The Marvel Cinematic Universe has gifted the fandom with an incredible array of superheroic talents, ranging from the God of Thunder to the wonky and dysfunctional Guardians of the Galaxy. But Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel that stands amid the crowd – a gleaming beacon of power and hope – representing in her name everything that Marvel is supposed to stand for, remained pitifully absent well until her services were needed (for 2 whole minutes) in Avengers: Endgame.
The thought of barging in through the door into a franchise, stealing the thunder from edifices like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (whose arc Marvel has contributed so many years to, priming them for what’s to come) was not merely intimidating, but woefully bizarre.
Brie Larson Comments on Her MCU Career as Captain Marvel
Brie Larson showed incredible promise with her 2019 solo debut as Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel. But the momentous flight that she launched failed to stick to the motto: Higher, Further, Faster, and swooped dreadfully low in her subsequent handful of appearances in Endgame. The actor later reflected on the time she had taken her first formative steps in the MCU franchise and claimed:
“I was scared of what would happen to me. I was like, ‘What world is this, where these are the choices I have to make as an artist?’ Anytime I feel like I’m being put too much on a pedestal, it’s my job to figure out how to remove that within myself. What I always come back to is, I have to live with myself in a way that nobody else has to. The choices I make, I have to live with, whether I regret them or not.
Artistically, I always understood that. But for some reason, as me, it’s been totally different. You can follow me around on set and be like, ‘Wow, she really knows what she’s doing.’ And then I go home, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I get insecure, and I think I’m not enough.”
In the years since Endgame, Marvel has given the Academy Award-winning actress a purpose greater than portraying an on-screen superhero. Brie Larson has found a cause greater than herself in activism and fitness. And although the former takes up most of her time, she often credits the latter with saving her life.
Brie Larson’s Anxiety Reflects MCU’s Incompetency
In the decade since Marvel took flight with Iron Man, a relatively ostentatious number of films have been released by this single franchise, marking its rise in recent times to one of the topmost tiers of production houses in Hollywood. But in all these years, Brie Larson’s superhero entry, which was teased at the end of Infinity War (2018) and finally introduced in 2019’s Captain Marvel remains the first and the only solo female superhero film in the entirety of MCU’s Infinity Saga.
It becomes even more embarrassing for Marvel when Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, being one of the original six Avengers, receives a subpar posthumous run at a solo film and fails to live up to the standards of Marvel cinema and the expectations of the franchise’s audience.
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The aftermath of Black Widow witnessed a steady uptake in female-helmed factions: Yelena Belova, She-Hulk, Ironheart, Kate Bishop, America Chavez, Shuri as Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, Monica Rambeau, and even Elsa Bloodstone, whereas the build-up to Endgame had rested primarily on the shoulders of 3 Iron Man movies, 4 Captain America films, and 3 Thor films. It even took Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff reaching Phase Four to finally rise to her potential as the Scarlet Witch.
All of it simply goes on to show the extent to which MCU’s success has not been proportionate to the characters that its literary canon harbors. No wonder Brie Larson felt intimidated stepping into a franchise as sensational as Marvel, at a time that was an immediate precursor to the culmination of that sensation aka Avengers: Endgame.
Captain Marvel is available for streaming on Disney+.
Source: Harper’s Bazaar
