A photo of Jaden Smith decked out in the mask of Spider-Man, and it was enough for the Web to ignite and imagine that the actor has been chosen to play Miles Morales in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It didn’t take much to ignite the Web: just a photo of Jaden Smith posted on Twitter, with a Spider-Man mask on his head and a caption that can be translated as “Wherever you are, I will try to pass.” A seemingly innocuous shot but which many saw as the announcement that the actor and singer inherited the role of Miles Morales in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Inspired by Donald Glover as much as by Barack Obama, Miles Morales was born in the Marvel comic books in August 2011. Endowed with African and Latino origins, the New York teenager lives in an alternate reality where Spider-Man does not is over, Peter Parker having been killed by the Green Goblin a few years earlier. But the bite of a biologically modified spider will change his life and give him the same spidery powers.
With his black and red costume, he therefore becomes the new Spider-Man of his universe and, after a complicated start against a villain calling himself the Kangaroo, he gradually wins the favor of the inhabitants.
Before landing on the big screen at the end of 2018 thanks to the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film the following year and which brilliantly explored the concept of the multiverse with a visual style of the most striking. He was doubled there by Shameik Moore, partner of Jaden Smith in the series The Get Down.
Star of the video game released at the end of 2020, Miles Morales is still waiting to make his debut in the flesh. On small or large screen. While the contours of the new Spider-Man trilogy on which Marvel and Sony will work remain unclear, it seems obvious that the character is part of their plans, after being the subject of two easter eggs: the presence of his uncle Aaron Davis (played by… Donald Glover) in Homecoming, and this replica of Electro (Jamie Foxx), convinced that a black Spider-Man exists somewhere, in No Way Home.
A sentence far from being trivial even if there is, for the moment, nothing concrete. Not officially anyway. And that’s why this photo of Jaden Smith is probably not related to a future Marvel project, which usually announces the arrival of a character in its shared universe, before revealing the identity of his interpreter. Especially since the actor wears the mask of Peter Parker (the version of Tobey Maguire very precisely) and not that of Miles Morales.
We will obviously have to follow all this very closely, and things will perhaps speed up once Tom Holland has declared whether or not he plans to continue to play Peter Parker. And it is at this time, perhaps, that Miles Morales will be able to make his debut, even if a cohabitation of the two versions of the Man-Spider is not to be excluded either.
In the meantime, Miles Morales will star in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” on October 6: