‘Luke Cage’ TV Updates: New Photographs Released Featuring Mike Colter as Marvel’s First African-American Lead; Studio Explains Connection between its Television Shows, Movies

‘Luke Cage’ recently unveiled new photographs ahead of the scheduled September release featuring Mike Colter as Marvel’s first African-American lead. Meanwhile, Marvel explained the connection between its television shows and films and how executing crossovers between mediums will be highly challenging.

According to Comingsoon.com, new photographs of Netflix’s widely anticipated web superhero series have been released ahead of the scheduled September release. They featured Mike Colter as the titular protagonist Luke Cage, a former convict turned crime fighter endowed with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin.

The images showed Colter in action as he is set to tackle real world problems in a super human body. Luke becomes a fugitive after a botched experiment that leaves him with unusual abilities and he moves from Hell’s Kitchen to Harlem to make a new life for himself. In addition to possessing super human strength and durability, he is an expert combatant who utilizes brawling and street fighting techniques to bring down his opponents.

Colter was first introduced as Luke in a recurring role in the first season of Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’. He played Jessica’s (Krysten Ritter’s) love interest.

According to Variety, the upcoming television series is Marvel’s first superhero show with a lead character of African-American descent. The 39-year old actor expressed his enthusiasm over the role saying, “It’s important in the landscape of television and also globally as far as symbols… When you look at black culture, it’s important that you have symbols.” He added, “I’m proud that people do think he’s a good superhero, and I do think that the black community has a lot to be proud of.”

Showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker also talked about the show’s “blaxploitation” roots from the 1970s saying, “Luke Cage came out in 1972, the year I was born, and also within the era of ‘Shaft’ and ‘Superfly,’ so the character is to a certain extent Marvel’s reaction to blaxploitation… It’s no different from anything else, except we get to have swagger.”

Meanwhile, Marvel clarified that seeing their television characters on the big screen will be highly unlikely. According to TechnoBuffalo, Marvel’s head of TV Jeph Loeb explained that executing a tv-film crossover will be highly challenging.

Loeb said, “I can tell you that part of the challenge of doing this sort of thing is that the movies are planned out years in advance of what it is that we are doing. Television moves at an incredible speed. The other part of the problem is that when you stop and think about it, if I’m shooting a television series and that’s going to go on over a six-month or eight-month period, how am I going to get Mike Colter to be able to be in a movie? I need Mike to be in a television show.

However, he did assure fans that although crossovers were highly unlikely, they were still possible.

‘Luke Cage’ is an upcoming web television series developed by Cheo Hodari Coker for Netflix. It is based on the Marvel comic book character of the same name and is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). It is intended as the third Netflix Marvel-based television show following ‘Jessica Jones’ and ‘Daredevil’ and will lead up to a ‘The Defenders’ crossover miniseries.

It is scheduled to premiere on September 30, 2016.