Tom Hanks explains why he’s never been in a Marvel film

Actor compared the MCU to John Ford’s Western films that ‘dominated’ the market at the time

Tom Hanks has shared his thoughts on the Marvel films, saying that he thinks they are “quite good”.

Despite having appeared in many Disney projects, the Forrest Gump actor has never starred in a Marvel Cinematic Universe film.

Asked on the Happy Sad Confused podcast why “Mr Disney” hadn’t made the move to the superhero realm, Hanks said that “to my knowledge” he’d never been asked.

“Talk about coin of the realm,” he said. “It’s like, holy cow.”

When host Josh Horowitz said that Marvel and Hanks felt like a good match, Hanks said he wanted to “unpack this a little bit”.

“Is there an era of film in which a very particular type of movie dominated the marketplace?” he asked. “You could say Westerns in the 50s, alright… Let’s take John Ford’s Westerns. You can maybe say that that is the John Ford Universe of Westerns. It’s not that different, perhaps, from the Marvel Universe of Motion Pictures.”

Imagining he had been offered the part in a “bodacious” classic Ford Western, Hanks explained: “You might do that, because you might end up in The Searchers or She Wore A Yellow Ribbon… But then you can look at the same era of Western in the 1950s and just a ton of them were not great.

“You don’t want to rag on any movie because movies are just too hard to make. I think the most that you can say is, it’s quite good, although, didn’t quite work.”

Hanks continued: “I think the bigger question here might just be how many screens are there going to be remaining, because I think there’s an awful lot of films that don’t need to be shown on motion picture screens.

Actor said he thought the Marvel films he’d seen were ‘quite good’ (Getty Images)

“What is it about? What’s up there? What are they examining on the screen and is it worthwhile? We’ve all seen plenty of, what is it, the Marvel Universe of Motion Pictures?”

After being told the films belonged to the “Marvel Cinematic Universe”, Hanks said: “Woah, the MCU. Alright… Look, I haven’t seen them all, I’ll give you that right now. The ones I’ve seen, I never come away from it without thinking, there’s a couple of great performers in there and those people really gave their all.

“Then after that, it’s like, did they examine the theme that I wanted to be seen? I could tell you, all of them are quite good. They’re all quite good.”

The quality of Marvel films has been the subject of much debate in recent years, after Martin Scorsese enraged fans by saying that the comic book adaptations were “not cinema” and comparing them to theme park rides.