Though Spider-Man’s inclusion in the superhero battle royale that was Captain America: Civil War has shown executives and audiences alike that corporate synergy can be a wonderful thing, Marvel Comics is still spread across an array of big-name studios, meaning that bringing together some characters known for rubbing elbows in comic-book panels can be a lot more complicated on the big screen. However, that’s not stopping some actors in different camps from vocalizing their desires to see such team-ups happen.
Recently, Alexandra Shipp, who plays Storm in this month’s X-Men: Apocalypse, told The Obsev that one of her professional pipe dreams involves bringing her mutant hero together with Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther for a blockbuster outing.
“I want that movie so bad. I’ve got a pitch, I’m like coming up with a vision board, I want this movie to happen,” she said. “Honestly it doesn’t have to be me – if Chadwick [Boseman] was like ‘you know what, I really want to do this with Halle [Berry]’ I’d be like yo, that’s fine at least make the movie.”
Shipp’s enthusiasm has roots in comic-book lore – Storm enjoyed marital bliss with the Wakandan prince for six years, between 2006 and 2012. The characters have fought side-by-side and proven a formidable team, and any comic-book fan would get excited at the prospect of seeing their chemistry get translated to the big screen. There’s just one problem – Storm, as one of the most famous X-Men, belongs firmly to 20th Century Fox, which is determined to get as much use out of the character (and all the X-Men, really) as possible. And Black Panther, introduced in Civil War, will next appear in his own Marvel solo pic and is expected to have a key, potentially dominating, role in the next Avengers lineup post-Civil War. He’s Marvel all the way.
But wait, you might say – what about Quicksilver? Yes, it’s true that a Quicksilver played by Evan Peters stole the show in Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past (his sequence in Apocalypse is the best in the film as well), and that another one played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson had a pivotal part in Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. But that situation was made possible through seeds planted by the comics long ago – as a less central character who’d flitted between the Avengers and the X-Men over the years, Quicksilver was less firmly an exclusive-to-Fox property or an exclusive-to-Marvel one.
There’s none of that ambiguity here – Storm was once an Avenger, but she’s a member of the X-Men through and through. Unless Fox cuts some kind of deal with Marvel, like the latter studio did with Sony to steer its dead Spider-Man franchise to safety, Storm’s staying with the X-Men into the foreseeable future.
In fact, the only situation in which a Shipp/Boseman team-up would make sense would be contingent on Apocalypse bombing, and bombing hard, later this month. That kind of disappointment might shock Fox into having more flexibility. Even then, it’d be a long shot. Still, it’s cool to see that Shipp knows her comics.
What say you, though? Would you like to see Storm and Black Panther share the screen? Or are you content to skip over that comic-book arc?