Stan Lee is the grandfather of Marvel comics, one of the men who started it all, and an enthusiastic cheerleader for all things Spidey, Avengers, X-Men and so on. Still, while he pops up in many Marvel movies for cameos, he isn't part of the main creative brain trust at Marvel Studios, which includes Kevin Feige, Joss Whedon and more. So take any comments he makes about future projects – such as Inhumans, Doctor Strange and Black Panther – with a grain of salt.
That said, he’s more likely than most to have an in when it comes to information about what the company’s planning, though the Marvel team is relatively secretive about unannounced projects. “The people at Marvel are looking through our whole list of candidates and wondering which ones are we going to use now,” Lee told web site TooFab. “They are going to do the Black Panther. They are going to use Doctor Strange. They are going to do Ant-Man. They are going to do the Guardians Of The Galaxy. And they'll probably do the Inhumans.”
Guardians Of The Galaxy and Ant-Man are, of course already underway, with Guardians almost finished shooting and Edgar Wright looking at getting Hank Pym and co into cinemas for 2015. Black Panther and Doctor Strange have not been officially confirmed, but there’s been enough chatter about them from Feige in particular to make us think they’ll be part of Phase Three or some other future plan.
As for The Inhumans? The characters, created by Lee and Jack Kirby in their 1960s run on Fantastic Four, are a race of genetically modified humans given spectacular powers by a vapour known as the Terrigen Mists. The line-up includes such names as Black Bolt, Medusa and Karnak. Nothing has been said about the chances of this lot ending up on our screens, but anything’s possible – especially if Guardians, due here on August 1 next year, works the way Marvel is hoping it does…