As 2019 is shaping up to be another massive year for Marvel with Captain Marvel about to rake in a big pile of money and the upcoming release of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, the brains behind the superhero juggernaut are putting pieces in place for its 2020 slate.
And it appears that Marvel are aiming to break new ground with its new films because it is being reported by That Hashtag Show that the studio are looking to cast an openly gay actor to play their first ever gay lead superhero for its upcoming Eternals movie.
There is really only one reaction to this news and I’ll let one of the Queer Eye guys do the honours:
It is being reported that the studio are looking for someone who is aged 30 to 49 and “physically looks like a superhero”, meaning that Marvel’s new hero is gonna be swole AF.
This isn’t the first time that Marvel have talked about wanting to introduce more LGBTQI characters into the MCU as the studio’s head Kevin Feige spoke about working on a couple of new queer storylines for future movies during last year’s Ant-Man And The Wasp press tour.
It also marks another progressive step forward for Marvel in terms of hiring non-white talent in recent years, having hired Taika Waititi to direct the successful Thor: Ragnarok, Ryan Coogler to direct the even-more-successful Black Panther, and Anna Boden to co-direct the sure-to-be-successful Captain Marvel.
And who knows? Given how big Marvel is, maybe the casting of an openly gay actor will open more Hollywood doors for those in the LGBTQI community and start a new conversation about greater representation in the industry.
This hot piece of gossip also means that Eternals is unexpectedly shaping up to be one of the most diverse films Marvel has ever put together in terms of cast and crew. We already know that Marvel have hired Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao to direct the film, which automatically pushes Eternals‘ cool factor up several notches.
Cool, cool, cool.
Given the depressing lack of queer representation in the MCU so far (I know Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok is bisexual but the deleting of all scenes alluding to it and having the cast tell people that fact during the press tour is pretty poor form), it really is about time Marvel did something to fix that anyway.
There have been no cast announcements yet so it remains to be seen whether Marvel will succeed in their quest to find an openly gay actor for the Eternals but the studio doesn’t really have any excuse if they fail as there’s more than enough time as the movie isn’t scheduled to come out until 2020 and production isn’t starting until the second half of 2019.