It’s been no small secret that Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige has a soft spot for the stranger side of the Marvel Universe. Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, and The Inhumans have long been personal passion projects of his, and now that Guardians of the Galaxy has obliterated box office records and Doctor Strange is one his way to Phase III, only one remains: The Inhumans. Vin Diesel dropped a not-so-cryptic hint on his Facebook page the other day teasing the film, and while many chalked it up to Vin being Vin, others saw it as Diesel possibly revealing one of Marvel’s as-yet-unannounced movie projects. Today, Collider lent further fuel to the fire by reporting that Marvel is indeed moving forward with The Inhumans and is very pleased with a screenplay by Joe Robert Cole.

For those of you who don’t know The Inhumans, they first appeared in 1965, and they’re an ancient race of primitive homo sapiens that were experimented on by the Kree, which gave them incredible powers. When the Kree abandoned their experiments, the newly-powered humans flourished, creating a society with advanced technology. They began experimenting with a mysterious substance, the mutagenic Terrigen Mists, which gave some of them superhuman powers, but resulted in horrible defects and mutations in others. Now, they were more than humans. They were Inhumans. Lead by their silent king Black Bolt and his royal family – Medusa, Karnak, Gorgon, Triton, Crystal, Maximus the Mad, and their mustachioed pooch Lockjaw – the Inhumans remained sequestered away in their hidden city of Attilan, emerging every so often to help the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four defeat all-conquering evils like Ultron, Doctor Doom, Thanos, and others.

If you haven’t heard of Cole, don’t worry. It seems like he’s one of Marvel’s arsenal of secret weapons. The House of Ideas is evidently taking a similar tack to what they did with Guardians; the original draft of which was written by Nicole Perlman, a part of Marvel’s in-house writing program, and then turned over to James Gunn to help bring his writer-directorial vision to life. Like Perlman, Cole is also a part of the studio’s in-house writing program and the strength of The Inhumans script he turned in is evidently good enough for Marvel to accelerate their development efforts on the film once more. In spite of Vin Diesel’s Facebook tomfoolery, there are neither actors nor directors attached to the film at the moment, so the best that we can do is wantonly speculate in the meantime. I’m calling it right now: Vin Diesel in a long, flowing red wig is going to be playing Medusa. You know you’d pay money to see that.

Is your body ready for The Inhumans on the big screen? Who should play who? Let us know in the comments below.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of The Dan Cave in which I break this all down and talk about how it can be a real feather in Marvel’s cap.

[HT: Collider]