I’ve been covering the info dump from yesterday Disney Investor Day, where they bragged about topping 86 million subscribers in 13 months, and announced a bunch of new theatrical and streaming stuff to roll out over the next few years. As you’ve seen already today there’s so much to unpack, I-resent-working-this-much-in-December fashion, and so much MARVEL to unpack. Because there was no Comic-Con this year, Marvel treated the investor presentation as their Hall H and unloaded like eight years’ worth of news in an hour. Honestly, I’m kind of exhausted by it all—I didn’t actually miss Marvel this year, I enjoyed the break—but some things leapt out as interesting amidst the avalanche of news. 

 

One thing that actually broke earlier in the day is that Rachel McAdams will return to waste her time as Doctor Love Interest in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (there are few acting roles as thankless as “Marvel love interest”, unless you luck into a comic book story where your character becomes the hero, like Natalie Portman). Great! Super!  But are you just going to waste her time again? Honestly, the vast majority of Marvel movies don’t even need romantic subplots, it’s just there to tick boxes on the formula sheet. I will never begrudge Rachel McAdams work and I hope she is GETTING PAID, but it’s also a terrible waste of her time if they can’t even be bothered to make Doctor Love Interest a real person so that I can remember her name.

 

Then, during the investor presentation Kevin Feige confirmed that Tatiana Maslany IS going to play She-Hulk after all. A thing everyone really loves is when actors are forced to deny involvement in projects so that you can never trust them about anything again. Obviously, when Maslany said she wasn’t She-Hulk back in October, she must have still been in negotiations. Either she was angling for more money in the press or she felt the deal might fall through; either way, this situation was way more dramatic than it needed to be, but these announcements are about maximizing stock prices, not handling business in a reasonable way. God forbid an actor confirm a gig before it can be produced to the hilt to make Wall Street jump the next morning. Mark Ruffalo will also appear in She-Hulk, and so will Tim Roth, reprising the role of the Abomination, a character most people probably forgot he played.