Avengers: Endgame may have cleared the path for the next generation of superheroes to lead the franchise into the future, but when you think about it, that doesn’t necessarily mean younger. Sure, the middle-aged Tony Stark and 100 year-old Steve Rogers may no longer be key players in the MCU, but many of the studio’s old and new faces aren’t exactly spring chickens.
Thor admitted he’s about 1500 years old and Loki has been around just as long, Bucky Barnes is way past his centenary year, the Eternals are an immortal race of aliens and even Captain Marvel is getting up there in age, given that the majority of her solo movie took place in 1995. And that’s without even mentioning the characters played by 52 year-old Mark Ruffalo, 51 year-old Paul Rudd, 49 year-old Jeremy Renner, 46 year-old Mahershala Ali and 43 year-olds Ryan Reynolds and Benedict Cumberbatch.
The point is, with the MCU set to continue its rapid expansion throughout Phase Four and beyond, the younger stars are going to play bigger roles than ever before, with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in particular set to be established as one of the franchise’s marquee names, while Letitia Wright’s Shuri is also reportedly being primed to inherit the role of Black Panther from Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in the future.
The two teenage geniuses have a lot more in common than you would think, and we’ve now heard that Marvel are planning on teaming them up in a future movie to defeat a common enemy. According to our intel – which comes from the same sources that told us Bill Murray was returning in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Percy Jackson is being rebooted as a streaming series – Kraven the Hunter will indeed be one of the villains of Spider-Man 3, but he’s also poised to return in a future installment and Peter Parker will need Shuri’s help to stop him when he does.
While we don’t have any plot specifics yet and it’s unclear which film this will happen in, you can easily imagine a character like Kraven showing up in Wakanda and wreaking all sorts of havoc, and his prior connection to Spider-Man gives an easy explanation for the web-slinger to head towards the African nation to take care of unfinished business. As well as their shared interest in science and technology, you can imagine that the sparks will also fly when a working-class high school student from Queens is forced to team up with genuine royalty and we can’t wait to see what Marvel has in store for the pair when they bring the two heroes together.