Marvel’s Black Panther has been in and out of film development for ages, with the just-released-from-prison Wesley Snipes rumored for the lead on many occasions. We didn’t hear anything new about it for a long time, although we did get momentarily excited when Stan Lee namechecked Black Panther during a Reddit AMA when asked which obscure character he’d like to see adapted for film. Now we have news about a Black Panther film which is fittingly as obscure as the character itself.
Yesterday, Morris Chestnut (who is in another Marvel superhero movie, Kick-Ass 2) tweeted, “It’s time to get familiar with the Black Panther character!” He also linked to a picture of a Black Panther comic book at his Facebook page. If you tried to click either of those links, you’ll notice both the tweet and the picture have now been deleted.
So, we’ve got an actor with proven genre cred, who’s working with Mark Millar, who’s publicly sharing that he’s reading up on a character that could be Marvel’s next big movie project (you know, behind Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man and possibly Doctor Strange, at least). This could be nothing more than Chestnut deciding to read more comics since working on Kick-Ass 2, or it could just mean he’s preparing to audition for the role and he might not end up with it. Or it could mean (and could is a very key word here) that Marvel’s Black Panther flick has taken a big jump forward. [Blastr]
UPDATE: A few hours after this post went live, Morris Chestnut tweeted that Black Panther may be in Avengers 2.
We know one guy who’s elated with this rumor.