If you follow writer Kelly Sue DeConnick on Twitter you can't miss the countless women and girls taking inspiration from her Captain Marvel run. The Carol Corps, as they've affectionately been called, will only grow larger as Brie Larson takes on the role of Carol Danvers for Marvel's upcoming film and she's taking her new responsibility very seriously.
?????????????????????????????????????????? https://t.co/aW89i2R4ty
– Kelly Sue DeConnick (@kellysue) September 2, 2016
Larson has been busy on Twitter herself since the big Captain Marvel announcement, interacting with fans and showing us she's doing comic book research.
InnerSpace spoke to the actor at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) about Captain Marvel's place in the world at large:
The thing that's been the most exciting now is, like, on social media I get sent a lot of pictures of young girls in the Captain Marvel costume and I”m excited to see more than that. She”s such a great symbol for young girls and I”m realizing what a deficit we have, that we don”t have more of those. I think it”s really cool to see a girl in, you know, a Batman costume or a Spider-Man costume but I”m really excited that there is like, a symbol of women. I think that that”s really important.
Speaking to The Star (also at TIFF) she also touched on the importance of the role.
“That was the reason for doing it,” she told them of taking on Marvel's first woman-led superhero film. “I”m a very private person and not interested in doing films because I want my face to be plastered on more things.”
While I grew up admiring female heroes like Buffy and Xena, it's still surprising to me it took this long for female superheroes to get traction in live-action adaptations. Batman is going on his fifth film incarnation (not counting the LEGO version) while Batgirl has never been tried solo on the big screen. Wolverine is the only X-Men character to get a stand-alone feature (I guess you can count Deadpool now too), even though Marvel's biggest female characters are from that series.
False starts with anti-heroes like Elektra aside, we'll be eleven years into the MCU and twenty films deep before Marvel's first female-led film hits theaters. While excuses can be made as to someone like Captain Marvel not being well-known enough to carry a film, the same can't be said for Wonder Woman, a worldwide symbol of feminism even to those who've never picked up a comic. The attention is long overdue and something Larson says is important.
“This is what I want to dedicate my life to and when the opportunity came to play this symbol of feminism, to play this empowering role for women and it”s on kind of arguably the biggest platform that we have right now, it”s undeniable that this is an important step and I want to be part of it,” she told The Star.
(via CBR)