Is Laurence Fishburne Returning As Silver Surfer In The MCU?

As Morpheus in The Matrix movies, Laurence Fishburne crossed the divide between the real world and virtual reality. Nowadays, he’s doing something similar once again – by having a foot in both the Marvel and DC superhero universes. From 2013’s Man of Steel onward, Fishburne plays Perry White, the chief of the Daily Planet, in the DCEU. Beginning with 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp though, the actor will appear in the MCU, too, as the giant-sized superhero Bill Foster/Goliath.

Just because he’s not enough of a sci-fi/geek icon already though, Fishburne recently revealed that he has another project with Marvel in the bag. According to him, it’s something he pitched to the studio himself which he hopes will “change the world.” However, it has encountered some problems, with “a lot of legal red tape” preventing it from moving ahead right away.

“I’m developing something else for Marvel that I can’t talk about,” says the actor. “It’s gonna be really cool. It’s gonna change the world, we hope (laughs). I went to Marvel and pitched them something that really couldn’t work out—there was a lot of legal red tape that just [was] something they couldn’t work out.

But then they came back with the offer for Ant-Man and the Wasp and then they said, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ and I went ‘Oh yeah that, yes!’ so…”

So, what could this mysterious project be? Well, we still don’t have a firm answer to that just yet, but speculation has begun to make its way around the web and at the moment, fans believe the actor may be looking to voice Silver Surfer now that Marvel has the rights to the character.

After all, these comments came only a few weeks before the Disney/Fox deal started to be made public and Fishburne has already voiced the part in Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. He did a fairly good job, too, and given that he wouldn’t actually be appearing in the flesh, there’d be no conflict with his other MCU role in the Ant-Man sequel.

Again, though, this is simply just speculation and will remain as such for now. While the studio does have the rights to use the Silver Surfer in their cinematic universe, it’ll be some time before he actually appears on screen. With Avengers 4 already close to completing production, the earliest we could see the fan favorite show up would be in Phase 4.

Make no mistake about it, though, he is on his way to the MCU, and when he does eventually arrive, it might just be Laurence Fishburne lending his voice to the character.