Alexandra Shipp Wants Storm And Black Panther To Share The Screen

 

Alexandra Shipp, who plays Storm in this month’s X-Men: Apocalypse, told The Obsev that one of her professional pipe dreams involves bringing her mutant hero together with Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther for a blockbuster outing.

She said “I want that movie so bad. I’ve got a pitch, I’m like coming up with a vision board, I want this movie to happen. Honestly it doesn’t have to be me – if Chadwick [Boseman] was like ‘you know what, I really want to do this with Halle [Berry]’ I’d be like yo, that’s fine at least make the movie.
Shipp’s enthusiasm has roots in comic-book lore – Storm enjoyed marital bliss with the Wakandan prince for six years, between 2006 and 2012. The characters have fought side-by-side and proven a formidable team, and any comic-book fan would get excited at the prospect of seeing their chemistry get translated to the big screen. There’s just one problem – Storm, as one of the most famous X-Men, belongs firmly to 20th Century Fox, which is determined to get as much use out of the character (and all the X-Men, really) as possible. And Black Panther, introduced in Civil War, will next appear in his own Marvel solo pic and is expected to have a key, potentially dominating, role in the next Avengers lineup post-Civil War. He’s Marvel all the way.

Yes, it’s true that a Quicksilver played by Evan Peters stole the show in Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past (his sequence in Apocalypse is the best in the film as well), and that another one played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson had a pivotal part in Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. But that situation was made possible through seeds planted by the comics long ago – as a less central character who’d flitted between the Avengers and the X-Men over the years, Quicksilver was less firmly an exclusive-to-Fox property or an exclusive-to-Marvel one.

There’s none of that ambiguity here – Storm was once an Avenger, but she’s a member of the X-Men through and through. Unless Fox cuts some kind of deal with Marvel, like the latter studio did with Sony to steer its dead Spider-Man franchise to safety, Storm’s staying with the X-Men into the foreseeable future.
In fact, the only situation in which a Shipp/Boseman team-up would make sense would be contingent on Apocalypse bombing, and bombing hard, later this month. That kind of disappointment might shock Fox into having more flexibility. Even then, it’d be a long shot. Still, it’s cool to see that Shipp knows her comics.