Get Out, Us and Nope director Jordan Peele has had a meeting with Marvel about making a franchise movie according to a new report.
Ever since his wildly successful 2017 filmmaking debut, Get Out, writer-director-producer Jordan Peele has been known for making original, darkly imaginative genre movies. To date, he’s managed to avoid the gravitational pull of the kinds of major franchises that tend to suck in filmmakers and keep them busy for years on end.
According to a new report, however, there’s an outside chance that Peele might eventually direct a Marvel movie. As picked up by World of Reel, Hollywood journo Jeff Sneider mentions in his latest newsletter that Peele recently took a meeting with Marvel to discuss the possibility of directing one of its films.
That’s not much to go on, admittedly, given that filmmakers have meetings all the time. That a filmmaker of Peele’s stature – and one previously committed to writing, directing and producing his own material – raises one or two intriguing questions, though.
The most obvious one is, which movie did Peele and Marvel talk about? Sneider has written on Twitter that he knows which film it was, held the title back, but teases that he might drop its name at some point in the near future.
The other question is, would Marvel give Peele the creative latitude to tell a story according to his own tastes? Some filmmakers have managed to make their voices heard within the Marvel machine – James Gunn springs to mind – but there are also plenty of storytellers who’ve felt the weight of the company bearing down on them.
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The Marvels director Nia DaCosta, for example, spoke candidly about working with Marvel last September.
“Sometimes you’d be in a scene and you’d be like, ‘What the hell does any of this shit mean?'” she told Vanity Fair. She also added that The Marvels is “a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie […] I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.”
Whether Peele is willing to take on that kind of burden remains to be seen. The argument put forward by Sneider is that Peele’s films after Get Out – 2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope – haven’t enjoyed the same level of success, with the implication being that Peele might be in search of a hit.
The flip side to that, though, is that Marvel’s own movies have struggled to find the same level of success following the box office highs of Avengers: End Game and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Peele’s films don’t make billions, but nor do they need to; the relatively low-budget Us still made its money back ten times over, while even the likeably eccentric sci-fi horror Nope more than doubled its money in cinemas alone.
With an Oscar and multiple other awards behind him, Peele is one of the most respected filmmakers currently working. Whatever the outcome of that meeting proves to be, it’s arguable that Marvel needs Peele more than the reverse.
