A big part of getting every single Marvel character into the MCU has been Marvel Studios having to fight tooth and nail to claim the rights back. Getting Spider-Man was a massive achievement. Fantastic Four and X-Men are still out there, but it seems like another legendary name could have come home: Namor The Sub-Mariner.
In an interview on Kevin Smith’s Fat Man on Batman podcast, caught by our guy Phil over at Squareeyed.tv, Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada dropped the bombshell. When Smith starts quizzing him on who has the character, Quesada says “I can’t speak for studios… As far as I know, yeah we do. It’s not at Fox, it’s not at Sony… Yeah.”
Shrouding his initial answer with a little bit of mystery, he says “I cannot confirm or deny, sir.” Interesting. You can listen to Smith’s whole interview here:
It has been a long old road getting Namor to swim back home, with the character’s film and TV rights having been referred to in the past by MCU overlord Kevin Feige as “complicated.” This hasn’t stopped Marvel dropping a wee hint to him in the past though, such as this map locating someone with superpowers in the middle of the ocean in Iron Man 2…
So another big name has come home. The two biggies still out there are obviously X-Men and Fantastic Four, but with those two titles come a LOT of characters. It means we won’t be seeing the likes of Deadpool, The Silver Surfer, Galactus… in fact a lot of their space-based rights are still elsewhere. Don’t expect a Secret Invasion film any time soon, either…
The big question now is where will Namor fit into things? The slots between now and the two Infinity War films is pretty stuffed, so could he simply be popping up in someone else’s solo flick? It might be post-Infinity War by the time we see a Sub-Mariner, but we’re happy waiting.
Interestingly, in related news, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadaows’ Shredder, Brian Tee, has told Entertainment Tonight that he would love a chance to play the Sub-Mariner: “Marvel Studios just picked up the rights to Namor, who is the Submariner, and I would love to play the Submariner…I grew up as a comic geek and the Submariner is one of my childhood’s fondest superheroes. I feel like I can play him! If there is one role, right now, that I would love to play, it would be Namor.”
We reck Tee deserves a crack at playing a bigger character as his Shredder remained, curiously, in the shadows in TMNT. But is this the role for him?
Let us know.
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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