Marvel Studios constantly plans ahead. The producers know what stories they’d like to tell in future movies, so they frequently ask for lines of dialogue to be dropped into ,current movies. Stephen Strange gets name-dropped in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Captain Marvel’s logo appears at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Some of them are very vague, though, leaving it up to screenwriters to confirm their intent a full year later.
There was a line of dialogue in Avengers: Endgame that would have been important, or it could have meant nothing. During ComicBook’s Quarantine Watch Party for Avengers: Endgame, screenwriter Chris Markus confirmed that this moment was meant to lay the groundwork for Namor the Submariner.
The scene in question has Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) working with surviving heroes as they patrol the globe… and the expanded universe. War Machine (Don Cheadle), Carol Danvers (Bris Larson) and Rocket (Bradley Cooper) are checking in. Nat asks Okoye (Danai Gurira) about tremors that were picked up at the bottom of the ocean. When pressed on it, Okoye assures Widow that it’s just an earthquake under the ocean. They handle it by not handling it.
Of course, Marvel fans with their tinfoil hats firmly affixed wondered if that dialogue was meant to tease Namor, who rules the seven seas and has been a major part of the Marvel Universe since 1939. He has yet to appear in an MCU movie, but has direct connections to both The Avengers and The Fantastic Four. And now Markus confirms that the dialogue was an act of seed-planting that could flourish in time.
Namor is Marvel’s equivalent of Aquaman. His powers allow him to live, swim and fight beneath the seas, but he’s also able to come up on our mainland… where he often plots hostile takeovers. Namor has been more of an antihero in the Marvel stories, willing to help but also very cautious of the surface dwellers and frequently clashing with them because he’s protective of his underwater kingdom.
Because Namor has been around for so long, he has been associated with several teams that haven’t been used on screen before, but could show up down the line in the MCU. This includes The Defenders and the Illuminati, though Namor has connections to The X-Men as well (because he’s a mutant), so he could be used to bring that team into the MCU, as we assume is planned.
Marvel fandom has enjoyed celebrating the one-year anniversary of Avengers: Endgame opening in theaters, and it’s exciting that there are still truths to be unveiled about the blockbuster after all of this time. I love that there is a Namor reference in Endgame, even if it never pans out. We already know the next seven MCU movies, and Submariner isn’t part of the plan. Will they find some way to bring Namor in? Do you even want to see him on the big screen, or did Jason Momoa beat him to the punch?
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