Now that audiences have finally gotten their first look at Namor aka the Sub-Mariner in Marvel Studio’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, people might still be wondering why Namor hasn’t gotten his own MCU movie.
Namor and the Complicated Rights Issues
According to a report on The Wrap, “The situation around Namor harkens back to the pre-Marvel Studios/pre-Disney era of making movies out of Marvel Comics characters, before the studio streamlined and controlled intellectual property. Before Marvel Studios made Iron Man as its own independently produced film, the company was in the habit of licensing or selling off rights to characters to other studios — the X-Men went to Fox, Spider-Man went to Sony, etc. And Namor is one of those characters that is still controlled by another studio.”
The studio in question is Universal Pictures. As it currently stands, Universal owns the rights to both the Hulk and Namor, and neither IP can’t be in thier own movie unfortuantely.
However, that doesn’t mean that Marvel can’t borrow Namor, like they borrowed the Hulk, to put him in an ensemble film. In the same report from The Wrap, the outlet spoke with Wakanda Forever producer Nate Moore who elaborated on the situation and cited the source material as inspiration.
“It honestly affects us more, and not to talk too much out of school, but in how we market the film than it does how we use him in the film,” Moore said. “There weren’t really things we couldn’t do from a character perspective for him, which is good because clearly, we took a ton of inspiration from the source material, but we also made some big changes to really anchor him in that world in a truth that publishing never really landed on, I would argue, in a big way.”
How is the MCU’s Namor different from the comics?
Unlike his comic book counterpart, the MCU’s Namor is the ruler of Talocan, not Atlantis. The change gives Namor a backstory tied to Mayan culture, with Tenoch Huerta in the role. While Ryan Coogler took the character in a new direction, Namor still dons his classic green trunks and pointy ears.
Directed by Ryan Coogler from a script he co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole, Wakanda Forever stars Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Florence Kasumba, Dominique Thorne, Michaela Coel, Tenoch Huerta, Martin Freeman, and Angela Bassett.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is now playing in theaters.