Chris Evans Returning To Marvel As Johnny Storm?
Fans have wanted Chris Evans to return to Marvel since the moment he left at the end of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. According to a tweet from Marvel news reporter Culture Spider, fans will get their wish, but not the way they may have expected. Chris Evans will reportedly reprise his role not as Captain America, but as the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm in Deadpool 3.
Chris Evans starred as Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch, in Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), back when Marvel still licensed film rights for those characters to Fox. Now that Fox and Marvel Studios both live under the Disney umbrella, the Fantastic Four are free to live in the MCU. And with the recent expansion of Marvel’s on-screen multiverse, the gloves are off.
Deadpool 3, which sees the return of Ryan Reynolds as the title character and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, is poised to go absolutely bananas with cameos. Said to be a buddy road trip movie through the multiverse, Deadpool is rumored to encounter several iterations of Marvel characters from the films made by Fox in the 2000s. Chris Evans is the latest Marvel alum to join the list of potential cameos.
Chris Evans is in the unique position of having played two Marvel superheroes on the big screen. While his prolific tenure as Captain America was explainable by its neat separation from Fox’s Fantastic Four films, the blurred lines of Marvel’s multiverse complicate Evans’ double dipping. Fans have joked about the overlap for a long time, but who better to take the meta commentary to the big screen than Deadpool?
Deadpool 3 will be directed by Shawn Levy, best known for Night at the Museum, Free Guy, and episodes of Netflix’s monster hit Stranger Things. Deadpool is known for expending maximum effort when it comes to poking fun at the very machine that has made him so famous, and he’ll have plenty of material to work with in the upcoming sequel. In addition to Chris Evans and Hugh Jackman, Deadpool is rumored to be joined by Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius of the Time Variance Authority, Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Dafne Keen as X-23.
Other Fox Marvel heroes like Jessica Alba’s Invisible Woman or James Marsden’s Cyclops are still on the table for Deadpool 3. At this point, it seems there is not much that isn’t on the table for the film. A return by Chris Evans as Johnny Storm, however, is about as crowd pleasing as a cameo could get for Marvel fans.
Little is known about Marvel Studios’ upcoming Fantastic Four film other than that WandaVision creator Matt Shakman is on board to direct the film. John Krasinski, who played Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, along with his real-life wife, Emily Blunt, have been rumored but not confirmed to play Reed Richards and Sue Storm. What the return of Chris Evans could mean for the Marvel film is a question that, surprisingly, only Deadpool may be able to answer.
