Marvel Has A Finished Script For 'The Inhumans'

Marvel Studios is growing ever-more confident. Once, Guardians of the Galaxy was seen as a risky move. The success of that film proved that the combination of smart casting and Marvel's marketing machine can overcome the big hurdle of audience unfamiliarity. So how weird can Marvel's character stable get? The next test may be The Inhumans. Rumors have flown for some time, of development of a film based on the strange characters. Vin Diesel just teased the possibility of the movie, and now there's a report that Marvel has an Inhumans script in hand.

Collider reports that the script is by Joe Robert Cole, who came out of the same Marvel writer's program that allowed Nicole Perlman to kickstart development of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Marvel is reportedly ready to take Cole's script out to filmmakers. In much the same way that the development of Guardians of the Galaxy proceeded, this script will likely be rewritten by either the director, or a new writer working in concert with that filmmaker. 

In the past, a logline for the script surfaced on some industry boards:

The Inhumans are aliens who were put on Earth as sleeper cell aliens to eventually call back their race to take over the planet. Ultimately, the group of aliens fully assimilates and don't want to cause war.

The Inhumans are another set of Marvel's cosmic characters, in this case designed by Jack Kirby. They're even a bit more strange than the Guardians of the Galaxy. The Inhumans are a race of evolutionarily-advanced beings, created from humans by the Kree, one of the chief alien races in Marvel's continuity, to fight another alien race, the Skrulls. It's big-time Jack Kirby sci-fi wackiness, with a character roster that includes Black Bolt, a ruler who never speaks because his voice is so powerful, and a giant dog called Lockjaw.

At one point, the idea of putting Lockjaw on screen would have seemed too far out for a mainstream film. But that was before Guardians, and the huge popularity of Rocket Raccoon and Groot.

The Inhumans also present intriguing options for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Kree are seen in Guardians (Ronan the Accuser is Kree), but the Skrulls are off-limits to Marvel, as screen rights to the characters are tied to Fox's holding of the Fantastic Four. So the Skrulls probably won't be involved in any Inhumans story.

But that logline above has led to speculation that characters who are traditionally mutants — specifically Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch — may be revised as Inhumans in Age of Ultron. Kevin Feige has specifically said that won't be the case. Even so, if the Inhumans are written as "alien sleeper agents," they could provide a way to redefine the origin of some characters, making them easier to use in Marvel's on-screen stable.