Captain Marvel
won the box office again this weekend, which is hardly a surprise. It’s not only the most anticipated movie of the month, but also the last film we needed to see before Avengers: Endgame hits theaters in late April. But Captain Marvel won the box office in style, raking in $69 million in the US over the weekend for a total of $265 million. That’s $760 million when you add the rest of the world, which is a massive success for Disney. Fans everywhere are likely very interested to see the most powerful Avenger in action ahead what’s coming in Avengers: Endgame, but the movie doesn’t tell us everything about the new hero. Marvel last week dropped a hugely important detail about Captain Marvel that we nearly missed, and it could be very useful going into Endgame. If you haven’t seen Captain Marvel, you should know that spoilers follow below.
Talking to SlashFilm, Marvel head Kevin Feige explained one of the big Infinity War mysteries ahead of the Endgame premiere — why Nick Fury waited for so long to use that sci-fi pager. But that wasn’t Feige’s only revelation. He was also asked how Captain Marvel can be challenged in the future of the MCU when she can take out “a gigantic spacecraft single-handedly.”
We already know from the footage Disney previewed at its shareholders meeting that Captain Marvel is pretty confident in her powers in a fight against Thanos. And the Avengers could sure use the extra help, given the fact that the injured Titan still has a damaged-but-working Infinity Gauntlet by his side. But Feige noted that Captain Marvel isn’t going to be as powerful in the MCU as we expect her to be after seeing Captain Marvel. Here’s the relevant quote, emphasis ours:
Well, the point of this movie was to see her exactly as you said, unleashed, unchained. What happens when she taps into her full potential not being held back? So it was not the time to hold back. It was not the time to emphasize limitations or loss. We’d seen that over the course of the rest of the movie. We wanted to see her cut loose. In future stories, well, none of the Marvel characters are immortal. Even ones that seem immortal, some people might be very hard to kill, but nobody’s unkillable. So if we’re lucky enough to see future adventures with Captain Marvel, of course there will be limitations and there will be Achilles heels and there will be things that we learn and see that it’s not as easy as a slicing through whatever she wants to at any point. But this wasn’t the time to accentuate that.
So, not only does Carol have an Achilles heel of her own, but she can be killed. Feige’s comment is even more important ahead of Endgame, a movie that will surely see the death of at least one of the original Avengers, if not more. Feige practically confirmed that no superhero is off limits when it comes to being killed off in the MCU movies, no matter how hard they might be to kill. That means the battle scenes featuring Captain Marvel in Endgame won’t necessarily all be wins for the Avengers.
While Endgame will be heartbreaking to watch — even more so than Infinity War, because the coming death(s) won’t be undone — it’s still good to hear that Marvel doesn’t plan on having a superhero at its disposal who will easily win every battle. I don’t think anybody would want to see a Captain Marvel who can survive any attack, defeat all villains, and even go back in time whenever something needs fixing.
Yes, by the way, we also learned in recent weeks that Samuel L. Jackson’s claim about Captain Marvel being able to travel through time was bogus.
