Captain Marvel
is getting ready to crush the box office for the second week in a row as more Marvel fans make their way to theaters to watch the final Marvel movie before Avengers: Endgame premieres. Endgame will be the culmination of a decade of Marvel superhero tales, and Captain Marvel delivers new pieces of information we need to be aware of before we see the Avengers undo the damage Thanos cause with the snap. However, one of the revelations from Captain Marvel throws a huge wrench in the Infinity War credits scenes, and it could have massive implications for the future of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. Before you proceed any further, you should know that several Captain Marvel spoilers follow below.
Captain Marvel isn’t just an origin story meant to introduce the most powerful superhero we’ve seen so far, and explain how she got those powers. The film also explains what Nick Fury was up to back in the ’90s, before Captain Marvel appeared and he realized aliens were real. That’s what prompts Fury to pen his Avengers initiative memo that will ultimately lead to the formation of the Avengers.
We also get to see how Fury lost his eye and why he has that high-tech pager. We learn the Tesseract (the Space Stone) was lost for six years, and we’re introduced to a young Agent Coulson. We’re also exposed to the Kree vs. Skrull epic war and we meet younger versions of a couple of villains from the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie. I am talking about two Krees, Korath (Djimon Hounsou) and Ronan (Lee Pace), of course. Finally, we’re treated to a Stan Lee paradox, and a brilliant credits scene that shows us how Captain Marvel meets some of the surviving Avengers in the days following the snap.
In other words, there’s a lot of information to unpack and absorb, including plenty of tiny details that may be relevant to the evolution of the MCU. One such detail concerns the Infinity War credits scene where Fury uses the pager to send a distress signal to Captain Marvel. Let’s rewatch the clip and focus on Maria Hill:
What’s important to note here is what she calls Fury in the scene. She uses his first name, “Nick,” on three separate occasions. That’s not a big deal unless you’ve just watched Captain Marvel. That’s where we learn that everyone calls Fury “Fury” — even his family. The entire scene where he shares this detail with Captain Marvel is hilarious, and it pays off minutes later.
Skrull chief Talos, disguised as Fury’s superior, makes the mistake of calling him “Nicholas” instead of Fury. That makes Fury realize that his boss might be a Skrull, and so he makes a run for it.
To get back to Infinity War, the fact that Hill calls him Nick might not mean anything. The adrenaline may be to blame. After all, they nearly crashed into a car moments earlier, and then Hill saw herself turning to dust. Either that or she and Fury share a different kind of relationship, one that allows her to use his first name from time to time. Is there any romance? Well, Fury still uses her last name when responding, so there’s that.
But what if this particular dialogue was planted in the Infinity War scenes to pave the way for a Skrull “Secret Invasion” story in the MCU. The Skrulls might be the good guys in Captain Marvel, doesn’t mean they’re all good. Even Marvel boss Kevin Feige confirmed a few days ago in an interview that the Skrulls, like humans and Kree, have good and bad elements among them. So a Secret Invasion story may be possible. Here’s what he said, word for word:
I think like the Kree and like humanity, there are good Skrulls and there are bad Skrulls. But one of the things we wanted to do in this movie is, you know, don’t judge a book by its cover and tap into people’s preconceived notions of the pointy-eared green aliens being evil and subverting that. But I do think to continue fleshing them out and making them these three dimensional actual beings, the Skrulls, you would encounter good ones and bad ones.
The gist of the Secret Invasion plot is that Skrulls have been meticulously infiltrating Earth over a period of time, going as far as to replace some of the Avengers in preparation for an actual invasion.
That said, Fury is too busy with everything else happening around him to react to Hill’s choice of names, as he does with Talos in Captain Marvel. Both Hill and Fury die after the snap, but both characters will appear in Spider-Man: Far From Home later this year, so it’ll certainly be interesting to see their interactions knowing what we know from Captain Marvel.
