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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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What's interesting about Wright is that you can't exactly argue there's much sexism involved, since Nakia and Okoye are next in line when it comes to fan-picks for the role of Black Panther. It really just seems they hate her for the antivax shit. Which I get, but...yeah, like what you said, it ain't gonna happen.
Edited by MatthewWayne on Nov 5th 2021 at 10:18:00 AM
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."I think you can like T'challa as a character all you want (and I do too), but it doesn't take too much effort to grapple with the concept that recasting T'challa at this juncture would A) send the message Chadwick Boseman himself is replaceable B) put whoever replaces him in a terrible spot where he'd live in Boseman's shadow and plagued by comparisons. It even puts the supporting cast in a bad position where they'd be forced to have to peform while pretending nothing changed and this is the same T'challa of always when everything changed and Chadwick Boseman's T'challa is gone no matter how you slice it.
I think it's a tough choice with ups and downs either way, but it's starting to get on my nerves the recurring discourse that I'm seeing (not necessairily here in tvtropes, mostly elsewhere) that Marvel must simply recast T'challa with 0 consideration of what that entails and if they choose any other alternative they're spitting on Boseman's grave. It gets on my nerves because of the moralistic, judgemental look on a terrible situation that has no easy way out and because people start assuming they definitely know better what to do with Chadwick Boseman's legacy than his friends, family and co-workers.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
I'm also seeing that a lot online, and it also is annoying me. Especially when they claim it's what his family wanted. Like they actually know them or heard stuff from them.
And look, I know there's some people who would complain that I don't understand or shouldn't have a say in this because I'm white, and T'Challa is a character that resonates with black kids. And for the most part that's correct. But no matter what ethnicity you are, you should never claim that you know better than the man's family, or put words into their mouths about how they feel about what's happening.
Edited by MatthewWayne on Nov 5th 2021 at 11:06:05 AM
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."I think streaming services mean that recasting a lead character is simply not something that's going to happen anymore.
It's one thing to recast a part when having a few years go by between films means there's time for the previous actor's performance to fade from memory. It's another thing to do that when you have to expect people might be watching the movies back-to-back, and suddenly the main character looks completely different.
Plus, so many moments in Marvel are built around an actor showing up for a scene or two, with no real introduction, but we're supposed to recognize them as their character from previous outings and be instantly invested. You can't really do that if the characters don't have consistent actors.
Only way I can see such a recasting go down is if there's an In-Universe reason for them to have an altered appearance.
The last time a recasting happened In-Universe, the entire Internet fell over themselves trying to convince themselves it meant the X-Men were coming...
In all seriousness though, yeah that's the best thing that can happen with a recasting in the MCU. Unless it's done super early like with War Machine and the Hulk.
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."Then again, I can see some people arguing that it is racist since other MCU actors like Chriss Pratt and Gwyneth Paltrow have troubling stuff with them and haven't been fired/replaced. I recall someone even doing that here when stuff from Simu Liu's past social media posts were in the news.
The thing with Chris Pratt is that he keeps this stuff to himself. He never spreads any misinformation on Social Media, contrary to Wright. He seems to be one of the few cases where the belief doesn't affect the work and public image.
As for Paltrow, I don't know enough about it.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianI'd rather stick with the gross antivaxxer (or better, recast) than recast T'Challa and let Marvel give him a British accent. Boseman is the only reason that didn't happen before.
But if recasting Shuri is on the table, I'm down. (And, for the record, screw Chris Pratt and Gwyneth Paltrow too. I've been creeped out by Pratt since even before we knew he hated LGBT people.)
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Conversely, not recasting him sends the message that black characters are disposable.
This is, likewise, the big problem with the "Shuri can just take his spot" chain of logic. The problem isn't T'Challa vs Shuri. The problem is that we're only allowed one major black hero in the first place, and instead of being able to enjoy a wide range of characters who look like us on the screen like white audiences do (also the main flaw in the "they could replace Cap with a different hero no problem, so why not T'Challa!" logic from last page - Cap is one of a sea of major white faces), we instead have to Discard and Draw a single character slot rather than live in a world where we could actually have more than one: there's nothing keeping us from having T'Challa and Shuri save for the fact that Marvel doesn't want to do that.
The problem becomes especially obvious when one considers that one of the primary audiences of the MCU - children - have little to no context for Hollywood and aren't going to entirely understand why they can't have the character who inspired them any more because of real life problems. In turn, going "well, they can just find someon new to latch onto" deflects from the fact that they absolutely should not have to resign themselves to only being satisfied with one person who looks like them on the screen at a time.
Chadwick Boseman specifically geared his acting career towards ensuring that powerful black figures had a place on the screen, so that people could know them and experience their stories. He was a person who specifically believed that putting these figures on the screen was the most important thing an actor could do.
Undoing that and refusing to allow T'Challa to continue to have a screen presence after his death is no more respectful of his memory than saying "he's dead, so now no one else can ever play James Brown / Jackie Robinson / etc."
I've generally perceived not recasting as a choice that respects Chadwick the actor superficially, but deeper down flies in the face of everything he actually stood for. It's a Hollywood decision, not an ethical one.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 6th 2021 at 6:37:38 AM
Well, that's' comprehensive. Alright, I'm jumping on Team Recast.
Still worried that Marvel would take the opportunity to give him that British accent they've always wanted.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I think the English accent is less likely now since Perlmutter isn’t in a position of influence anymore and because Bossman was such a big hit
Forever liveblogging the AvengersThe tricky thing is: A fictional character being replacable is a much less offensive message than an actor being replacable. Because one's real and the other one is not.
I don't know if I'd put it in so many words, either. While it does harm the character arc and sabotages the story of a iconic african hero (something harmed by the already shaky representation in the MCU), the The Character Died with Him doesn't make the character "disposable" if his memory lives on in the fictional universe, something I'm sure they're planning to do. It just makes T'challa's absence metafictional but Chadwick Boseman's work still appreciated and homaged ("In my culture, death is not the end" as it goes). His absence and his memory becomes the living legacy of his performance as characters are affected by the same grief and absence we are forever more. The same isn't true in reverse, for example, since Chadwick Boseman himself isn't an element of BP's fictional universe, so if T'challa carries on without him he would become simply "the first guy to play T'challa" and nothing else with the passage of time.
While I don't think you're wrong, per see, I think that's taking too narrow a view of things. Chadwick Boseman also made a career of showing his own unique brand of acting to bring roles to life, and just slotting in another black actor in his place as if they'rre interchangeable entities and acting like everything is fine can easily read as spitting in the face of everything he worked for as a professional, as if the actor, the person who portrays, is just a puppet on strings rather than a living breathing person. A statement that black actors don't matter, only black (fictional) characters do. That's a very easy thing to read, here.
Anthony Mackie, the other prominent black MCU hero of current times, noticeably takes the view you can't recast T'challa
more or less for that reason:
Angela Bassett likewise thinks
you can't recast him.
So, to reiterate, I think it's a bad choice either way, but I'm ultimately willingly to back the decision his friends and co-workers seem to support (unless one subscribes to the theory that Disney is forcing them at gunpoint to make these statements, which seems pretty silly to me). Mackie and Bassett also have long trajectories of portraying black voices on-screen, I feel like we should take them (and the entire crew of BP) in consideration.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I was already anti-"Shuri as Black Panther" from go, and Wright's troubling viewpoints are a very minor factor at this stage.
My main issue is that one of the things that I think really sets Black Panther apart from the other MCU superheroes is that's he's not especially... quippy? He obviously has a sense of humor, but when he's suited up you can tell he takes himself and the mantle seriously. There's a certain dignity to the Black Panther as an identity that I feel like other characters either don't have (Iron Man), have except when they're in a group (Cap), or used to have but have since ditched entirely (Thor).
So to make Shuri the Black Panther feels like a choice between either "Black Panther becomes yet another quippy superhero" or "Shuri has to become more serious to be the Black Panther" (I'd bet on the former option), and like. Okoye is right there, and I feel like she could bring the same kind of dignity Chadwick Boseman did.
But I'm primarily team "they should have recast", because it feels like it does the cast and the writers and the entire creative team a huge disservice to have to write around a giant panther-sized hole in the plot, anyways. Just wanted to espouse that Shuri is very, very low on the list of eligible characters who I'd want to see take up the mantle.

I do want to be clear that my point wasn't about Chadwick Boseman and T'Challa at all. I know I've brought it up a lot and my stance on that's very clear but it's not something I wanted to harp on. It's only really connected in the general sense in that IMO none of these actors are irreplaceable - these comic characters will likely outlive all of us, after all.
Yeah, the chances of actually removing Wright are slim to none - she's nowhere near as constantly inflammatory as Gina Carano was - but it's kinda amusingly annoying just how un-kosher the idea is in general. Like, people make fan petitions for stupid shit all the time, y'know? But no, the focus is far more often on the fandom tug-of-war between all the prospective BP candidates, with Wright's antivaxxer shit coming up as an excuse to try to minimize her as much as possible, which like...good luck with that one guys. Like, shit, even if she ain't the Panther she's never not going to be increasingly major - Marvel Comics gave her her own superhero name for a reason.
Edited by Watchtower on Nov 5th 2021 at 1:15:03 PM