After a ton of hype about Captain Marvel’s powers, and her potential to take down Thanos, why did the interstellar heroine have such a tiny role in Avengers: Endgame? The film’s writers have revealed the real reason.
Avengers: Infinity War teased the arrival of Carol Danvers in a buzzworthy post-credits scene, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said she would be the most powerful character the Marvel Cinematic Universe had ever seen. Audiences were convinced she would be the hero to finally bring Thanos to his knees. But then, she didn’t.
The film’s co-screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely addressed exactly why in a recent deep-dive interview with The New York Times.
It turns out, Captain Marvel actress Brie Larson filmed her sequences for Avengers: Endgame well before she shot her own solo movie, and apparently before it even had a completed script. Which means that, if you just go by the shooting schedules, Avengers: Endgame is technically Carol Danvers’ first appearance in the MCU. Imagine that.
It would be difficult to write an arc for Captain Marvel in Endgame when her own origin story hadn’t been pinned down yet. What kind of person is Carol? What drives her? And what happens if her motivations between movies somehow contradict each other? Without the foundation of a solo story in place, the Endgame team apparently decided to dodge the problem entirely by not including much of Captain Marvel in their movie.
Of course, none of those concerns got in the way of Black Panther being a pretty major player in Captain America: Civil War, but things were a little bit different with that film. While the events of Civil War directly set up the story of Black Panther, Endgame is kind of the other way around, picking up with a modern-day Carol while her story is already in progress.
McFeely explained,
“We shot [Brie Larson] before she shot her movie. She’s saying lines for a character 20 years after her origin story, which no one’s written yet. It’s just nuts.”
McFeely also stated that the goal of Avengers: Endgame wasn’t to bring this hotshot new hero into the mix and have her save the day. Sure, she came to Tony Stark’s rescue at the top of the movie, and she also swooped in to aid the Avengers at a critical moment in the final battle, using her signature move of body-slamming spaceships until they explode. But beyond that Dragon Ball-level spectacle, Captain Marvel just wasn’t a major player in the defeat of Thanos. Instead, the writers smartly made the choice to let the Avengers that we’ve come to know for years take the spotlight, and in McFeely’s eyes, that’s the way it was meant to be. He said,
“Certainly, Captain Marvel is in [Endgame] a little less than you would have thought. But that’s not the story we’re trying to tell, it’s the original Avengers dealing with loss and coming to a conclusion, and she’s the new, fresh blood.”
Markus added that Captain Marvel also had responsibilities elsewhere in the universe, so of course she wouldn’t be tied up with the Avengers’ big “Time Heist” mission. Help out where she can? Definitely. Abandon her other commitments? No way. As McFeely noted,
“She’s been in space nearly half her life. She has obligations.”
The weird thing is, with the Captain Marvel movie mostly focusing on Carol becoming a hero on Earth, audiences really have no idea what Carol’s interstellar obligations look like. Even weirder is that the writers of Endgame didn’t know much either.
McFeely and Markus’ comments are fairly revealing when it comes to the reality of moviemaking at Marvel. The studio maps out its film slate years in advance, and uses each movie as an opportunity to tease the next. So far, it’s worked exceedingly well.
But there’s also a slight drawback to this style of production, in that some films can end up feeling a little hamstrung by having to serve the needs of a broader narrative.
MCU filmmakers often have to work their movies into the larger series in ways that sometimes come off as a little tacked-on, or at least hard to weave into a story. This appears to be sort of what happened with Captain Marvel, her solo film, and Endgame.
Now that Captain Marvel has come and gone, fans can almost certainly look forward to seeing a lot more of her in future films. Kevin Feige even teased a second solo movie. Keep watching the video to hear more about the real reason Captain Marvel Had Such A Tiny Role In Endgame!
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