Should Marvel games use MCU actors?
There’s a whole lot of moving and shaking going on at the Distinguished Competition (DC) as the late great Stan Lee used to call it. Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has more or less become their Kevin Feige and he’s got plans, big plans. Reboots, recasting, and a huge connected universe that also includes video games. with Gunn even claiming that actors from DC live-action properties will reprise their roles in future DC video games.
While the MCU is a non-stop synergy engine of movie and TV shows where everything connects in some way, video games based on the characters in the last decade have remained independent of the super popular MCU. Games will often use a lot of the characters the MCU has made extremely popular and they’ll usually share the same character traits but they feature different character models, the games take place in completely different canons and feature completely different actors voicing those roles, often well-established veteran voice actors.
But should Marvel video games feature the actors we have come to know and love as their MCU counterparts? Should Hugh Jackman be voicing Wolverine in Insomniac’s upcoming game? But also, is it feasible? Despite the constant comparisons between the two mediums, video games are a very different beast from TV and movies. Generally speaking, movies take a couple of years to make max (some way shorter) and have pretty hard-set pre-established releases. It’s actually pretty rare for a movie to be delayed once a release is slotted.
Video games, on the other hand, at least big AAA games based on massively popular IP such as Marvel, can take several years to make, and delays are pretty much par for the course. It is to licensed games’ benefit these days that they are rarely directly tied to a particular release because when that was common, most of those games were horribly rushed garbage.
Granted, voice acting is just one aspect of those games, you could theoretically have actors come in, read their lines and the game still might not be done for several years and that might be fine. But games change so much over the course of development, they sometimes don’t even resemble what they originally started out as, which often leads to story and dialogue changes, which you’d have to call the actors in for, actors who are likely on tight schedules and might not be available.
However, even in an ideal situation where everything is planned out well ahead of time and goes at least smoothly enough and the live-action actors are readily available and able, I still think that certainly shouldn’t be the norm. An occasional game based in the MCU featuring some of the actors sounds like a cool idea, but if that’s the established rule, we don’t get the excellent Guardians of the Galaxy or Insomniac’s Spider-Man, or Midnight Suns as they were.
They might leave off great characters cause they either have no plans to use them in the MCU or they do and they haven’t been cast yet. Not to mention not having the baggage of rules or continuity of the MCU gives the games a lot more freedom to do different things with the characters and the universe they inhabit in those games. So as I said, maybe an occasional game using actors from the MCU and based in the MCU would be fine and probably even cool, but establishing it as the standard as Gunn is trying to accomplish with DC just seems limiting and arguably an unsustainable standard in the long run.
That’s all for today, the next week or so is a little up in the air as far as my schedule goes, I may have time to write depending on how things shake out, or I may not. But I should still be able to put out a post in the next two weeks so see ya real soon!
