12 Castings For New Movies That Prove Hollywood Has Gone Insane

There's a school of thought that says movies should never be obvious or expected. That only surprise and delight should be the chief pillars of film-making, rather than recycling the same old tired cliches and giving the same people all the work. 

Unfortunately, Hollywood mostly didn't get that memo, since sequels and reboots spew out of every studio door, and Nicolas Cage continues to fund his sickly habit for creative self-destruction. But every now and then the studios rail against type, throwing filmic curve-balls like Boyhood or Whiplash, or casting people like Michael Keaton or Heath Ledger in things they "had no right to be in".

Now, castings like that are all well and good when you've got the benefit of hindsight, but their unexpected successes have led to studios taking gambles on square pegs fitting into distinctly round looking cast holes. There's every chance that some of those left-field choices will work - as almost the entire cast of Guardians Of The Galaxy proved - but that doesn't mean that they don't look like the work of the mentally unstable to anyone in control of most of their faculties.

And for some reason it seems like Hollywood is in the midst of a particularly odd Silly Season right now when it comes to casting...

Shut up, you're probably saying. If an Oklahoma stage star can play Wolverine, a comedian play Batman and Paul Rudd play any superhero then surely Martin Freeman can slot easily into the MCU.

Nope. Freeman might be big business at the minute thanks to being one of the only redeeming parts of The Hobbit trilogy, but he's just so incredibly English. Yes, he was very good in Fargo, but there was something very British about that characterisation: the suppressed rage and capacity for huge violence is exactly what every Tube ride feels like, after all.

There is a disconnect between Freeman's quaintness (that's not the insult it sounds) and the garishness of blockbusters. Simon Pegg has found the same thing, and he hasn't had much success playing an American. Perhaps therein lies the key for understanding Freeman's casting.

Perhaps he's going to play an interesting side character only on screen briefly, like the British prime minister, signing away the lives of his country's heroes.

Or, he might be Captain Britain. And the world will explode.

Will It Work?

If he's the Prime Minister, probably, as it's in his wheel house. If he's a superhero, you have to be worried.