Earlier today, the internet went wild – and understandably so – when news broke out that Silver Surfer would have a cameo in Avengers: Infinity War. It seemed too good to be true, of course, but the source was the thought to be reliable Metacritic, with the outlet listing the character as part of the film with an actor (Curt Clendenin) in the role, as well.
Now, however, the truth has emerged and unfortunately, it looks like everyone got all excited for no reason. Apparently, what happened is that since Metacritic ingests all of their data from IMDb, it’s easy to get things wrong. For those who don’t know, IMDb users can edit a film’s details, such as adding characters or actors. So, someone obviously added Silver Surfer/Curt Clendenin to the cast list of Infinity War and that got picked up by Metacritic when they were scraping for information.
At the time of writing, the character’s since been removed from the IMDb page for the film, and as Metacritic mentioned, they’ve come across this issue several times in the past. Only now, it’s attracted so much more attention as having Surfer in Infinity War would have been a pretty big deal. And something that’s obviously going to get fans incredibly hyped.
For those unfamiliar with the character, Silver Surfer (real name Norrin Radd) was originally created by Jack Kirby, with Stan Lee helping to develop him. He’s been seen on film before, of course, but like so many others, he could really use a redo. As you’ll no doubt remember, Doug Jones played him in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, a wholly forgettable affair that didn’t do the character justice.
Speaking of which, had Marvel indeed included him in Avengers: Infinity War, he probably wouldn’t have fared much better. I mean, there’s just so much going on in the pic as is and already it’s at risk of having too many characters and plotlines to juggle. To then throw a very important character like Norrin Radd into the mix would just be foolish. We already know that Marvel cut Carol Danvers out of the film for that very reason (most likely) and as such, it just wouldn’t have made sense to introduce Surfer at this point.