Obvious LUKE CAGE Spoilers ahead – if you don’t want to see them, look away now. Then again, why would you be here in the first place based on that headline?
While appearing on ESPN’s First Take, Mike Colter was asked by Stephen A. Smith why Mahershala Ali’s Cottonmouth character was killed off so early.
The character was generally perceived as a great villain, and many (including myself) were surprised when he was killed off of the show so early.
Colter went into a very detailed answer – and even compared it to sports:
“Look. The decision to do that was done way before production. A lot of people are involved in this. When you’re doing it on paper, it’s like running a play in football. You do it in practice, it works, it looks good. In the game, it doesn’t work and all of a sudden in retrospect – it seems stupid. All of the series have a bad guy. Usually, by the end of the season, everyone is tired of the bad guy and thinks we should have been able to resolve these 10 episodes in 8. So in theory, you’re going wow, you bring another [bad guy] in and the [bad guy] is good and people are enthralled by this guy – now we’ve set the series in a sense and now people are in another direction and they don’t know whats going to happen. You’ve basically knocked them on their heels. It’s like running a trick play and onside kicking at the start of the second half. These things work. But when they don’t work, people will go ‘oh that was redundant’. Some things in hind sight, you know, people look and go ‘we should have done things differently’. I don’t think any one is going to argue that. Listen. The whole thing is subjective, whether we want to admit it or not.”
So there you have it. The decision was planned at the get-go by Marvel. As they’ve shown in the past, if they think it works for a story, they’ll kill any character off.
What do you think of Colter’s explanation? Be sure to sound off in the comment section below!