At the start of this pandemic, one of the fun ways we were able to brighten up the then-nascent darkness that was consuming our lives was by pointing out that Bad Boys For Life—by virtue of its somewhat surprising success before theaters were shut down—was the biggest movie of the year by default. Surely it would sweep the Oscars, because it’s not like Sonic The Hedgehog or Bloodshot were going to stop it, but then the Academy decided to make unprecedented changes to Oscar eligibility and our brief moment of fun was taken away.
However, for a few months, Bad Boys For Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were on top of the world, and now they’ve managed to translate that prestige to a pair of spots on the directing team for Disney+’s live-action Ms. Marvel TV show. They’ll be joined by Oscar-winning documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who happens to be the first Pakistani-born filmmaker to ever get an Academy Award (which she got for 2012's Saving Face, a documentary about acid attacks on women in Pakistan, and she also won one for 2015's A Girl In The River: The Price Of Forgiveness, with both documentaries also winning Emmy awards). In retrospect, those accomplishments are probably more impressive than making Bad Boys For Life. The three of them will be joined by Meera Menon, who has worked on You, For All Mankind, Outlander, and Dirty John, and she has some comic book cred from working on The Walking Dead, The Punisher, and Titans.
So Disney is clearly putting some work into this, which makes sense since Ms. Marvel herself, Kamala Khan, has been positioned to be a major Marvel star for a while now. In the comics, she’s a Pakistani-American teenager who idolizes the Avengers (specifically Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel) and turns out to be an Inhuman with stretchy powers. She’s been a fixture of the kid-friendly Marvel Rising animated franchise and was most recently the star of the shockingly good Marvel’s Avengers video game storyline. Nobody has been cast as Ms. Marvel yet for the show, but hopefully Disney finds someone who can make Kamala’s stretchy powers look as fun in live-action as they do in print or in cartoons—because this sort of power set has a tendency to look pretty fucked-up in live-action.