“Avengers: Endgame” is on track to be the biggest box-office success of all time after it smashed records with over $350 million domestically and eclipsed over $1.2 billion worldwide.
It just goes to show you – like “Game of Thrones” – how much of a cultural impact the film/television mediums can have on a worldwide scale. But like Uncle Ben says in the original “Spider-man,” “With great power comes great responsibility.”
And it wasn’t shocking that the Marvel universe finally had a gay character, but you may be shocked to see who played him.
It’s undeniable that people are geeking out about how blown away they were by “Avengers: Endgame.” Rotten Tomatoes currently has a grade of 96% on the site but it seems as though fans loved it even more with a less critical eye.
If you haven’t seen it, one of the craziest parts about the entire experience is the structure – that meaning of that being the ordering of scenes through time progression and also characters’ actions in response to it.
What happened with “Avengers: Endgame” was the rarest thing in the entire history of the film medium. It was twenty-two movies with a grand finale. The only thing close to that are “Star Wars,” which currently has ten movies (with the eleventh hitting theaters Christmas day) and possibly the James Bond franchise, which currently has twenty-six movies.
Other than that, the world has never seen a culmination quite like this.
One of the nameless ancillary – relatively tiny roles –discusses a story about how he lost his husband when Thanos snapped his fingers.
“Avengers: Endgame” co-director Joe Russo –who is not gay, played that character.
Joe Russo told Deadline, “Representation is really important. It was important to us as we did four of these films, we wanted a gay character somewhere in them. We felt it was important that one of us play him, to ensure the integrity and show it is so important to the filmmakers that one of us is representing that.”
It’s clear that they view this as a sign of progress in the Marvel universe. But what’s ironic is that it’s also insulting.
If they really wanted to do a service for the LGBT community – after twenty two movies – then they should’ve probably already had an LGBT superhero by now, right?
Instead, they dedicated this progressive character as practically a throwaway? Joe Russo’s character had zero effect on the plot, which makes their efforts to add a character like that completely disingenuous.
Keep in mind too that this is a worldwide movie and it’s surprising that Marvel would greenlight this character because much of the world condemns homosexuality. Marvel President Kevin Feige probably didn’t care but admitted last year that there were others in the universe who were LGBT but they never addressed it in the plot like Tessa Thompson’s character Valkyrie in “Thor: Ragnarok,” who is rumored to be a lesbian.
When asked by Variety’s Marc Malkin about why there hasn’t been a gay superhero yet, she said, “That breaks my heart to hear that, because there’s no reason. I don’t understand how you could think that a certain type of person isn’t allowed to be a superhero. So to me it’s like, we gotta move faster. But I’m always wanting to move faster with this stuff.”
We may be a bit far removed from a gay superhero but its power players like Larson who will be sure that it happens.