It’s always a risky proposition to put too much stock in passing comments from Stan Lee. Sure, the man is responsible for ushering in the Marvel Age of Comics back in the day — co-creating such characters as the Fantastic Four, Avengers and (original) X-Men — but that was 50 years ago. These days, he’s as known for his Marvel movie cameos as anything else, meaning that he might be out of the loop when it comes to actual decisionmaking. If that’s not the case, though, and we can trust what he’s saying, the man once known as “The Man” might just have confirmed a rumored Marvel Studios project.
Talking to TooFab, Lee talked about future Marvel Studios plans, saying that “the people at Marvel are looking through our whole list of candidates and wondering which ones are we going to use now. They are going to do the Black Panther. They are going to use Doctor Strange. They are going to do Ant-Man. They are going to do the Guardians of the Galaxy. And they’ll probably do the Inhumans.”
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Some of those projects have been discussed in the past (Guardians and Ant-Man are actively at different stages of preproduction), but is this the first time that anyone actually connected with Marvel — even as tenuously as Lee — has mentioned Inhumans as a future project for the studio?
If Inhumans is actually being developed for a Phase 3 (or beyond) project, it’s a smart move for Marvel Studios. Created by Lee and Jack Kirby in their 1960s run on Fantastic Four as a race of genetically modified humans given spectacular powers by a vapor known as the Terrigen Mists, populated by characters with names like Black Bolt, Medusa and Karnak.
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Later this year, Marvel is set to overhaul the concept in an event called “Inhumanity,” in which many regular humans will be revealed to be descended from Inhumans, giving them latent powers that could manifest in later life — in other words, a version of the central “mutant” concept of X-Men, but one whose movie rights are controlled by Marvel (“Inhumanity” will lead into a January-launching series, Inhuman, as part of Marvel’s All-New Marvel NOW! publicity push).
Elsewhere in the same interview, Lee explains that he doesn’t think that Marvel is in any rush to offer up a movie with a female lead anytime soon. “The thing is, the women like these movies as much as the guys,” he said. “So we don’t have to knock ourselves out finding a female.”
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