it sounds like Marvel Studios is pretty close to having all of its characters at Feige’s disposal. The comment from last night’s screening makes it seem as though the tricky Universal characters aren’t that far out either.
Aquaman is hitting theaters later this year, and Marvel might be ready to launch its own underwater adventure pretty soon, though when exactly that happens is still a mystery.
