October 28, 2014. At the height of the collective madness for Marvel, Kevin Feige takes the stand at Comic-Con and announces the films that are to come in the future phase 3, among which were ‘Captain America: Civil War’, ‘Doctor Strange’ or the then two parts of ‘Avengers: Infinity War’. But, between both, there was another tape destined to make history in the company, number 20, something really important and destined to succeed: ‘Inhumans’.
Here begins the story of this singular hero
The Inhumans were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965., within ‘The Fantastic Four’, although the great explanation of his story would come in the pages of ‘Thor’ two years later. Attilan’s group of superheroes were never Marvel’s most popular, and in fact by the 1980s they were all but gone from print. It wasn’t until the late 1990s, when his limited series won an Eisner Award, who began to have more relevance as regular characters in the collections. Never too much, but enough for Perlmutter, director of Marvel Entertainment at the time, to think that they could replace mutants in the collective imagination.
In 2014, Fox had just released ‘Days of Future Past’ and It didn’t seem like he was going to let the X-Men end up in the hands of Marvel., who looked for another group in the style of the mutants to alleviate his absence. It was so much Perlmutter’s commitment to the inhumans that in the comics they became one of the largest groups thanks to the Terrigen Mists, which they woke up the inhuman gene and killed the mutants. Thus was born the event ‘Inhumans against X-Men’, trying to bring them to the forefront by mere opposition. It didn’t work very well: Black Bolt and his ilk were never wildly popular, but the movie kept going.
But in 2015 several things happened: the first, the confirmation that Sony would allow Spiderman to appear in the MCU, which opened the door to collaborations with other companies such as Fox to borrow their characters. The second, the success of the first Marvel series (at that time they were part of the Shared Universe) on ABC: ‘Agents of SHIELD’ or ‘Agent Carter’. Third, the appearance of the inhumans in, precisely, ‘Agents of SHIELD’, giving one of its protagonists terrigenous powers. Nothing was known about the film yet.
The golden age of television
When ‘Spiderman Homecoming’ and ‘Ant-man and the Wasp’ sneaked into Phase 3, ‘Inhumans’ disappeared. And the questions to Kevin Feige were obvious: “What happened to this?”. His response, admittedly hilarious seen today: “‘Inhumans’ is going to happen for sure. I don’t know when. I think it’s going to be on television. And I think as we get into phase 4 it can be a movie“.
A couple of later, ABC announced its new collaboration with Marvel: an eight-episode miniseries titled… ‘Inhumans,’ which, they promised, It wasn’t the long movie or a spin-off of ‘Agents of SHIELD’, but a series created specifically for television and created by… the same showrunner of the first season of ‘Iron fist’. The first images only confirmed the worst suspicions: the wigs looked light years away.
In the end, the Inhumans made it to the movies. And not just anyone! The first two episodes opened in IMAX in style. Well more or less. The reviews were so devastating that even the producers publicly accepted that the first two episodes weren’t very allça. The IMAX screenings were a flop (they only grossed three and a half million worldwide) and viewers dropped from almost six million for its pilot to just three for its last episodebecoming the most successful series of the year… number 121. For whatever reason, there was no season 2.
The future is (not) inhuman
After that embarrassment, possibly the most uncomfortable moment for the MCU since its creation, the Inhumans were left wrapped in the earth mists. Anson Mount, who played Black Lightning, reprized his role (but from another universe) in ‘Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness’, a much more appreciated cameo, partly because his costume faithful to the comicthan the whole series itself.
I have already commented on it above, but, to explain what happened with ‘Inhumans’, we have to talk about Ike Perlmutter, the then president of Marvel Entertainment known for being an ax selling toys… and being racist and sexist. Perlmutter wouldn’t let Feige make Black Panther and Captain Marvel movies for years, convinced they wouldn’t make any money (“Girls don’t buy toys”). And yes, that is why you are thinking. Rumors indicate that his decisions could be so bad that he was about to eliminate Robert Downey Jr from ‘Civil war’ because he asked for a raise, putting in the place of Iron man … Hulk. Feige had to threaten to leave Marvelin one of his continuous scuffles, to get him to see reason.
‘Inhumans’ was Perlmutter’s dream projectafter failing to get hold of the ‘X-Men’ franchise, and a way to play with the franchises they had left at Marvel. It was a mess, a blur at the bottom of the page that, luckily, is not irreparable. With the multiverse at stake, who knows what lies ahead!