If you’ve never read an installment of Connecting Imaginary Dots, allow me to explain the idea. Connecting Imaginary Dots was the title I came up with for my speculation pieces when I was writing at MCU Exchange. These types of pieces basically allow me to unload a bunch of junk that’s circulating in my brain in a way that should never be confused for things I actually expect to happen. I basically take a bunch of facts that are almost always entirely unrelated and do my best to connect the dots with by stretching my imagination. In the past these types of pieces have resulted in me theorizing that the Spider-Man sequel which became Far From Home might end up being a team-up outing of Spidey and Hulk in the Savage Land;however, I also wrote one theorizing that Sterling K. Brown would be playing the father of Erik Killmonger in Black Panther LOOOOOONG before anyone else was considering it and one in which I theorized that Annette Bening was actually Mar-Vell when everyone else still thought Jude Law was playing the character. The bottom line is this: these are fun spec pieces that allow me to just be a fan. With that out of the way…
Back in August a casting call, revealed by GWW, indicated that Marvel Studios was searching for an actor, 30-40, to play “the ruler of a distant ancient kingdom.” At the time of their report, GWW speculated that the character might be Namor and, given Kevin Feige’s recent comments, it’s looking increasingly possible that they might be right.
In a recent stint a as a guest speaker at the New York Film Academy, Feige gave a little insight into how they chose characters for Marvel Studios films, including Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness.
The most pertinent bit is transcribed below:
Sometimes you’re choosing title hero, choosing which main character or main team you want to bring to the screen and often times, it’s as you’re making and developing the movie [asking] ‘Who will come into it?’ and ‘Who will fit into it? The next Doctor Strange film, for instance, features some new MCU characters which will be making their debut in that movie you won’t expect or won’t guess who it is but we found a cool way to make it work because we want to make a particular type of movie there and there was a character who we always wanted to do something with who will fit really well there.
On the surface, only part of that (“a character who we always wanted to do something with”) sounds like Namor. Namor and Strange have a long comic book history through their time together on The Defenders, a team of otherwise non-teamer uppers who often come together to tackle threats that are more mystical or supernatural. The non-team team often included Hulk, Silver Surfer, Valkyrie and others over the course of the years. Namor also suffered from amnesia, causing him to forget his true heritage. Could the opening up of the Multiverse and the potential influence of Nightmare be enough to jog the memory of the Avenging Son of Atlantis?
Though the casting call did not specify which project the character would appear in, other information in the casting call does give a small hint. For instance, we can probably rule out the character of “DAVID” appearing in Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings because other character descriptions that appeared around the same time and have since been confirmed to be for Shang-Chi gave a time frame of January through May, a time frame we now know fits for that film, while the description for “DAVID” gave a TBD start date. So while we can’t pin down that this character will appear in Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness, we can be fairly confident that it is not for Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings and it doesn’t make a ton of sense to believe that they were already searching for actors for Thor: Love and Thunder a full year before it would film.
So, if we are connecting all the dots and doing some imagineering, we can at least make a case for Namor to make his long-awaited MCU debut in 2021 and, while we’re at it, we can make the case for “ADAM”, a character from another similar description, to be Jericho Drumm, aka Brother Voodoo…but that’s another story.
So what do you think? Could Namor finally make his debut in 2021’s Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness?
