Is Ava the Hero Marvel Needs Most?

Ava DuVernay has been open about her experience following the Sundance Film Festival success of Middle of Nowhere, watching her male peers at the festival land high-profile studio jobs while her phone failed to ring. Now, with an Oscar nomination behind her, the studios have finally come calling to DuVernay. Will she answer?

According to The Wrap, Marvel Studios is courting Ava DuVernay to take on one of their upcoming tentpoles, with Black Panther and Captain Marvel suggested as the likeliest candidates. The significance of those two titles is obvious; Black Panther would be Marvel’s first black superhero to star in his own film, Captain Marvel the studio’s first woman to do the same, and as an African-American woman Ava DuVernay would bring insight to either film. That is, if she can make the film she wants to make there—and that’s the real question about Marvel these days.

It’s been nearly a year since Edgar Wright left the studio’s Ant-Man, a project he had been developing for the better part of a decade, and only a few weeks since Joss Whedon sounded off with remarkable candor about the storytelling battles he lost in making Avengers: Age of Ultron. Marvel Studios has become a powerhouse by hiring fascinating filmmakers, like Shane Black for Iron Man 3 and Kenneth Branagh for Thor, but also by reining those directors in, not allowing any individual vision to get in the way of the massive Marvel Cinematic Universe they are building.

Perhaps some vocal complaints about the exhaustion that comes from all that universe-building has gotten to them, and Marvel has decided to hire DuVernay and really give her some freedom. It’s almost certain that Marvel has heard the longstanding complaints about their movies starring exclusively white men, even as Marvel comics have gotten increasingly, and successfully, more inclusive. The Black Panther movie—which was set up within Age of Ultron—and Captain Marvel movie should finally bring some of that inclusiveness to the screen, and either could be handled beautifully by Ava DuVernay, who proved with Selma she can thread intimate emotions within a story that is much larger than any individual. Doing that as part of the giant Marvel machine could be her biggest challenge yet—but DuVernay, so far, has never seemed like a director who’s afraid of a challenge.

Culled from The Wrap