THE POWER OF THREE

A triple threat of the MCU’s most powerful women unite in The Marvels. Total Film meets the filmmakers to find out how Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan will contend with a formidable new foe, unexpected power-swaps and flerkens galore.

The sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel is poised to photon-blast onto screens imminently. Except it’s not called Captain Marvel 2. Or Captain Marvel: Saviour of the Universe [insert punchy subtitle of your choosing], come to that, unlike fellow Marvel Cinematic Universe heroes Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man and Captain America whose multiple sequels have titles that all begin with their very singular names.

Instead of giving Captain Marvel solo billing in the follow-up to the 1995-set sojourn into Carol Danvers’ history, three characters take centre-stage under the banner The Marvels – Danvers herself, aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson); Danvers superfan Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), and Danvers’ estranged honorary niece and goddaughter, Monica Rambeau, aka Photon (Teyonah Parris). Is this a case of attempting to strengthen the film’s chances out of concern that audiences won’t go and see, or like, a second solo Captain Marvel movie? Indeed, the first was negatively review-bombed by misogynistic haters three weeks before it was even released and star Larson became the target of online trolling.

The answer is a resounding no. Captain Marvel went on to gross more than $1.1bn worldwide – the first woman-led superhero movie to top the billion-dollar mark. But the film’s composer, Laura Karpman, whose work on Disney+ MCU series Ms. Marvel has also just been nominated for a gong, perhaps says it best when describing her work on the score.

‘What I can say is that, for me, the real forward motion of the score is about their team,’ says Karpman, chatting via Zoom to Total Film from her home. ‘And about this idea of [the film’s tagline], “Higher. Further. Faster. Together.” This idea about being able to do something as a collaborative – women really working together to help each other – I think that’s a hugely important thing socially.’

THE FUTURE IS NOW

The Marvels is set in MCU present, 30 years after the events of Captain Marvel. Danvers has cropped up in various adventures since 1995 and the revelations surrounding her origin story – including playing a key role in the Battle of Earth, the culmination of the franchise’s Infinity Saga in which the Avengers collectively whooped the Mad Titan’s big purple butt. She also materialised in that Ms. Marvel post-credits scene, swapping places with Kamala Khan and directly setting up the events of The Marvels. The movie was never going to be a straight sequel – and it makes perfect sense to bring together these connected characters we’ve seen elsewhere. Monica Rambeau was explored as an adult, of course, in WandaVision – a grown-up version of the child we met in Captain Marvel – seen gaining her powers after stepping through Wanda Maximoff’s magical Hex.

‘The notion that Monica Rambeau and Carol Danvers’ paths would cross has been something that’s been in the works for quite some time,’ executive producer Mary Livanos tells TF. ‘It was discussed, [when making] Captain Marvel, if the adult friend relationship might be between Monica and Carol, but we ultimately decided on [Monica’s mother] Maria so that in the future we could have Monica Rambeau grow up, be her own hero, and feature a reunion between Carol and Monica that could evidence how sometimes difficult estranged family-esque relationships could be.’ It was a no-brainer to bring Ms. Marvel into the mix. ‘Little Ms. Marvel has this ideal view of Carol Danvers, and to see that stripped back and Ms. Marvel get to know her hero for who she actually is was an interesting deconstruction that really warmed our hearts,’ says Livanos.

That’s something we saw executed in Disney+ series Hawkeye, too, in the Kate Bishop/Clint Barton relationship. Livanos admits to ‘a bit’ of overlap there: ‘We all are prone to fall into similar trappings when it comes to hero worship. You think that heroes can fix any problem,’ she says. ‘But in this movie, we actually examine how sometimes decisions you make in an attempt to make things better can sometimes make things worse, and have a cascading effect that spirals out of your control. So, while we’re seeing Carol Danvers grapple with what has become of her actions, we see that also processed through the eyes of Ms. Marvel. We actually experience forgiveness through the eyes of another person. That can be freeing for the person who might not be able to forgive themselves.’

In the face of so-called ‘superhero fatigue’ – ‘I think superhero fatigue absolutely exists,’ The Marvels director Nia DaCosta tells TF – this Captain Marvel team-up is also an attempt to give fans something different.

IT’S FUNNY AND ENTERTAINING, AND THE ACTION IS GREAT

Nia DaCosta

‘The Avengers movies are these epic conclusions to chapters of storytelling, whereas this is a team-up within the narrative that we didn’t necessarily expect for Marvel,’ explains Livanos. ‘Usually, you wait for characters to show up all together in Avengers movies. We were excited to design a team-up featuring characters that women from all walks of life could relate to.’

DaCosta – best known for her 2021 sequel to 1992 horror Candyman – says The Marvels is really fun. ‘It’s funny and entertaining, and the action is great,’ enthuses the acclaimed director, whose dog, on cue, walks into view on camera while we Zoom-chat. ‘She’s so bored!’ says DaCosta. The Marvels audiences won’t be, if you believe DaCosta.

‘The biggest difference from the other MCU movies to date is that it’s really wacky, and silly,’ says the director. ‘The worlds we go to in this movie are worlds unlike others you’ve seen in the MCU. Bright worlds that you haven’t seen before.’

The trailer teases a location populated by people dancing, drenched in the bright colours she notes, and featuring Parasite actor Park Seo-joon’s enigmatic character.

‘It was really important to me that every planet felt like a completely different space in terms of colour, lighting, and just energy because if you have the entire universe at your disposal, the planets can’t feel the same,’ she says. ‘That’s one that is very much high-key, colourful, bright.’

What can she say about Park Seo-joon’s character? Fans have speculated he could be Amadeus Cho, a superhero from the comics whose alter ego is Brawn, a successor to Bruce Banner’s Hulk.

‘His character is really awesome, and [it’s] really fun when you realise his relationship to our hero,’ says DaCosta. Livanos reveals a little more. ‘He’s a definite ally to Carol Danvers. Someone from her past that is meaningful as a friend to her, and so he and his people are important to Carol,’ says the producer, who also worked on WandaVision.

Important how? You might wonder. This is a Marvel movie, and inevitably there’s a major threat to thwart. That comes in the shape of Dar-Benn, a Kree antagonist played by Zawe Ashton (who also happens to be the partner of the MCU’s Loki, Tom Hiddleston).

The trailer shows Dar-Benn out for revenge on Captain Marvel, whom she labels ‘The Annihilator’. Since Avengers: Endgame, Danvers has busied herself hunting down the galaxy’s villains. Dar-Benn accuses Danvers of taking everything from her, and swears payback. She has, we’re told, entangled the trio’s light-based powers meaning they switch places whenever they use them, and she is targeting, says Danvers, ‘every planet we call home’.

‘Dar-Benn is a total deep-cut from the comics,’ says Livanos. In the comics, Dar-Benn is a Kree general and revolutionary who seizes joint-control of the Empire after killing the previous Kree ruler. ‘But really, Dar-Benn represents a new era of the Kree Empire after a cataclysmic encounter with Captain Marvel in the past. So, from the ashes of the Kree Empire, Dar-Benn rose. Her agenda for helping her people is noble from her perspective, but also the issue of this movie.’

So how much does Dar-Benn have in common with the character’s comic-book origins? ‘I would just smoothly say not very, minus their viewpoint on the Kree and the Kree’s positioning in the universe,’ says DaCosta. ‘We were inspired by the [comicbook] period of two emperors and there was some more of that story in the first versions of the script. But as we took over and moved into our own space and what this story was, more of that shed away. But in terms of energetically being a Kree imperialist, she’s similar.’

A GOOD HEART

DaCosta is also full of enthusiasm from what Ashton brings to her portrayal of the latest Marvel villain. ‘Zawe brings a lot of fun to being evil,’ says DaCosta. ‘Then, on the other end, she also brings a lot of pathos. I wanted a villain that was really fun and definitely on the wrong side of history, but you could see why they thought they were on the right side. That’s something that Zawe also brought to the table – really wanting the villain to be understandable even if you didn’t like her.’

DAR-BENN’S AGENDA FOR HELPING HER PEOPLE IS NOBLE FROM HER PERSPECTIVE

Mary Livanos

HAMMER OF THE GODS

In the trailer, Dar-Benn is seen brandishing the Kree war hammer, like the one we’ve seen Kree warlord Ronan the Accuser use previously in Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a powerful tool that she uses to help achieve her goal, says Livanos. ‘Here’s what I will say about that, which in the comics is called the Universal Weapon,’ adds DaCosta. ‘I would just say, for anyone watching this film, or having expectations, just know that I am deeply devoted to the comics. And so, there’s always clues there.’ DaCosta is a self-confessed nerd who wrote fan-fiction as a child, and who talks of swapping Black Bolt comics with Iman Vellani and bristling at MCU changes to the comic books’ incursion lore (she says the MCU’s approach to explaining incursions ‘was always very stressful to me’.)

The trailer also showcases another artefact in Dar-Benn’s possession: the second bangle that forms a pair with the one Kamala Khan wears. Kamala’s bangle unlocked her latent mutant powers, but one of the questions hanging over the conclusion of Ms. Marvel was around the location of the second bangle. Now we have our answer.‘You’ll get enough of the story of how and why Dar-Benn has acquired the bangle,’ says DaCosta.

Livanos says that’s revealed early on. ‘In Ms. Marvel, we learned that the bangle, paired with some other form of power, can force a temporary hole in space and time to lead to somewhere else,’ she explains. ‘With the power of both bangles, more is definitely possible. And we see the culmination of that over the course of this movie. It definitely leads to plentiful opportunities for the future of the MCU, whatever the Avengers and Secret Wars teams may want to do with them.’

Ah, the future of the MCU. Back in 2019, Captain Marvel was sowing its own seeds, with Ms. Marvel, WandaVision, Secret Invasion, and more growing out of those kernels. It stands to reason that The Marvels is similarly planting acorns for upcoming MCU oak trees, including the Avengers team-up movies that are set to conclude the Multiverse Saga – Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, and Avengers: Secret Wars. So how does The Marvels fit into the bigger picture?

‘That’s a question for [Marvel boss] Kevin Feige,’ says DaCosta. ‘I have lots of thoughts. But I actually have no idea what they’re going to do in the Avengers movies. I do know that those guys who are doing that watch the films, see what we’re doing. I have things I really want [to happen]. But I’m not sure.’

Livanos says that The Marvels primarily explores the ramifications of Carol Danvers’ actions in the main universe, but adds that ‘the plot deals with some fluctuations in time and space, and there’s definite danger afoot that could affect the multiverse’.

She continues, ‘Where it all leads is a bit of a spoiler, and exactly how it’ll all pan out in an Avengers movie is currently being figured out right now. But we’re definitely ending our characters in places that allow for plentiful opportunity.’

Livanos also confirms that seeds have been planted throughout the film. ‘When you’re working on your one narrative at a time you try to introduce threads that you hope could go off and do bigger things for the larger MCU,’ she shares. ‘And that has happened with this movie – we’ve taken advantage of some cool narrative track that’s been laid.’

Given, then, that Secret Invasion finished airing on Disney+ at the end of July, itself a continuation of the Skrull storyline introduced in Captain Marvel, that series’ narrative track looks set to chug us into the plot of The Marvels. Just as at the end of Ms. Marvel we saw Kamala Khan switch places with Carol Danvers, leading directly into The Marvels, so we saw at the end of Secret Invasion Nick Fury head back up to the S.A.B.E.R. space station. It’s here we find Fury in The Marvels – with, as we now know, his Skrull wife by his side.

‘You see a trajectory: what Fury’s dealing with, with the Skrulls and everything, in that series really determines how he feels about the Skrulls in our film,’ says DaCosta.

Livanos, meanwhile, says that the natural progression from Secret Invasion is an evolved Nick Fury. ‘When we get to spend time with Nick Fury as he interacts with Carol Danvers, we see a different side of Nick that’s truly delightful and sweet,’ says the executive producer. Secret Invasion gave us a glimpse of his softer side in his relationship with his wife – but of course we also saw his younger self go gooey over Goose in Captain Marvel.

‘Carol and Nick have a deeper relationship than most of the other characters in the MCU,’ continues Livanos. ‘So we get to see more of a laid-back, fun Fury than we’ve seen before.’

THREE’S COMPANY

Although we’ve established that The Marvels picks up where Ms. Marvel leaves off, DaCosta says there’s still space for another character to develop: Kamala Khan.

‘One of the first times we see Kamala in the film is that moment from the end of Ms. Marvel. So there’s not much of a gap for her in terms of story,’ says DaCosta, who shares that the Ms. Marvel post-credits sequence in question was actually originally shot for The Marvels. ‘But I think, spiritually, there’s a bit of time for Kamala’s powers to develop somewhat. And then throughout our film, you see them develop more and more. You see that for Monica Rambeau, as well, who’s just gotten her powers in WandaVision and then in our movie has to use them in so many different ways to help save the universe.’

These three individuals swapping around like they do has to make action sequences inventive – and presumably tricky to choreograph. ‘Myself, along with my second unit director, Peng Zhang, and our stunt coordinator, Jo McLaren, were just like, “Okay, we need to tell this amazing story with great action. All three of these women need to have separate styles, and they have to evolve throughout the film”. But on top of that, they’re also all switching places,’ says DaCosta. ‘That gives it so much dimension, but it makes it really fun. And then you have the complication that two of them can fly and are basically invulnerable, and then [there’s] one 16-year-old girl who can make hard light. So how do we mix and match and keep the peril and the stakes high with these three women switching places? That was so fun to figure out.’

Does she think they pulled it off? ‘It’s really good stuff,’ says the director. ‘There’s a really great fight, in which the three of them realise they’re switching for the first time. They’re in the middle of trying to save their families from – I won’t say who – some assailants and they have to learn how to use switching to their advantage. It’s a really fun, crazy, wacky fight.’

The last time we saw Monica Rambeau, there was a suggestion that she had some residual anger towards Carol, who upped and left and whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child. That’s tackled in The Marvels.

WE GET TO SEE MORE OF A LAID-BACK, FUN FURY

Mary Livanos

‘For a child to lose their aunt, and then to lose their mother – although she wasn’t a child when her mother passed away – [she’s left to] feel like she has no family,’ says DaCosta. ‘But then to see that her aunt has been popping to Earth every now and then, and off in space doing [stuff] for a bunch of other people and also not being able to reconcile any of that because she’s never around – that can really create a wound. Monica definitely has a wound that she finally gets to address in this film.’

As for the dynamic between the three of them, DaCosta has a familial analogy. ‘It’s basically like three sisters who’ve been estranged coming back together,’ she explains. ‘The youngest is Kamala and she idolises the eldest sister, who’s “the prodigal daughter of the Milky Way”, as we say in the trailer. And then the middle child who’s felt the abandonment of the eldest more deeply, and who knows the eldest better than the youngest. That’s Monica. She’s the tether between the two. And then we have the jaded elder sister who’s like, “I’ve been doing this for years.” You have all of them giving something to the other that they need. The enthusiasm for the job that Ms. Marvel gives to Captain Marvel, and the focus and intelligence of Monica is something they both need. They complement each other but they are really like sisters who have to figure out how to love each other, essentially, so that they can save the world.’

Livanos calls Carol the brawler, and Monica the brains, with Kamala essentially the wide-eyed ingénue ‘caught up in Captain Marvel-sized epic adventures, the likes of which she has never seen before. It’s big, there’s a ton of scope, it spans the entire universe. But the action is incredible and a total blast. And to see how the switching inconveniences our heroes is a total trip.’

One element we’ve yet to touch on is ginger fur baby flerken, Goose, and – plot twist – flerkittens. Are we to assume the floofballs evidenced in the trailer are Goose’s offspring? Livanos and DaCosta will neither confirm nor deny.

‘That’s a beautiful discovery in the film,’ intimates DaCosta, referencing a sequence that Livanos says will ‘floor’ every audience.

But wait, are we going to discover more about what goes on inside Goose? In Captain Marvel, we saw Goose swallow the Tesseract with no apparent fallout. But the MCU has so far only, ahem, scratched the surface. Alongside the enormous tentacles concealed inside their deceptively tiny bodies, flerkens house pocket universes. They’re basically the TARDIS of critters in the MCU. DaCosta reveals we’ll see some further use of Goose’s inner pocket universe in The Marvels.

If you’re thinking there’s a spin-off set inside Goose waiting to happen, you’re in good company. ‘I’d love to make that show,’ says

WE HAVE MORE AND MORE FILMS THAT ARE FEMALE-LED

Nia Dacosta

Livanos. ‘Nia and I have, at great length, talked about what may be happening inside Goose’s pocket universes. Nothing’s off the table.’

Nia’s mic-drop response? ‘The end of Men in Black, where we zoom out and it’s like aliens playing with marbles… I think that you could zoom out of all the MCU movies and we’re just inside Goose’s body in a pocket universe.’

FLERKITTY KITTY

So is there more to come from DaCosta in the MCU – in particular with these three characters?

‘I’ll pitch Kevin 17 versions of what can happen with all these women, and why and how, and this and that,’ she says. ‘And he’s like, “Okay, girl”, and sometimes I think I’ve really got a movie going after this. And then other times, I’m like, “Oh, they have this whole other plan that I’m not a part of.”’

Whatever happens, she hopes these three characters go forward as a trio – ‘because they’re really great together’. The other question is whether The Marvels can replicate Captain Marvel’s box-office success. After all, 2023 is a very different climate to 2019. Does DaCosta think the success of Barbie this summer has paved the way for both the success of her woman-led superhero movie and more beyond that?

‘In terms of women-led films and women as superheroes in particular, and excitement around that, I think it’s really just about whether or not the movie’s good,’ considers DaCosta. ‘Especially now we have more and more films that are female-led that are action-based or superhero-based. Barbie is so specific – it’s Barbie. Every girl in the world pretty much probably had a Barbie, and a lot of men. So l think that’s a phenomenon that’s probably gonna make a billion dollars. But I think for women-led superhero films, as long as the quality stays up, that’s what’s gonna keep the audience coming back.’ That and flerkittens. Lots of flerkittens.

THE MARVELS OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 10 NOVEMBER