For the record, Emily Blunt says she hasn't had any discussions with Marvel Studios about becoming CAPTAIN MARVEL, so while all that fantasy casting of Blunt as Carol Danvers may have made you feel warm and fuzzy at night, you might want to put it aside for a little bit as Blunt drops some truth on where those rumors are coming from.
While in Toronto to promote SICARIO, Blunt addressed this desire to stick her, along with some other pretty select company, in the running for every female-based action role that surfaces.
My new anointing. No, I have not heard anything about Captain Marvel.
I think it’s because the list is very short, because we don’t see women in these kind of roles. So I think as soon as you do a role like that, like Charlize did or I did, or Rebecca’s done — there’s like four of us or something. And Jen Lawrence. So I feel like us four, we get talked about — and Angie, Angelina. So it’s a list of like, four women who are going to be considered for those kind of roles. So I think that’s why the rumors happen, because they’re like, "who else? Surely not another girl can wield a gun," you know what I mean? "A woman doing push-ups? There’s only one who can do that."
You have to admit… She does have a valid point.
Every time we discuss one of those roles, it's the same crop of names that gets thrown about, both in who seems to be on Hollywood's "short lists" and also who fans would like to see in those roles. Collectively, we seem to have trouble with outside-the-box thinking, which is why we all keep going back to the tried-and-true well of people we've seen execute similar skill sets in movies before. As a result, we wind up all being our own worst enemies as we complain about seeing the same people doing the same roles all the time… but that's what we ask for.
When you look up and down the MCU roster, it's a lot of people who wound up fitting into their respective characters but whose track record hardly lined them up for those roles. Robert Downey Jr. never did anything that would prompt you to envision him as Iron Man. The same thing for Evans and Hemsworth and Ruffalo and Johansson and the list goes on and on. I've got a hunch that CAPTAIN MARVEL is going to find its title character from somewhere else, not the same list we hear repeated over and over… and when it happens, it'll just step right into the grand tradition of Marvel Studios of finding its superheroes in the places the rest of us aren't typically looking.
CAPTAIN MARVEL will eventually get here on July 6, 2018.
But, in the meantime, it's time to start thinking outside the box. Who, other than the usual suspects, could you envision taking the role of CAPTAIN MARVEL?