Marvel Cinematic Universe

If you're half-black/half-Polynesian, or half-black/half-Arab, or half-black/quarter-white/quarter-American Indian, or just plain black but with a lighter than average skin tone, odds are no one is going to be able to guess your exact ethnic makeup just by looking at you. And if you know that you can easily pass as half-black/half-Latino, why wouldn't you show up for the potentially very lucrative casting call?

edited 10th Dec '16 12:41:01 PM by RavenWilder

Miles has already been in an animated show.

And frankly, "obscure marvel character won't be able to carry a solo movie" statements are mostly bullshit at this point, seeing as people basically watch Marvel movies nowadays because they're confident in Marvel movies being consistently good at this point, so Marvel and Sony could definitely feature Miles as a main character if they wanted to.

Who says that people don't already do that? Because they do. Floriana Lima is a white actress who plays, in her character's own words, "a non-white, non-straight" person in the current season of Supergirl. In fact, Floriana Lima has been playing one-off characters that have Latino backgrounds and names for the past eight years before she got her current job as Maggie Sawyer in Supergirl.

edited 10th Dec '16 1:00:25 PM by higherbrainpattern

Yeah it's not a matter of popularity so much as whether the available lore is at a state that the character could be introduced seamlessly GOTG didn't need to be famous to get a movie. Now, Miles does have the baggage of his character's backstory involving Peter being there first, and likewise Kamala is more than popular enough but her story would probably benefit from Carol and maybe the Inhumans being introduced first.

It's not that Miles is obscure, it is that he will look like a Spider-man rip-off to the uninformed audience. In addition, you always have to ask yourself what a new character brings to the table. Got G and Doctor Strange weren't just successful because they were Marvel movies, but also because they offered something were different. Selling Ant-man was way more difficult compared to those two.

Anyway, Marvel won't introduce Miles before Peter is grown up for sure. Miles won't be a theme until at the very least phase 5.

edited 10th Dec '16 1:57:09 PM by Swanpride

Actually, the Spider-Verse is all about alternate universes, so it might entirely be possible.

Except for the fact that Floriana Lima is actually Italian-American and, depending on who you ask, Italians aren't white. Or some are and some aren't. But Italy tends to have a diverse population, so there are lots of POC Italians. So calling her "white" is wrong.

By the time Phase 5 comes out Peter Parker will be in his 30s, that's almost definitely too long. Peter getting to the college stage and focusing on his studies would clear out plenty of room for Miles. And Miles has something to offer as the first voluntary Legacy Character in the MCU. We haven't had anything similar to that, and the closest possible situation at this time, involving Captain America, isn't quite the same. Steve Rogers may have given up the hero name but he's not likely to christen any of his friends. If someone picks it up it's either because they chose to or were named so by a third party.

We also don't have any cases where the Legacy Character was a kid inspired by watching the other more famous superheroes to become a superhero themself. It's a part of Kamala's story and she's enough of a massive hit that she's a good candidate for a movie down the line, but since the Legacy Character aspect of her backstory is relatively minor. They can focus on that aspect more heavily for a movie about Miles, then when it's time to adapt Kamala the Miles film will have softened audiences to the idea (just like the overly repeated line about how Dr. Strange opens audiences' minds to be more accepting of mystic elements in the MCU) so they can gloss over it and move onto Kamala's more unique aspects.

AFAIK most autochthonous Italians self-identify as white. The people who argue that they're not white tend to be strident white supremacists who believe only Germanic Europeans count as white, so their word is automatically worthless, or young teenagers who think they're being clever by trying to reappropriate said racists' propaganda (or worse, savvy former pretending to be the latter). Then again I've seen some of the latter argue that Italians aren't white yet Chinese and Koreans are, so we're either dealing with a language mismatch where these people are talking purely about skintone, people being completely arbitrary because they're not as smart as they think they are, or nontraditional racists trying to justify hate for one of these groups with very strange dogwhistles. In short, while it's a stretch to dismiss all of them, the majority of non-Italians who try to argue against their whiteness tend to not be the reliable sort.

However anecdotally a lot of Italian Americans would argue that they have a weird liminal place between white and nonwhite in US culture. They're white enough to be considered Acceptable Targets (see the incident of the "wop burger" and other anti-Italian slurs), but not so much that they can escape the kind of persistent cultural stereotyping that's more common among nonwhite American groups when other whites descended from non-Germanic groups don't have to deal with it anymore. It's possible that may have colored Lima's self-identification, if she's not an outright mixed race Italian.

And if we're going to critique her about playing Latina characters in general, technically Italians are a form of Latin in the same way Spaniards like the Estevez family who are often accepted as Latinos also are (most Argentinians for example are of pure European ancestry, often Italian, and they're definitely classified as Latins) so if she was playing white Latinas exclusively then it wouldn't have been a wrongdoing, and conversely if her Latina characters are exclusively nonwhite then it may be a case of the above. It's too complicated and multifactorial for either of the "is white" or "isn't white" groups to declare wrongdoing unless there's more information on this from places that are not Tumblr.

edited 10th Dec '16 3:00:40 PM by AlleyOop

Spider-Verse is also a comic Crisis Crossover, one that's explicitly very different from the usual kind of Spider-Man story. The comics have the benefit of being able to do tons and tons and tons of wildly different series with dissonant themes and varieties of adventure that the character can go on while not losing the core of the kind of story they want to tell - due to both concurrent titles and simply having a lot of canon history backing it up.

A movie series can't really do that unless it's got a lot of installments - and thematically keeping Peter's story as the one about the everyman hero coming of age, and centering his movies around New York, is going to be way easier and ultimately make a better story than abruptly (and it will have to be abrupt, given the nature of the threat) giving him a movie about hopping through alternate dimensions. They could maybe do it in a crossover movie if they can figure out a way past the "introducing an entire multiverse and all the characters therein" hurdle, but no way are they doing Spider-Verse in Peter's own series.

I could see them do Spider-Island, though, and introducing Miles that way.

edited 10th Dec '16 2:24:37 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Except for the fact that Floriana Lima is actually Italian-American and, depending on who you ask, Italians aren't white.

Pretty much only by Pierce's dad.

Hell HITLER was cool with them.

Because he already had a group of people to rage against.

Discrimination is pretty much a matter of setting. Any group can discriminated against, depending on the time and setting.

This is news to me. I've only seen two movies with such a paring; Hitch and Out of Time. If there's an interracial pairing in a romantic movie or any movie of a kind, more often than not it's black/white.

I could've sworn I'd seen a video several years back discussing how Hollywood preferred black-Latino couples over black-white couples. I might be remembering it wrong, admittedly, it's been a while.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Discrimination is pretty much a matter of setting. Any group can discriminated against, depending on the time and setting.

Yes, I'm saying virtually no one looks at the italians and goes "They're not white" now.

No one in the US does. In Europe, well, the word "Spaghettifresser" (spaghetti eater) isn't as popular as it used to be, but there are still a number of stereotypes attached to Italians.

Europe has a lot of discrimination based on ethnicity instead of skin color.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Really depends on what they look like, substantially based on skin tone, eye and nose shape, etc, regardless of the particulars of one's family tree. I doubt the really hardcore racists are about to split hairs over the fact.

edited 11th Dec '16 10:26:49 AM by Unsung

The US kinda' does. They're stuck with guido and Godfather stereotypes, and I know a few who get mighty peeved over the former and say it's basically a way to make racism towards them acceptable.

Anyone else kinda nervous about the fact that Spider-Man: Homecoming is listed as having six different screenwriters?

That's not usually a good sign. It often means that the movie's producers aren't confident in the movie and keep asking for re-writes.

I'm not particularly worried about it. They probably tweaked with the script a bit during filming.

Technically, three different writing duos are credited, which I think is big difference from six different individual writers. Besides, it might not matter as much as you think. The original Toy Story has four writers credited, but The Last Airbender only has one writer credited.

edited 11th Dec '16 1:28:02 PM by FoxBoxKid

Make mine Marvel.

I wouldn't be surprised if Marvel's been batting this idea around behind closed doors for years just on the off-chance that they suddenly did get the rights to make a Spider-Man movie, updating it a little more each time another MCU movie comes out.

The production process on animated movies is very different, much more collaborative and iterative than live-action, so it's not really a fair comparison. All the credited writers on Toy Story probably worked together at the same time over the course of the whole movie, whereas the separate teams on a live-action movie might have never met, and the screenplay might still change over the course of production. That's not to say that Spider-Man will be bad— the dialogue is pretty snappy, and that's huge for Spider-Man.

edited 11th Dec '16 1:36:53 PM by Unsung

I have faith. Marvel hasn't put out a terrible movie yet. At worst it will just be mediocre.

There were similar problems with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but there was acknowledged rewrites in the middle of filming and that's why the film was so disjointed. The number of writers for Homecoming is likely because of the joint Sony / Marvel production, ensuring that the film is satisfactory to both studios.

Like all movies, it could go any direction. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was not even really written by the people credited, Nicholas Meyer combined ideas from three or four different scripts into one.

Marvel movies are very collaborative, too. Though in this case, I suspect that there is a writing team for Sony, one for Marvel, and one (perhaps picked by the director) which is supposed to bring the different visions together into one coherent whole. The big question is who does the final version.

We really have to consider this. Sony wants a strong Spider-man franchise, one, which might be able to exist even longer than the MCU itself if necessary. Marvel wants the Spider-man movie to fit into their overreaching story-arc. And then there is the director, who might have a few ideas on its own. So, you have three writing teams, each looking out for someone else's interest. Could be a mess, but if there is true collaboration going on, this can actually be a good thing, because six heads have more ideas.

I really don't think Sony has to worry about Spider-Man outlasting the MCU. That's highly unlikely. Given the way things went last time I think they should be as hands off as possible.

Given how Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 suffered from Sony demanding too much stuff be crammed in, having too few ideas is the exact opposite of what I'm worried about.