Tom Hanks has taken on all manner of roles over his decades in the film industry, but one thing we've never seen him do is take down bad guys as a Marvel superhero.
Admittedly he might be slightly past Marvel's prime crime-fighting age now at 66 years old, though his role as Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code suggests he might be able to put his mind to use cracking clues to track down the bad guys.
In spite of his talents, though, Hanks has never been cast in a Marvel film - not as a superhero, villain or even a kindly pedestrian caught up in the carnage of the Avengers.
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The actor appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast ahead of the release of his latest film Pinocchio on Disney+ today (8 September), when host Josh Horowitz expressed belief that Marvel and Hanks felt like a good match.
Describing Hanks as 'Mr Disney' thanks to appearances in films such as Toy Story and Saving Mr. Banks, Horowitz asked why he'd never taken on a role in a Marvel film.
Apparently, the answer is simple. "To [Hanks'] knowledge," he's never been asked.
Hanks went on to say he wanted to 'unpack this a little bit', adding: "Is there an era of film in which a very particular type of movie dominated the marketplace? You could say Westerns in the 50s, alright… Let’s take John Ford’s Westerns. You can maybe say that that is the John Ford Universe of Westerns. It’s not that different, perhaps, from the Marvel Universe of Motion Pictures.”
However, imagining he had been offered a part in a classic Ford Western film, Hanks said: "You might do that, because you might end up in The Searchers or She Wore A Yellow Ribbon… But then you can look at the same era of Western in the 1950s and just a ton of them were not great.
"You don’t want to rag on any movie because movies are just too hard to make. I think the most that you can say is, it’s quite good, although, didn’t quite work.”
Hanks then turned his attention to the 'bigger question' of 'how many screens' will remain in the future, expressing belief there's 'an awful lot of films that don’t need to be shown on motion picture screens'.
“What is it about? What’s up there?," he asked. "What are they examining on the screen and is it worthwhile? We’ve all seen plenty of, what is it, the Marvel Universe of Motion Pictures?”
After learning it was actually the 'Marvel Cinematic Universe', Hanks admitted he hasn't seen all of the films, but said there are a 'couple of great performers in there' and took the diplomatic view of describing them all as 'quite good'.
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Topics: Tom Hanks, Disney, Marvel, Film and TV, Celebrity
Emily Brown