As mentioned in this piece, Murphy’s Multiverse was able to independently confirm that Captain Marvel 2 has been registered in the UK. While searching for information on that, something even more interesting came to the surface…Grass-Fed Productions is also registered in the UK with the paperwork signed by none other than Marvel Studios representatives. So, as speculated on the other day, Grass-Fed is a Marvel Studios production. A lot of people doubted it; I’ll admit it even made me doubt myself, but the evidence is clear at this point.
What does all this mean and how does it tie into the earlier report on Captain Marvel 2? As of now, the next property set to film in the UK is Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness and it’s probably closer to getting off the ground than we think. The leaked audition video for America Chavez was a couple of weeks old and the fact that is was, for a time, publicly available almost certainly means that the actress who posted it was informed she did not get the role. Now that doesn’t mean that someone has, but it does mean they’re down the road a bit in that process, so I wouldn’t be shocked if they found the right actress for the role. Should the Strange sequel be able to start by November or so, it could wrap up by next March or April (the original shoot was set for April/May-August and we can expect that productions might take a bit longer now). Captain Marvel 2 is probably going to film in the UK after Strange is done, so it could get started as soon as May of next year and finish around September. From there, they likely move on to whatever film Grass-Fed Production is and that could start production in or around October of 2021. So what film could it be?
The other day, I speculated on the possibility that it might be either Blade or the Secret Invasion project that Marvel Studios is developing. If you’re curious, you can read the reasoning behind those guesses here. My gut instinct is that this is Blade because it’s the only other “announced” Marvel Studios project for which there is no known production company, but another interesting possibility has come to light in the past few days.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Sony had brought Olivia Wilde on board to helm their Spider-Woman project. The rights to the character are split between Sony and Marvel Studios so, without getting into too much detail, the character can’t be fully realized in a project unless the two studios cooperate on the production, similarly to how they’ve worked on Spider-Man. As explained more here, Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connell, who both worked with Marvel Studios on the first two Spider-Man films, are producing Spider-Woman, so until we have it clarified by one studio or the other, fans of the character are holding out hope that the studios will play nice, work together and set the film firmly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just like Tom Holland’s Spidey, with the possibility of telling other stories in whatever Sony’s universe is.
But how do you get from “Grass-Fed” to Spider-Woman? It’s actually not as big of a leap as you might think. As one of my Twitter followers pointed out earlier in the week, Jessica Drew was actually raised by one of the High Evolutionary’s New Men, Bova, a cow evolved into a highly-intelligent humanoid. Bova cared for Jessica until she was a teenager and then placed her in an orphanage where Jessica stayed until her own adventures began. Drew’s origin has been retconned several times and, if this is a Marvel Studios project, there’s no telling which origin they’d use or if they’d include Bova, but the subtlety of the reference and not knowing whether or not they’d tell this story does not mean they wouldn’t jokingly reference it while naming the production company.
Canonically, both Blade and Jessica Drew were born in the UK and spent time all over Europe, so filming out of the UK would give the production crews easier access to a lot of European locations, rather than flying back and forth from America, and give either film a more authentic feel. At a time where travel isn’t quite as easy as it once was, that probably matters. If we follow the timeline I laid out above, Blade would seem to make the most sense given that it would line up for an October 2022 release and Marvel Studios still has a date set aside there; however, don’t forget that prior to COVID altering everything, Sony had planted a flag for an Untitled Marvel project on October 8, 2021 and some speculation at the time centered on that being Spider-Woman. And yes, even though Spider-Woman would be a Sony film, it would be a Marvel Studios production which means they would register the production company like the did for Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far From Home, though Sony would chose the date for the film.
Unfortunately, we don’t have enough information at the moment, but given Sony’s recent movement, it’ll be informative if Marvel Studios follows suit at some point over the next few weeks.
