Captain Marvel‘s first official images were released on Wednesday, and fans have lapped up what they’ve seen. The film seems to be heralding a new era of diversity in the MCU and, according to Studio President Kevin Feige, it will. Marvel is positioning Captain Marvel as the first of more women-centric entries coming some time later in the canon.
Feige sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss where Marvel were heading, and spoke of the need for more female-led superhero films.
“With [Ant-Man and The Wasp] and now with Captain Marvel and many movies to be announced in the near future, I’m anxious for the time where it’s not a novelty that there is a female-led superhero movie, but it is a norm,” said Feige. “And it is less a story of, ‘Oh, look, a female hero,’ and it’s more a story of, ‘Oh, what’s this about? Who’s this character? I’m excited to see that.’ And I think we can get there.”
There has been a trend in recent Marvel movies that have seen strong, female characters come to the fore as heroes and villains. The only other standalone Marvel flick with a female lead in development, however, is Black Widow. It’s taken over 10 years to get to this point, and Feige pointed out a few reasons why it had taken so long to do so.
“I think there are a lot of reasons, not the least of which was fighting for many years the erroneous notion that audiences did not want to see a female-led hero [film] because of a slew of films 15 years ago that didn’t work,” he divulged. “And my belief was always that they didn’t work not because they were female-led stories—they didn’t work because they were not particularly good movies.”
Captain Marvel is set for release in March 2019, and tells the story of how the titular hero gets her superpowers during an intergalactic war.
