Kirsten Dunst would do another superhero movie, for the money

Though we think of them eating caviar up in ivory towers, Hollywood actors nevertheless have to put food on the table. (Caviar is still food!) Kirsten Dunst, for example, is a famous star, but she is also kind of an indie darling, and indies don’t always pay the bills, darling. That’s why cinema’s (original) Mary Jane Watson says she’d like to work on a regular television show, or, she tells Marie Claire, return to the superhero industrial complex, “because you get paid a lot of money, and I have two children, and I support my mother.”

There is a time-honored tradition of actors being completely upfront about taking a job—particularly a sub-par job—for the paycheck. And the superhero industrial complex usually comes with a big paycheck, so let’s all be honest here, that’s a big draw. There are a few of these honest souls in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “You know what? I had no interest in doing one of those films,” writer-actor-director Taika Waititi admitted of his Thor days on the Smartless podcast. “It wasn’t on my plan for my career as an auteur. But I was poor and I’d just had a second child, and I thought, ‘You know what, this would be a great opportunity to feed these children.’” And Glenn Close, who had a minor role in Guardians Of The Galaxy, admitted (via Buzzfeed), “I’m gonna go off and do the next generation of Marvel Comics/Disney and I get to be the chief police of the galaxy… I’m doing that because it will then afford me to go do the other kind of movies that I really love, and hopefully I will have a great time. It’ll be a new experience for me, but practically speaking it will mean that I can do those smaller movies and it’ll be okay.”

Dunst herself admits to Marie Claire that she had no desire to “capitalize off the Spider-Man thing” to become a “movie-star-movie-star” back when she was starring in the Sam Raimi trilogy, which she refers to as a “hidden indie.” But, now she’s a mom with different responsibilities, so she seems ready to do some capitalizing. With the dawn of the multiverse, she could come back as MJ, but there’s also precedent for an actor starting as a character in another studio’s Marvel movie and being someone completely different in the MCU (see: Chris Evans in Fantastic Four and Captain America). Or she could be a totally different superhero over at DC, or something. C’mon, guys, let’s get Dunst her cash!