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Marvel Executive Says World Is Ready For Gay MCU Superhero

Marvel’s production chief Victoria Alonso says it’s time a gay superhero appears in the MCU franchise.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had superheroes with green skin, superheroes played by white guys named Chris, and—as of this Friday—a lead superhero in a solo movie who happens to be a woman. What it doesn’t have, though, is an abundance of gay characters. By comparison, DC’s superhero shows on The CW have a number of LGBTQ characters.

Marvel Studios is apparently hoping to address this lack of representation at some point, though, with Marvel production chief Victoria Alonso telling Variety that “the world is ready” for a gay superhero to show up in the MCU. She also noted that Marvel is very committed to representing the fact that its audience is “global, is diverse, [and] is inclusive,” and so she knows the studio won’t have “continued success” if it can’t stay on top of diversity and inclusivity.

“Why wouldn’t we be? Why wouldn’t we be?” Alonso said about increasing diversity within the MCU and adding a gay superhero. “I’m so passionate about this I’ve got to tell you,” Alonso continued. “Our entire success is based on people that are incredibly different. Why wouldn’t we? Why would we only want to be recognized by only one type of person? Our audience is global, is diverse, is inclusive. If we don’t do it that way for them, we will fail. If we don’t put pedal to the metal on the diversity and the inclusivity, we will not have continued success. Our determination is to have that for all of the people out there watching our movies.”

Meanwhile, though, there are rumours that we’ll actually see a gay hero in a Marvel movie relatively soon, even if it’s not someone with a big name. As the same Variety story notes, there have been rumblings that Marvel Studios wants the lead in its Eternals movie to be a gay man. That would be the perfect opportunity to do something like that since the general public doesn’t know a single thing about The Eternals and so Marvel can do whatever it wants with the movie without having to adhere to an important comic book canon.

Source: Variety