Captain Marvel
Carol Susan Jane Danvers
Movie · Phase 3
Captain Marvel
2019 · 123 min
A Kree special-forces soldier called Vers has recurring dreams of a life she cannot remember and crashes through the roof of a Los Angeles Blockbuster in 1995. Pairing up with a two-eyed Nick Fury…
The Infinity SagaDisney+79%Released
The story
A Kree special-forces soldier called Vers has recurring dreams of a life she cannot remember and crashes through the roof of a Los Angeles Blockbuster in 1995. Pairing up with a two-eyed Nick Fury who is still filing paperwork, she chases a Skrull infiltrator and finds a photograph of herself in an Air Force flight suit.
The twist inverts the whole premise: the Kree are the aggressors, the Skrulls are refugees, and the mentor who taught her to suppress her power was managing an asset. Carol's arc is not learning to fight — it is being told she is not allowed to and doing it anyway.
Key facts
- Release date
- 8 Mar 2019
- Status
- Released
- Phase
- Phase 3
- Saga
- The Infinity Saga
- Runtime
- 123 min
- Certificate
- PG-13
- Director
- Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
- Writers
- Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet
- Streaming
- Disney+
- Timeline placement
- 1995 — the earliest modern-era MCU film, with a 2023 post-credits coda
Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Brie Larson | Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel |
| Samuel L. Jackson | Nick Fury |
| Ben Mendelsohn | Talos |
| Jude Law | Yon-Rogg |
| Lashana Lynch | Maria Rambeau |
| Annette Bening | Mar-Vell / Supreme Intelligence |
Characters
Easter eggs
- The Marvel Studios logo is replaced with a montage of Stan Lee's cameos and the card 'Thank you, Stan', his first film released after his death.
- Stan Lee's own cameo has him on a train reading lines from Mallrats, the Kevin Smith film he cameoed in during 1995.
- Fury loses his left eye to Goose the Flerken, finally answering a question the MCU had dodged for eleven years.
- The Avengers Initiative is named for Carol's Air Force callsign, which Fury reads off her photograph.
- Project Pegasus, the Tesseract programme referenced in Thor and The Avengers, is where Mar-Vell hid her lightspeed engine.
- Blockbuster Video, Radio Shack, a True Lies standee and a dial-up CD-ROM date the film precisely to 1995.
- Ronan the Accuser and Korath appear as active Kree officers, nineteen years before Guardians of the Galaxy.
- The post-credits scene picks up the Infinity War pager in the Avengers compound, with Carol asking where Fury is.
Trivia
- Anna Boden became the first woman to direct an MCU film, co-directing with her longtime partner Ryan Fleck.
- Brie Larson trained for nine months, learned judo and boxing, and could hip-thrust 400 pounds and push a 5,000-pound Jeep uphill.
- Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg were digitally de-aged for the entire film, the most extensive de-aging Marvel had attempted.
- Goose was played by four different cats plus a CG double; Larson is allergic to cats and much of her handling is a puppet or a double.
- It was the first female-led MCU film and the first Marvel Studios release to pass $1 billion without an Avengers or Iron Man in the title.
- The Skrull transformations combined prosthetic appliances with digital augmentation, and Ben Mendelsohn spent hours a day in the chair.
- Pinar Toprak became the first woman to score a Marvel Studios film.
Box office
- Budget
- $152 million
- Worldwide
- $1.128 billion
- Domestic
- $426.8 million
Reviews
Critics
79%
Packed with action, humour and visual thrills, Captain Marvel introduces the MCU's latest hero with an origin story that makes effective use of the franchise's cosmic-scale ambitions.
The MarvelGossips verdict
A competent origin film doing three jobs at once — introduce Carol, retrofit Fury's history and set up Endgame — and it never fully commits to any of them. The Skrull reversal is a genuinely good twist and the 1995 texture is a pleasure. Larson is best in the quiet Louisiana stretch, and the film hurries past it to get to a space fight.
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Frequently asked
When is Captain Marvel set?
1995, making it the earliest film in the MCU's modern era. Only Captain America: The First Avenger and various prologues sit earlier on the timeline. The post-credits scene jumps forward to 2023.
How does Nick Fury lose his eye?
Goose, who is a Flerken rather than a cat, scratches his face during the Project Pegasus escape. Fury spends the rest of the MCU implying it was something more heroic.
Are the Skrulls the villains?
No. The film reveals them as refugees displaced by Kree expansion, with Talos leading survivors looking for a home. Secret Invasion later revisits that promise and its consequences twenty eight years on.
Why does Carol leave Earth?
She commits to relocating the Skrull refugees and dismantling the Kree Empire's grip, which is the reason she is unreachable through the entire Infinity Saga until Fury's pager reaches her.