Many sites have insisted that Oscar-nominated Selma director Ava DuVernay is a lock to not only direct Marvel Studios’ Black Panther but even going so far as to help supervise Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa and the world of Wakanda on the set of currently-lensing Captain America: Civil War… but is she even under consideration? Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige set the record straight in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“We’ve met with her for sure,” Feige confirms. “We’ve met with a number of people for a number of movies. She has been one of them… We need to find the best director for any given movie, and that’s really where we always start. If diversity is part of that, it’s great. It’s important. You will start to see things across the industry as a whole change as more filmmakers come up through the ranks and become part of making movies like this.”
Angelina Jolie has also been consistently rumored to direct the studio’s upcoming Captain Marvel, which makes 2018 a potential banner year for diversity at the studio, which has been criticized in the past for failing to make a female-centric film and its firing of original Thor: The Dark World director Patty Jenkins, who is now helming Wonder Woman for Warner Bros.
“I think it will happen sooner rather than later, without giving too much away,” Feige says of having a woman directing a Marvel Studios movie. “You look back sometimes, and it’s just the nature of this industry, or the nature of the culture, but there’s a big shift happening. What’s exciting about Marvel, go back and look at the source material: It’s been diverse in a cutting-edge way going back to the ’60s, and I think we’ve represented that effortlessly and accurately in the movies we’ve made up to this point, but certainly with ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Captain Marvel’ doing it in a much more overt and purposeful way.”
Scheduled for July 6, 2018, Black Panther is currently being written by Mark Bailey, while Captain Marvel will star a yet-to-be-cast actress as Carol Danvers who is given alien powers by the Kree. The latter is being written by Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve and it’s shooting for a November 2, 2018 release date.
