Benito A Martínez Ocasio, the Puerto Rican musician better known as Bad Bunny, has been cast as the superhero and masked luchador, El Muerto, in a movie set within Sony's Spider-Man Universe. Ocasio becomes the first Latino actor to headline a live-action Marvel film.
El Muerto is a relatively minor character within Marvel comics canon, created by writer Peter David and artist Roger Cruz and debuting in the pages of 2006's Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #6. Ocasion will star as Juan-Carlos Estrada Sánchez, who in the comics eventually gets in the ring with Spider-Man himself.
Via Marvel, "The powers and mask of the super-powered wrestler El Muerto have been passed down generation to generation. Each wrestler had to prove themselves to their oppressor, El Dorado, so that they could remain alive and keep their powers." According to reports out of CinemaCon, where Bad Bunny's casting was announced, the onscreen version of El Muerto will be an antihero on the verge of inheriting his father's power.
Mexican filmmaker Jonás Cuarón (who wrote 2013's Oscar-winning Gravity with his father, Alfonso Cuarón, and directed 2015's Desierto) will helm El Muerto, according to The Wrap, from a script by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, who recently penned the Blue Beetle movie for Warner Bros.
El Muerto joins the growing roster of Spider-Man characters getting their own movies at Sony, following Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Kraven the Hunter (set to hit theaters on Oct. 6, 2023) and the Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney starrer, Madame Web, due out Feb. 16, 2024. Sony also announced Tom Hardy's Venom is getting a threequel.
While El Muerto will mark Bad Bunny's first lead role, he made his big screen debut with a cameo in F9: The Fast Saga and played a part in Bullet Train opposite Brad Pitt. He's also a regular of WWE Raw and appeared at WrestleMania 37, both of which should prove useful as he prepares to enter the ring.
El Muerto is dated to hit theaters on January 12, 2024.
This article was originally published on April 26, 2022.
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