10 Important Milestones The Marvel Cinematic Universe Must Pass

9. Introducing A Non-White Lead Character

Bruce Banner. Tony Stark. Steve Rogers. Thor Odinson. Natasha Romanoff. Clint Barton. There's something all those characters have in common, and it's not just the fact that they're all men (with the exception of Black Widow, but we'll get to that later); they're all white, and those people in the MCU who aren't (Nick Fury, Falcon, that big guy Thor wrestles so he can get to his hammer) serve as merely supporting characters at best and don't have their own movies. This is something Marvel is regularly criticised for in the past, and the reasoning for their lack of diversity is usually explained away as a sign of the times in which most of their most popular character were created - the early 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act had yet to be passed and minorities were still second class citizens. Times have changed, however, and it's not like characters can't be reinvented (Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, for a Marvel-centric example) or that Marvel doesn't have a large stable of non-white characters (Black Panther, Blade, Misty Knight, Shang-Chi), so they really need to pull their finger out pretty soon if they want to stop just making movies for one particular audience. Admittedly, there is some progress on this front in that Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are getting their own Netflix series, but we haven't yet seen Marvel front the cash for a headline non-white character in a movie of their own, though there have been rumblings of a Black Panther vehicle on the horizon...