Captain Marvel will soar into theaters in less than a week. She’s doing so as the MCU’s Phase 3 prepares to wrap up in April with Avengers: Endgame, so her arrival could be considered well overdue. Granted, Carol Danvers has presumably occupied herself (for decades) with fighting in the Kree-Skrull War, and she’s only surfacing now due to the distress call sent by Nick Fury in an Infinity War post-credits scene. However, we would have met her in 2015 if Avengers: Age Of Ultron director Joss Whedon had gotten his way.
Why didn’t this happen? In a 2015 interview with Birth. Movies. Death. that’s newly resurfaced and making the rounds, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige explained that a scene with Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch was originally meant for Brie Larson’s superhero in an early Age Of Ultron draft:
“The way we reveal Scarlet Witch [in costume] at the end of the movie? Those were Captain Marvel plate shots. Joss said, ‘We’ll cast her later!’ And I said, ‘Yeah Joss, we’ll cast her later.’ [Whispers to an invisible associate who isn’t Joss] ‘We’re not putting her in there!'”
Feige explained that he felt that Captain Marvel was worthy of her own back story like the other title characters of the MCU. He even points towards “Black Widow” as an example of this (although she hasn’t received her own film yet), given that Natasha Romanoff evolved in Iron Man 2 before wearing her costume onscreen. Feige felt that Danvers should be no exception:
“[Captain Marvel] was in a draft. But to me, it would have done that character a disservice, to meet her fully formed, in a costume and part of the Avengers already when 99% of the audience would go, ‘Who is that?’ It’s just not the way we’ve done it before.”
Not only that, but Age Of Ultron was already a sensory-overload movie that was stuffed full of characters and would have been a poor vehicle to briefly introduce the most powerful superhero ever seen in the MCU. Danvers will finally get her due in Marvel’s first female-fronted superhero movie this weekend, right on time to (hopefully) defeat Thanos.
Captain Marvel hits theaters on March 8.