It is hard to imagine, a score of movies and $17bn of box office wonga into the Marvel era, that anyone could ever have accused the studio’s superheroes of being just a little obscure next to DC counterparts such as Superman and Batman. But prior to 2008, when Iron Man blasted on to the scene with a zippy performance from Robert Downey Jr, that’s just how many of the publisher’s more minor characters were seen – it certainly would have taken something of a Marvel aficionado to identify Groot and Rocket Raccoon prior to their hitting the big screen.
Yet the relative anonymity of the studio’s cavalcade of costumed titans has turned out to be one of its major plus points. Marvel has been able to refit and recondition heroes for the big screen, excising outdated stereotypes (the original, “yellow peril”-styled Mandarin) and sillier superpowers (thank goodness the Falcon no longer talks to birds) along the way. And without upsetting all but the most hardcore superfans.
This week we’ve seen further evidence, via a spanking new trailer, that Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, AKA Captain Marvel, is being wrenched from her comic book roots and given a new origin story; one where she debuts as a fully fledged Kree warrior with no apparent memory of her human origins. Fans will be well aware that Danvers only became “Captain Marvel” in 2012, following the death of the original, Kree alien owner of the moniker, also known as Mar-vell. Prior to this, she was known as Ms Marvel.
In the original comics, Danvers’ entire identity as half-human/half-Kree is linked to an encounter with Mar-vell – she even owes her powers to him. But in the MCU, it increasingly looks like Danvers will have been Captain Marvel from the very beginning, a move that certainly helps add to the sense of the character as a strong, independent female superhero. (Intriguingly, this major shift was recently prefaced in print.)
Such big screen modernisation, usually with a diversity upgrade, has been a fairly constant theme in the MCU. The original Nick Fury, Danvers’ main human aide in the upcoming film, was a cigar-smoking white guy. Few would argue that Samuel L Jackson has positively changed our perception of the S.H.I.E.L.D boss; at the very least it’s an improvement on David Hasselhoff in an eye-patch. Ditto Idris Elba’s Heimdall, who would likely have been a pretty forgettable character in the Thor movies had he not been provocatively reimagined as a black British Norse god.
Marvel hasn’t always got it right, of course. Doctor Strange’s Ancient One was always a rather stereotyped take on the wise, east Asian mystic in the comics. But that didn’t mean Marvel had to reimagine the sorcerer supreme as Tilda Swinton, even if the British actor ticks a few diversity boxes of her own. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie went from common-or-garden Aryan battle babe to mixed-race space warrior, but the studio missed a trick in Thor: Ragnarok by cutting scenes that would have made her the first openly queer Marvel hero.
The big test for Captain Marvel will be whether changing her origins story actually improves the movie. Iron Man 3’s key reveal, that Ben Kingsley’s Bin Laden-like terrorist is really a drunken, kidnapped actor, was so brilliant because it played on our own prejudices, but made sure we were all ultimately in on the joke. That the true bad guy was a white guy, just like Downey Jr’s Tony Stark, only added to the sense of cerebral, dazzling, postmodern narrative sleight of hand.
Whether Captain Marvel can achieve such heights of storytelling smoke and mirrors remains to be seen. Jude Law has been widely tipped to play a version of Mar-vell in the movie, but trailers thus far suggest the character will have a more complex relationship with Danvers on the big screen than he did in the comics – if he turns out to be her famed mentor at all.
That’s probably just as it should be. As studio supremo Kevin Feige has pointed out, Captain Marvel is supposed to be the most powerful superhero in the MCU, a being perhaps capable of defeating Thanos and bringing back all those poor dead superheroes snuffed out into smoke in Avengers: Infinity War. The very least Marvel can do is make Danvers her own woman this time around.
