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BAD BUNNY TO WRESTLE AGAIN, THIS TIME ON THE SILVER SCREEN FOR SONY'S SPIDER-VERSE

Massive music star and occasional WWE wrestler Bad Bunny, who put in tremendous performances at Wrestlemania 37 and the 2022 Royal Rumble, will once again wrestle, but this time, he'll be doing so as the lead star of El Muerto, a cinematic adaptation of a little-known Marvel Comics character for Sony's Spider-Verse films, which are produced outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Sony holds the rights to Spider-Man and all of his associated characters.

So, who is El Muerto?  The character is fairly low profile compared to Venom, The Green Goblin or even Morbius the Living Vampire.  Debuting back in 2006 in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #6 by Peter David and Roger Cruz, El Muerto (real name Marcus Estrada de la Garcia) is a masked professional wrestler who's mystical mask allows him to possess superpowers.  The story was that members of the family would pass the identity down through the generations.  After being tasked to unmask a super-hero under the threat of death, Muerto battles Spider-Man (naturally, in a wrestling ring) in an attempt to publicly unmask him.  He almost succeeds but is stopped by Spider-Man.  When his tormentor El Dorado arrives to take his life, Spider-Man helps and teams with El Muerto to stop Dorado.

Bad Bunny appeared yesterday at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, an annual gathering for movie theater owners where studios promote and market their forthcoming plans, as part of the official announcement.  Bunny himself found the El Muerto character while researching potential Spider-Man characters he could portray and pushed for it to be developed as a theatrical vehicle after Sony approached him wanting to work together. 

On stage during the announcement last night, Bunny referenced his first film Bullet Train (which will be released soon), commenting, "An amazing experience. David (Leitch) is awesome. I loved working with him on my first film and now with this opportunity to bring El Muerto to life. It’s amazing, it’s incredible. I love wrestling. I grew up watching wrestling and I’m a wrestler. I’m a former champion so this is why I love this character. I think it’s the perfect role to me and it will be epic.”

The film is in development and is planned to be released theatrically on 1/12/24.

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