An Update On SPIDER-MAN's Potential MCU Ethnicity
A rumor has been doing the rounds that there's a good chance Spidey won't be white when he jumps ship from Sony to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We didn't report on it initially because it seemed more like speculation than anything solid, but now we have slightly more information to work with...
When the Wrap's Jeff Sneider appeared on this week's Meet The Movie Press show, he said he was "95% sure" that Marvel's incarnation of our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man would not be white. He also said he didn't think it would be Peter Parker, and that even if it was he would be "most likely, black", with a chance he could be Latino. Jeff reckoned that with some of the content of those leaked Sony emails being deemed to be racist by many, it would be a chance for the studio to save face by going a more diverse route with this casting.
Jeff's broken more superhero-related scoops that I can count, and there's no question he has good sources when it comes to these type of things, so a lot of outlets picked up on this and posted it as a rumor. To us, the way it was phrased made it seem a bit more like an educated guess so we didn't run with it, but now Jeff has added something a tad more concrete to the story.
Obviously this still needs to be classed as a rumor, as Jeff himself cautions that the reason he didn't run the story on The Wrap is because nothing has been confirmed yet. However, it's now clear that this is something he's actually been hearing whispers about as opposed to a hunch of his. In their report on this, Badass Digest add that they've heard "Marvel is calling most of the shots on this new movie", but that they're "savvy enough, plugged in enough and good enough at PR to at the very least have some black actors considered for the role." It sounds like it could really go either way at the moment, but hopefully we'll hear something official on this over the next while. Thoughts?
About The Author:
Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.