Despite the hushed excitement surrounding a potential Marvel TV/movie crossover – something Joe and Anthony Russo refuse to rule out in the lead in to Avengers: Infinity War – Luke Cage himself, Mike Colter, is harboring some doubts.
For one, Marvel’s newfound Hero for Hire believes that The Defenders – Cage, Daredevil, Jessica Jones and, soon, Iron Fist – have flourished on Netflix precisely because they haven’t shied away from the darker tenets of their respective source material, thereby creating content that is aimed at a slightly older audience. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, by contrast, is designed to be as palatable as possible, and it’s fair to say that the studio has excelled in ensuring even its more obscure mascots (Guardians of the Galaxy) have gone on to become household names.
So, how do you find common ground between those two styles? That’s something Colter contemplated while appearing on The Breakfast Club (via CBM).
“What we do is really unique…We’re adult kind of oriented. We’re not PG-13. We’re not really for the mass audiences, crowd pleasing, family oriented. We have sex scenes. We have, you know, adult situations, and while I think it’d be nice to be in the films, I don’t know if we want to dilute what we’re doing that makes us very unique.”
All that being said, Mike Colter would still be on board for a collaboration should the stars align (read: should Marvel overcome any scheduling headaches).
“That being said, you know Marvel, if they can make it work I’m sure it’d be nice, but it’s really scheduling. They schedule movies years in advance, we’re shooting TV series year round. It’s very tough to just kind of make things just work the way you want to because it’s just so much going on.”
Luke Cage stormed onto Netflix late last week and, as you can glean from our own glowing review, is a shining example of a superhero origin story done right.