It’s far from confirmed, but some early reports are coming out that Friday Night Lights, Chronicle, and Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan is under consideration to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot—and that his sister would be played by Allison Williams, making the formerly white siblings interracial:

According to The Wrap, Michael B. Jordan of Chronicle fame could take the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

We recently reported that Girls star Allison Williams was up for what we assumed was the role of Johnny’s sister Susan the Invisible Woman. Jordan is black and Williams is white, which raises questions regarding Johnny and Susan’s parentage in the film, considering they are brother and sister in the comics, but certainly adoption or making them step-siblings are among the options if both of these casting choices are finalized.

Jordan is a phenomenal actor, and the prospect of him leveling up to blockbusters should make people who like excellent performances very happy. Unfortunately, this news seems likely to prompt the same sorts of hysteria that came to the fore when Idris Elba, the black British actor, was cast as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge in the film adaptation of Thor, and when Nonso Anozie was cast as fabulously wealthy merchant in Game of Thrones. For some reason, there are certain fans of established particularly poorly when adaptations of their favorite material either change the race of a character in the transition from page to screen, or cast an actor of a race that the fans didn’t have the imagination to expect.

What’s striking about a lot of these characters is that, whether they’re written as white or not, their race doesn’t tend to be particularly important to their characterization. Johnny Storm is a playboy. Xaro is rich. Heimdall is impassive. These are the characteristics about them that are foregrounded in the texts where they originate. Of course, there are ways in which either illustrating those characters or assuming that they’re white inflect those characteristics. Johnny can probably get away with things that, were he black, might get him branded irresponsible or profligate. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing recently, the black-white wealth gap is a matter of public policy, and that produces different assumptions about how black and white characters, even in fiction, obtained their wealth. And big white men and big black men face obvious and different assumptions about their strength and what they might use it for. But even though these characters are assumed to be white—or there’s an assumption that they should continue to be portrayed by white actors—by fans, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to stay that way. If these characters aren’t used to explore whiteness, then there’s no reason for them to stay that way other than that fans prefer to see white people in those roles. And in the absence of specific white people competing for them, the objections don’t even become about specific things certain actors might bring to the role. It’s just about whiteness.

Sometimes, casting a black actor in a role previously assumed to be white won’t make that role about blackness either, nor should it. One would hope that Asgard and Westeros (or Essos) haven’t somehow managed to replicate America’s racial politics, or that in worlds with gods and dragons, people of color aren’t the things that are implausible, or that stand out most. But if people want to defend keeping characters white, and if reverse racebending is going to work right and put more non-white actors in roles where race doesn’t matter to the characters, I hope these conversations don’t stop there. It would be terrific to see more thought put into what living as both a white person and a person of color bring to certain characters. Not all stories are explicitly about race, and not every experience characters have is defined solely about their racial or ethnic experience. But considering race among many other factors, including class, gender, and sexual orientation is a way to build out a character, and a whole world.

Watching the trailer for Thor: The Dark World that was released yesterday, I was struck by a sense of how annoyed I would be if my boyfriend went missing for an exceedingly long time, and then showed up only to port me to an alternate universe without even giving me time to let my kicky astronomy colleague Darcy know where I was going. And it got me thinking about what women are allowed to do—or at least what movie studios think audiences will be psyched to see women doing—in trailers for the action movies that will be released this year.

Thor: The Dark World: If you’re a lady in Asgard, you apparently get to be anxious, get kidnapped, and walk around tables. On the upside, you also get to be in battle, which is a great setting for having your hair whip artfully around your face.

Fast and Furious 6: Appear in black-and-white surveillance photos. Be counted among the crew when the gang gets back together. Hang out with The Rock in a professional capacity. Attend parties where they wear miniskirts. Hang from jeeps. Shoot guns. Specifically at Vin Diesel. Have fist-fights in subway stations.

Man of Steel: Kal-El’s mother gets to be pessimistic about her son’s chances on earth. A neighbor lady gets to be perceptive about his abilities. Faora gets to stand near General Zod, though it’s a blind-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance considering she’s supposed to be a significant villain. And in a rare exception, Lois Lane gets to talk about her reporting.

I’ve been generally bullish on Zack Snyder’s forthcoming Superman reboot, Man of Steel, or as I’ve been jokingly calling it given the long shots of waves and broody atmosphere of the trailers, Terrence Malick’s Superman. So I was excited to see this latest trailer in the form of a calmly-voiced demand from General Zod (Michael Shannon), demanding that Clark Kent be turned over to him:

It’s also a reminder that while Marvel’s done a much better job of developing its full roster of heroes into a gigantic franchise that runs in multiple tracks that converge into event pictures like The Avengers, DC has its rival beat all hollow when it comes to the development of generally frightening and distinct villains. Marvel’s villains have tended to relatively cartoonish and disposable. Iron Man has faced off against Obadiah Stane, who despite Jeff Bridges’ generalized acting chops was a relatively generalized industrialist, the Ten Rings, who were relatively generic jihadists, and Ivan Vanko a reasonably generic Former Soviet Bloc Crazy With Eccentric Teeth. Captain America went up against the Red Skull in The First Avenger, and the bonkers makeup didn’t do much to conceal that Hugo Weaving’s villain schtick has seen better days. Only Thor has had a truly worthy adversary in his half-brother Loki, but it took two movies for him to morph from standard-issue petulance to achieve his “brain like a bag full of cats,” an unsettling combination of imbalance and precise manipulation.

DC, by contrast, has been extraordinarily lucky to have Christopher Nolan designing its villains for the better part of the last decade in his Batman films, which have anchored the DC franchise even as Marvel seemed ascendant. The Scarecrow may have been the least of Nolan’s creations, but it was an unsettling performance that made the best possible use of Cillian Murphy’s sharp, almost pretty features. As the Joker, Heath Ledger was so unsettling and so fully committed to the role that it remains uncomfortable to watch him. And if The Dark Knight Rises made some miscalculations in the handling of Bane, it provided Anne Hathaway with a career-shifting role that let her be sensual and angry in ways she’s never been on film before. These villains are indelible, rather than disposable—I think, not matter how unsettled they make us feel, they’re characters we’d happily spend time with on their own, and certainly ones who offer specific insight into facets of Batman’s personality and mission in a way Marvel villains rarely have. We’re still a long way from knowing how Man of Steel will shake out, but DC’s been wise to know that you can’t know superheroes without knowing their nemeses, and that’s a strong insight DC will have on its side as it tries to play catchup to its own rival.

I’ve long suggested that a Doctor Strange movie would be a great way to introduce a new tone to the Marvel universe, a kind of movie that could rely less on big fights and more on magic and atmospherics. Now, it seems gossip suggests that Thor 2 might be planning to introduce Strange somewhere along the way, though as Topless Robot points out, it’s not entirely clear what he’d be doing hanging out in Asgard.

And while I love Mads Mikkelsen, the Danish actor who is reportedly in contention to play Doctor Strange, I’m coming towards the end of my patience with Marvel announcing spinoffs and new characters, who don’t feel all that new given that they’re all white dudes. If a man shows up, even in a peripheral way, in a Marvel movie, it feels like he has a chance of sticking around. Hawkeye backs up S.H.I.E.L.D. in Thor and gets to be sexy and brainwashed and tragic in The Avengers. Bucky hangs out with Steve Rogers in Captain America, and gets to be a focus of Captain America 2, which will follow the Winter Soldier arc, which involves Bucky’s resurrection, though Gabe Jones (Derek Luke), Jim Morita (Kenneth Choi) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) will stay safely in the past.

Women and people of color who aren’t Samuel L. Jackson haven’t been as lucky. Terrence Howard got replaced in the Iron Man franchise by Don Cheadle, a move that Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter reportedly said he thought wouldn’t matter because people of color are indistinguishable. Pepper Potts, despite running Stark Industries while Tony goes off and does his superhero thing, will forever remain primarily Iron Man’s girlfriend. The same fate seems likely for Jane Foster, whose only appearance in The Avengers was as an image flickering on a computer screen. This may be more contractual than intentional, given that Cobie Smulders, who played Maria Hill in The Avengers, may end up having to do another season of How I Met Your Mother beyond this year, but Joss Whedon says that his S.H.I.E.L.D. show, rather than focusing on Maria, who could have been a hugely promising hook, will feature all new characters. If Guardians of the Galaxy is, in fact, going to be a Carol Danvers movie, it would be awfully nice for Marvel to let us know, and soon.

I was happy to hear yesterday that Kat Dennings will be back in Thor 2, and that apparently, her role, as a research assistant to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, absent from The Avengers) and Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), will be expanded. While I’ll never give up on wanting female superheroines to get equal billing in the Marvel Universe, at their best, non-powered female characters have already contributed a great deal to the franchise, mostly by injecting a healthy dose of sarcasm into a genre that could easily collapse under its own weight.

I think it’s no mistake that Iron Man‘s been the most fun character in the core lineup so far: he’s skittery, grandiose, and a combination of sophisticated and enormously immature. Alone, he might be hugely irritating, a nerd-bro fantasy. But Pepper Potts’ presence means that Tony Stark’s most ridiculous behavior is constantly being called out as utterly ridiculous. He’s charming in spite of, not because, he is a rude, reckless womanizer. In The Avengers, Gwyneth Paltrow does Barbara Stanwyck proud when Agent Coulson comes to call, as Pepper points out that Tony’s immature attempts to avoid the man aren’t just childish—they act against the interest of Tony’s own curiosity. Part of Tony’s arc in the movie is to the recognition that Pepper saw Coulson’s worth more clearly than he did because she bothered to pay attention and get to know the man. He doesn’t just lose a colleague when Coulson dies—he loses a man who might have been in his friend.

Similarly, in Thor, Darcy was a fabulous reminder of how ridiculous it would actually be to end up babysitting an extremely handsome, exceedingly disconcerted man who wanders around trying to buy pets to ride, smashing coffee mugs, eating all the Pop Tarts, and talking like he stepped out of summer stock. When she zapped Thor with a taser or complained that she was being asked to do an awful lot for six college credits, Darcy punctured the occasionally stifling atmosphere Jane’s literal and metaphoric starry-eyed approach to Thor. Part of what’s fun about superheroes—and an appropriate thing to point out as a way to question their power—is their overwhelming incongruity. I don’t want to see Darcy as a buzz-kill if she and Jane take a jaunt to Asgard in Thor 2, but her sense of the absurd, deployed correctly, is another very funny way to express wonder.

Captain America was, tonally, a very different picture, but one of its most fun moments was Natalie Dormer’s brief turn as a gal in uniform who wants to get at Cap. The Marvel movies have essentially hewed to fairly traditional ideas about their heroes and true love—part of Tony’s hero’s journey is his move away from being a womanizing cad. Dormer’s minx was a reminder that you can tell stories about superheroes as catnip for the ladies, too, and the juxtaposition of her clear desire with Cap’s innocence was something that might be useful in a more extended exploration of Steve Rogers’ integration into modern life. Similarly, I think the two recent attempts at Hulk movies have suffered badly from the big-eyed dewiness of Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler’s performances as Betty Ross. If Hulk movies do go into production, it would be a lot of fun to see a Betty who can banter with Bruce, even needle him the way Tony did in The Avengers. It’s awfully dull to have a Hulk who’s simply afraid he’s going to hurt this delicate woman he loves, and it would be more fun to have a woman who’s a foil, whose very engagement with Bruce is a risk for him and an incentive to get himself in check.

I’m bored by movies where women reform men, or act as prizes for low-level good behavior. But at their best, Marvel’s managed to give us women around our heroes who at least nod in the direction of the screwball tradition. The men may have the superpowers, but the women are the ones who are grown all the way up, and seeing around corners without even the benefit of enhanced eyesight.

I’m glad to see a conservative group agrees with me that by a broad definition, Hollywood is a pretty patriotic place, comfortable making movies that embrace American values and seeing them do well at the box office. That said, the idea that it’s conservative to want “good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness,” as Movieguide says this year strikes me as a bit of an overreach. In case there was a question about it, just because I’m a professional progressive doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see Walter White end up dead or in the pokey; that I sit around in cahoots with that schemer Satan thinking about how to get inaccurate information about everything from the demographics of the United States to clean energy into popular entertainment; or that I’m dedicated to seeing brutalist architecture dominate movie sets or something.

More to the point, Dr. Ted Baehr, who founded Movieguide, says that “Moviegoers and TV viewers prefer movies and television programs that celebrate traditional American values like liberty, private property, the free market, patriotism, and limited government.” But is that actually what’s reflected in their nominees for top movies? Captain America: The First Avenger is about a wildly expanded federal government that, among other things, performs dodgy experiments on the troops. Thor is part of a larger story that sees entrepreneurial superheroes brought together and brought to heel but government bureaucracy. You could maaaaybe stretch and say that Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is about an enterprising small businessman, but mostly, I think it’s about the boats that shoot things at each other and the zombies and the mermaids and Johnny Depp playing pretty gay. Thor is all about how unmarried lady scientists should fall for dreamy pagan gods and how science validates a non-Christian view of the world. And yes, I’m totally glad to see someone say that the Twilight movies represent“fringe worldviews,” but you know what? Americans love those fringe worldviews if they involve who want to have premarital sex with vampires but who wait because those vampires are just so darn oriented towards family values.

Look, I totally understand the desire to believe that America is secretly hankering after movies and television that reflect a certain set of values and if that darn Hollywood machine would only cooperate, the market would reap rewards and the right priorities would spread throughout the land. But I don’t think there’s conclusive evidence, in either direct, that that’s the case. And if conservatives really want to sell the idea that their values make for better storytelling, they’re going to need more coherent ideas than these, and a more compelling spokesman than, say, Dean Cain. This is a conversation worth having and hashing out—I think someone should do a big, comprehensive study of the ideas and values audiences report taking away from their favorite entertainment. But trying to claim American movies for conservativism, box office evidence to the contrary, isn’t the place to start it.

Two depressing pieces of news have come down the pipeline for those interested in a comics industry that’s more broadly responsive to and invested in women’s perspectives.

First, Patty Jenkins is out as director of Thor 2, with the reason for the split being “creative differences.” Now that I’ve seen Monster, I’m even more disappointed by this news than I would have been otherwise. Jenkins is pretty extraordinary at getting actors to go to some insanely dark places. The rise of Loki might not have needed something as intense as Charlize Theron keening like an animal in the woods after committing her first murder. But it would have been nice to see a superhero movie with some emotional firepower from someone other than Michael Fassbender and that runs deeper than James Franco’s determined squinting. And second, there was a lot of squandered potential in Thor for the female characters: Darcy Lewis was the sum of her wisecracks, Sif didn’t get to do very much, and Jane Foster spent as much time being googly-eyed as scientifically brilliant. I trust that Jenkins would have bent the arc on that, at least a little bit.

Second, Marvel’s VP for publishing, Tom Brevoort, let all of us know that in the chicken-and-egg conversation about how to get more women reading comics that if women don’t pony up, despite the problems with the products we’re being asked to buy now, the industry isn’t really that interested in us. He said in response to a Formspring question:

I feel like we’ve got a social responsibility to feature characters of all kinds, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those characters can or have to be headliners. That tends to be defined by the audience and the marketplace. If all of the fans crying for more series with female leads from all of the companies had supported all the ones that were done in the past, this circumstance wouldn’t exist. That said, that doesn’t change the responsibility, but ti[sic] may impact on the manner in which that responsibility plays itself out.

What drives me insane about these kinds of arguments is two things. First, the idea that fans should have to come the entire distance seems like both a social responsibility and capitalism fail. If you’re failing to attract an audience that you would like to have, even if you think that audience is missing the point, means you’re not actually putting out a product that meets their needs. If you’re a company or an industry with a record of particular hostility towards a group of consumers you would like to attract, it seems fairly elementary that you might have to try particularly hard to bring those consumers in the door. Just saying. And second, the idea that “social responsibility” is just about attracting minority consumers is a million kinds of stupid. If you care about getting the most creative possible product to your readers, it’s entirely possible that the way to do that might not be with another super-even that pits one of your established teams against another, but by writing comics from new perspectives and about new issues. Just saying.

First, thanks again to Kate, Tyler, Jess, and Kay for holding down the fort last week. I can’t say how much I appreciate it. And I missed you guys—it’s good to be back!

-Really excited to see Patty Jenkins’ spin on Thor.

-Remakes don’t always have to be bad things.

-As great as it would be to move away from the standard television season and its inefficiencies, Jamie Weinman is probably right that it won’t ever change.

-I feel like Shame is going to make a lot of us with crushes on Michael Fassbender feel less than great about ourselves:

It would be so, so fantastic if a woman finally got the chance to direct a superhero movie, particularly a superhero movie where the superhero is a guy, and even more particularly a superhero movie with feminist, if underdeveloped, female characters. I refer, of course, to the rumors that Patty Jenkins might be in the running for the job of directing the sequel to Thor.

I haven’t seen Monster, the Aileen Wuornos biopic for which Jenkins is best known. But it suggests she’s pretty fiercely engaged with female complexity. And whatever you think of how the show went after, she did a fantastic job directing the pilot of The Killing, particularly in capturing the spiky dynamic between Linden and Holder without resorting to cliches that would have portrayed Linden as ball-busting or humorless and Holder as cocky. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to have Thor and Sif rocking a slightly competitive, mutually supportive relationship? Not to mention how great it would be to have more attention paid to a superheroine who is not just clothed, but armored, and super-competent? I’d hope they’d hold off on having Sif and Jane compete for Thor’s attentions because yawn, who needs to see that again, and I’d much rather have some characters just be friends in one of these things. But there are a lot of possibilities.

Even if those don’t choose Jenkins, though I hope they do, I’m glad to see that Marvel’s committed to at least considering unusual directorial choices. Kenneth Branagh was a good experiment even if it didn’t quite take, I appreciate that it didn’t scare them off. Getting a woman’s perspective in the director’s chair on one of these things is probably more important, in any case, than bringing in the Shakespearean grandeur. And hey, if this works, maybe we can get Kathryn Bigelow doing a superhero movie some day.

If you care about small, critically acclaimed science fiction shows, or about smart summer superhero blockbusters, you should care about Zack Stentz. He’s written and produced Fringe and Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles among other television shows, and this summer alone, he and his writing partner Ashley Edward Miller wrote the screenplays for Thor and X-Men: First Class. After we ended up talking about First Class as a metaphor for gay rights, Zack was kind enough to take the time to answer some of my questions about both of those movies, the future of the superhero genre, and the difference between writing for small, fanatically devoted audiences and big, mass-market ones. Our conversation appears below.

Both X-Men: First Class and Thor have villains who at times — if not for the whole movie — are more compelling than the movies’ heroes. Was that intentional?

In Thor, from the very beginning we had the goal of putting the Thor-Loki-Odin relationship at the heart of the film, and in discussions with Ken Branagh and Marvel, decided that it would be compelling to send the two brothers on parallel but opposite journeys. And we were really drawn to the version of Loki who isn’t a cackling evildoer from the beginning, but a complex, tortured character who — like Magneto in the X-Men mythology — is completely convinced that he’s the good guy.

In X-Men: First Class, I’d like to think we stretched the definition of “villain” even further. While you have Sebastian Shaw and the Hellfire Club throughout the story as the bad guys, through most of the movie, Erik/Magneto is the co-hero with Charles. You catch him at a moment of his life where he has the possibility of going either way — toward Charles’ vision of mutants as a valued part of human society, or Shaw’s plans for mutants lording over the human race. But because of external events as well as Erik’s inability to move past the trauma that’s been inflicted on him, you see him move ever more toward embracing that darkness.

Do you think audiences want more moral complexity in their superhero movies and their action movies in generally?

I’m not sure what audiences want, but I know that my writing partner Ash [Ashley Edward Miller] and I are drawn toward ambiguity and moral complexity when we write those movies. It’s just more interesting and dramatically compelling. If you’re going to have the mano a mano faceoff at the end of your big action movie, isn’t there more juice in seeing two people fighting who love each other rather than two people who hate each other? Or the obligatory “hero fights a bigger, even more powerful version of himself” beat? And isn’t it more interesting if the ostensible bad guy has a point of view that can’t be easily dismissed?

Relatedly, there’s been some discussion of the fall-off in superhero box office, particularly as audiences resist 3D conversions. Are people simply wearing on characters in costumes?

I think the danger of saturating the market with costumed crimefighters is definitely there, but I don’t think there are enough data points to draw the conclusion that we’re at that place yet. Thor did very well at the box office, especially for a character with such an oddball mythology behind him. X-Men: First Class isn’t racking up the huge numbers of its predecessors, but the studio is happy with it because they feel like it’s rebuilding the brand and audience goodwill after the last two installments drew more…shall we say mixed reactions. And we still need to see how Green Lantern and Captain America shake out.
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