Photo courtesy of PBS

Tribeca Film Festival award-winner Nia DaCosta has landed the job of helming the sequel to Disney/Marvel Studios’ ‘Captain Marvel’.  DaCosta’s latest film is the remake of ‘Candyman’, executive produced by Jordan Peele, the release of which has been delayed until October 16, 2020, due to COVID-19.  In 2018, her debut film, ‘Little Woods’, which she financed through Kickstarter, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Nora Ephron Award for “excellence in storytelling by a female writer or director.”  Beyond that and ‘Candyman’, DaCosta’s only other professional directing job has been on two episodes of the British TV series ‘Top Boy’.  And now she’s in the big leagues!

Marvel Studios / Disney

DaCosta becomes the first Black woman to direct a Marvel Studios movie, and only the second Black woman to direct any comic book movie, following Gina Prince-Blythewood, who helmed Netflix’s ‘The Old Guard’, which was released just weeks ago.

Reportedly, DaCosta met with Marvel Studios CEO Kevin Feige over the weekend and it seems he liked what he heard.  She replaces Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who co-directed the first ‘Captain Marvel’.  That picture grossed over $1 billion worldwide.  The screenplay for the sequel is being penned by Megan McDonnell, a staff writer on the upcoming Disney+ Marvel series ‘WandaVision’.

The first ‘Captain Marvel’ was a period pieces set in the 1990s, a decade+ before Tony Stark’s Iron Man hit the scene.  Presumably, the sequel will be set in the present and will likely explain exactly what Samuel L. Jackson‘s Nick Fury was up to aboard that space station in the mid-credits scene.

Brie Larson starred as former Air Force pilot-turned-part-alien space enforcer, Carol Danvers.  Danvers stepped into the present-day MCU in ‘Avengers: Endgame’.

Marvel’s Phase Four has been delayed by the coronavirus.  ‘Black Widow’ is the first film in that phase, and it will *fingers crossed* open in theaters on November 6, 2020.  This postponement has also caused the rest of Marvel’s Phase Four movies– ‘Eternals’, ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’, ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, and ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’, plus Sony’s next ‘Spider-Man’— to also be pushed back.  The same applies to the Disney+ shows.  ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ was supposed to be the first of those, but it hadn’t completed filming before COVID shutdowns.

Marvel Studios hasn’t scheduled any of the movies for Phase Five, but in addition to ‘Captain Marvel 2’, the lineup is expected to include ‘Black Panther 2’, ‘Blade’ (starring Mahershala Ali), ‘Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3’, and ‘Ant-Man 3’.

Stay tuned for more Marvel news as it arrives!

 

Source: Deadline