Stan Lee Says Marvel Studios Still Plans 'The Inhumans'

We've got a good idea of what Marvel Studios has planned for the next few years. Clearly we know many details about Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The First Avenger, and a bit less about Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Beyond that we've got a pretty good idea that Black Panther and Doctor Strange will get their time as leads of feature films. Stan Lee, who co-created the Marvel Universe in the early '60s, has just said as much, supporting a great deal of other comments various people have made in the past year. And while Lee may not be a creative or executive force at Marvel at this point, he also said there are plans for another team we've heard mentioned on and off: The Inhumans.

Jack Kirby's cosmic characters are even stranger than the Guardians of the Galaxy, and so an Inhumans film could hinge on the fortunes of Guardians. The Inhumans are a race of evolutionarily advanced beings created from humans by the Kree, one of the chief alien races in Marvel's continuity, to fight another alien race, the Skrulls. It's big-time Jack Kirby sci-fi wackiness, with a character roster that includes Black Bolt, a ruler who never speaks because his voice is so powerful, and a giant dog called Lockjaw.

Of the possibility, Lee told TooFab,

the people at Marvel are looking through our whole list of candidates and wondering which ones are we going to use now. They are going to do the Black Panther. They are going to use Doctor Strange. They are going to do Ant-Man. They are going to do the Guardians of the Galaxy. And they'll probably do the Inhumans.

Here's where it gets fun. Back in 2011, a purported logline for an Inhumans movie said the film would explore the story of "aliens who were put on Earth as sleeper cell aliens to eventually call back their race to take over the planet. Ultimately, the group of aliens fully assimilates and don't want to cause war."

Later this year Marvel will revisit the Inhumans in a new comic storyline called Inhumanity, and then a series called Inhuman, in which, per THR, "regular humans will be revealed to be descended from Inhumans, giving them latent powers that could manifest in later life — in other words, a version of the central "mutant" concept of X-Men, but one whose movie rights are controlled by Marvel."

A bunch of sleeper agents who have "fully assimilated" would almost certainly have children — that old logline and the plans for the new comics storyline fit quite well together. That's no confirmation of a plan, but it is a good link, and a reasonable pointer to what we might expect from a movie.