Captain Marvel, which debuted to great box office success earlier this year and is now streaming on Disney+, stars Brie Larson as the super-powered human-Kree warrior, Carol Danvers. As fantastic as it was to finally see a Marvel Studios film with a female lead, though, the character almost popped up a few years earlier in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. And while this bit of trivia has been long known among fans and journalists, it wasn’t until the recent release of the Infinity Saga box set that anyone outside of Marvel got to see what Danvers’s first appearance was like.
As noted by Comic Book, a Reddit user who received the Infinity Saga box set early snapped a photo of the original special effects plate that Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon shot with a Danvers stand-in. (Click here to check it out.) The shot was ultimately re-used for the final cut of the film, though the stand-in actress was digitally replaced with Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, otherwise known as the Scarlet Witch in the comics. You can see the result of this bait-and-switch at the very end of the video below.
While doing press for Age of Ultron ahead of its 2015 release, Feige was asked repeatedly about Whedon’s original intention to introduce Danvers in the film. Speaking with MTV News at the time, the Marvel Studios president and executive producer admitted the character was “in an early draft of the script.” Meanwhile, when Birth.Movies.Death pushed him on the topic, Feige explained the situation with Whedon’s special effects plates and using Maximoff instead:
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!’
Finally Joss was like ‘Let’s use those plates to let Scarlet Witch fly into frame, give her a big entrance?’ And that makes sense — she’s come to their side, and she deserves the cool intro, which will feed into another movie we start shooting in a few weeks.
Obviously, everything worked out in the end. Captain Marvel made over a billion dollars at the global box office and superheroes won’t be going away anytime soon, complaints notwithstanding.
(Via Comic Book)
