Namor of ‘Black Panther Wakanda Forever’ can return, but not in standalone film, says producer
‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ has crossed $600 million worldwide. The film is a roaring success, despite the absence of Chadwick Boseman, late actor who died in 2020 of colon cancer. Directed by returning director Ryan Coogler and written by Coogler himself with Joe Robert Cole, the film brings back the original cast. Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Florence Kasumba, Martin Freeman, and Angela Bassett star. Dominique Thorne, Michaela Coel, and Tenoch Huerta join the franchise with this film. Huerta plays the film Big Bad, Namor. While the character was left alive at the end, do not expect a standalone movie in near future.
‘Wakanda Forever’ producer Nate Moore told The Wrap while Namor can return, it will likely be a movie not centring on him. Universal Pictures owns the rights to the character, just like the Hulk, and that affected even how Marvel Studios marketed the film. Hulk has appeared in several MCU movies, but after the 2008 ‘The Incredible Hulk’, there has not been a standalone movie, though that could change.
“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,” Moore told The Wrap.
Huerta’s version of Namor is not Namor the Submariner we know from comics. In the lore, Namor is Marvel’s equivalent of Aquaman, though he predates the DC superhero. He is a mutant, and the son of a sea captain and the princess of Atlantic, the underwater kingdom thought to be submerged thousands of years ago that is populated by Homo Mermanus, humanoids who can breathe underwater. Namor has superstrength and abilities to control water. He has been both an anti-hero, superhero, and a supervillain out to avenge the wrongs done by surface-dwellers.
In ‘Wakanda Forever’, like many characters earlier, Namor (played by Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta) has received a sort of reinvention by Marvel Studios. In the movie, he is the king of Talokan, derived from Tlālōcān in Aztec myths’, which is a paradise, where spring never ends. Talokan in the film, however, is an underwater kingdom like Atlantis, and its inhabitants can breathe underwater as their physiology is a cross between human and fish.
