Jason Statham is game for just about anything and everything in his movies. Clamping jumper cables to his nipples and tongue? Sounds like a hoot! Pretending to stab a giant prehistoric shark in the eye? Just tell him where to aim. Delivering the line, “I’m a Beekeeper. I protect the hive. Sometimes I use fire to smoke out hornets” with utter conviction? Hurry up and give him an Oscar already.

Rarely one to turn his nose up at a chance to earn a paycheck, Statham has been noticeably reticent to sign up for a Marvel or DC comic book movie. Even in the middle of the superhero gold rush of the last 20 years, The Stath stuck to playing rugged mavericks with a carefully maintained layer of scruff on their mugs in macho actioners by the likes of Guy Ritchie and Sylvester Stallone. His big-budget franchise outings were similarly devoid of fantasy elements — at least the kind of outright magic and imaginative sci-fi you’d find in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

If you were to ask Statham, like Variety did in December 2023, what the holdup is, he would tell you it’s nothing personal against the genre. “I don’t have a big appetite for a costume, with cape and tights,” he admitted. “I like old-school ’80s movies. I was inspired by people like Stallone and Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. And even before those guys, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and [Clint] Eastwood. I just couldn’t see any of those guys putting on a cape and a mask and going around on wires.”

Eastwood, for the record, was once eyed to play an older Bruce Wayne in an abandoned “Batman Beyond” movie, while Stallone and Schwarzenegger have both done the superhero rodeo by now (with Stallone even joining the MCU itself). All the same, you can grasp what Statham is getting at.

Save for the occasional side trip into sci-fi or comedy, Statham likes his action movies to be gruff, muscular, and somewhat based in reality … or, at the very least, the version of reality where you can chuck a pot of nectar by-product at your opponent, toss your lighter at them, and casually stroll away as the sticky-sweet substance lights up your enemy like it’s the Fourth of July. (Sorry to disappoint, kiddos, but we tested it ourselves: Contrary to what “The Beekeeper” would have you believe, honey is not actually “flammable as f***.”)

Per The Stath:

“Cinema is like music. Some people like Country and Western, others like heavy metal. I’m drawn to a bit more of a grounded kind of action. [Laughs] Well, I like being grounded to be an element we inject into the crazy world that we’re in.”

With the superhero bubble having, possibly for real this time, finally burst, perhaps journalists will no longer be pressured into asking everyone they interview why they haven’t converted to the church of Marvel and DC yet. While there are plenty of comic book characters that I could envision Statham playing (those nearly decade-old rumors about him being in the running for Bullseye on the “Daredevil” series were, if nothing else, on the right track), there’s no reason that he has to do the Marvel do-si-do. Let him stick to making “Meg 3: The Search for Shark” instead for as long as he’s willing and able.