Oh, what, now the MCU is too good for Shaq?

This is per Variety, which was recently talking to the sports legend/budget pizza impresario about his dunk-focused Dunkman sports league, when the conversation somehow got on superhero films. The issue, Shaq says, is that executives keep telling him he’s simply too famous for being Shaq for anyone to believe him in literally any other role. “If I’m trying to play a doctor or anything, my character won’t be believable,” he told reporters. “I wanted to be in the Avengers and they were like, ‘Shaq, we fuckin’ love you and we’d love to put you in, but if your face pops up on screen people are going to go, ‘Hey, that’s Shaq!’ He said it truthfully, and I was like, alright… I guess my face is too bigtime.” (It is very funny, by the way, to imagine famously mild MCU head Kevin Feige asserting, “Shaq, we fuckin’ love you.”) 

And, look: We are sympathetic to the argument made by The Enemy Side here, i.e., that if you stick Shaq in a scene in a superhero movie, then your audience’s attention will immediately be sucked away from your plot or your space portal or whatever the tennis ball is standing in for today, and instead become fixated on bigger, more important questions. (For example: “Is that fucking Shaq talking to Shang-Chi right now?”) On the other hand: C’mon! Put Shaq in a movie! Have a little goddamn fun with your lives, people; you’ve got a million of these movies, but we’ve all only got one Shaq.