Everything to Know About the 'Captain Marvel' Movie
Marvel is finally making a female-led superhero movie - Captain Marvel, about Air Force pilot/space superhero Carol Danvers - and if their statements are to be believed, it's coming out in less than a year. It's only taken a decade for this to happen! (I'm counting from the first Iron Man, so as not to get too depressed.) Here's a roundup of everything we know so far.
1. It's coming out in 2019. On March 8, to be specific. The movie was originally scheduled for July 2018, then got bumped to November 2018, and now - prayer hands - March 8 is the final, official release date.
2. Brie Larson is playing Carol Danvers. Marvel announced the news back in July 2016, and since then, Brie has been training crazy hard and learning about the Air Force (Carol Danvers, aside from being a superhero, is also a kick-ass pilot). In January 2018, Brie visited an Air Force base in Nevada and met with Brigadier General Jeannie Leavitt, who Brie says helped her "get closer to the core [of] Carol Danvers."
3. Samuel L. Jackson will reprise his role as Nick Fury. Nick Fury first appeared in Iron Man in 2008 and has since popped up in various other MCU films. According to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, this iteration of Nick Fury doesn't yet know that superheroes are a thing. "We wanted to explore a period before Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury had any idea about any of the other heroes and crazy stuff going on in the world," Kevin told Entertainment Weekly in March. "You know, we first met Nick when he told Tony, 'You’re part of a big universe. You just don’t know yet.' Well, we want to go back to a time when he didn’t know it yet, and really showcase and announce that Carol Danvers was that first hero that Nick came across."
Note the absence of his eye patch...
4. Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, and more have also been confirmed to star in the movie. Jude will play Walter Lawson aka Mar-Vell, Carol's mentor who shows her how to use her powers. Djimon and Lee will play Korath and Ronan the Accuser, respectively, both Kree characters who've appeared in other Marvel movies.
In May 2018, Marvel announced the casting of Annette Bening in an undisclosed role. According to Variety, she will most likely play Carol's mom.
5. Captain Marvel could show up in Avengers: Infinity War. Joe Russo, co-director of the third Avengers movie, has emphatically stated that Carol is not in Infinity War, but naturally the internet would like to believe otherwise. Brie accidentally added fuel to the fire when she shared some fan art on Instagram that showed Carol soaring through the sky above the Avengers logo, but she added that the image was "not a confirmation of anything." Additionally, she was seen on the set of Infinity War and at some point had a mailbox at the studios during shooting, but this could just mean she filmed something and it was cut. UPDATE: She did not show up in Infinity War, but the post-credits scene was absolutely related to her. See number 10 for details.
6. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are directing, with a screenplay by... a lot of people. Marvel initially hired Meg LeFauve and Nicole Perlman to write the script; they eventually left for other projects after writing a treatment. Then Geneva Robertson-Dworet came on board, and later, Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive. All of these people, along with the two directors, have writing credits on the film. FYI: Boden is MCU's first female director.
7. Filming started in January 2018. Photos from one shoot showed Brie dressed in a Captain Marvel costume that's decidedly not blue and red, leading many fans to wonder just what exactly is going on here. A nod to Mar-Vell? A flashback? No one knows! Meanwhile, Brie continues to post fan art of Carol in the blue and red:
8. The movie will be set in the mid-1990s. Kevin Feige has said that the movie will include homages to classic '90s action films like Terminator 2, but has also noted that a lot of it will take place in outer space (as it should - Captain Marvel, is after all, the boss of space).
9. The plot is mostly a mystery, but there's a chance it'll involve the Kree-Skrull War plot from the comics. That arc happened in Avengers in the early '70s, and Kevin Feige has more ore less confirmed that elements from it inspired the movie. "We thought that would be an amazing, huge portion of mythology to belong to Captain Marvel," he said at San Diego Comic-Con last July.
As Entertainment Weekly revealed in its September 2018 cover story, the film will move away from the traditional Marvel origin-story template and begin with Carol already having her powers. Per EW, not long after joining Starforce, an elite Kree military team led by Mar-Vell (Jude Law), Carol “finds herself back on Earth with new questions about her past.” In her way: the Skrulls, and Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), who leads an invasion of Earth.
SPOILERS FOR INFINITY WAR FOLLOW.
10. Captain Marvel is going to help deal with the fallout of Infinity War. At the end of Infinity War, Thanos succeeded in filling up his magic gauntlet with magic stones and wiped out half the universe's population with a snap of his fingers. The alleged dead included Spider-Man, Black Panther, Bucky Barnes, Star-Lord, etc. In the post-credits sequence, Nick Fury and Maria Hill also turned to ash, but Nick sent out a page just before he floated away on a breeze. The last shot showed the pager, which instead of displaying a phone number displayed Captain Marvel's Hala star logo. This raises a lot of questions about why no one's ever called her in before now, but also implies that her movie will answer some of those questions. (And she'll probably be in the fourth Avengers movie.)
11. The movie will be scored by Pinar Toprak. This is a big deal because Pinar is the first woman ever to score a major comic-book movie. "It's an incredible honor to be a part of the Marvel Universe," she wrote on Instagram in June. "So many thoughts racing through my head. And the main one is gratitude."
12. In September 2018, Brie teamed up with Entertainment Weekly to reveal the first official look at Captain Marvel (and company). Blue, red, and gold FTW.
Says Brie of Captain Marvel, "She can't help but be herself. She can be aggressive, and she can have a temper, and she can be a little invasive and in your face." She adds, "She's also quick to jump to things, which makes her amazing in battle because she's the first one there and doesn't always wait for orders." Naturally, this quality might prove to backfire...
According to co-director Boden, Captain Marvel "is not a superhero who's perfect or otherworldly or has some godlike connection." Rather, "[A]t her core, she has so much heart and so much humanity-and all of its messiness."
EW also has new photos of everyone in full uniform. (Yes, movie magic has made it possible for Nick Fury to age backwards.)
13. Marvel released the first official Captain Marvel trailer on Sept. 18, and it's a trip.
Give yourself a few seconds to freak out over Captain Marvel literally falling out of the sky and into Blockbuster Video. Then give yourself a few more seconds to freak out over how amazing everything looks, from Captain Marvel's costume to those flashbacks of her killing it as a U.S. Air Force Fighter pilot.
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