Yes, Marvel Is Very Aware Of That Massive “Plot Hole” In ‘Captain Marvel’
Marvel boss Kevin Feige has responded.
The Marvel cinematic universe is so complicated — so full of evolving, nuanced relationships, and hours of backstories — that the longer the franchise goes on, the more chance it has of winding itself up in knots. Potentially.
And hey, in case you forgot, we’re in year 10 of the Marvel experiment, a massive entertainment overload that has begun to consume every facet of our waking lives, to our views on gender politics to the way we wage our online culture wars. So yeah, it’s not surprising that Phase Three of this unstoppable flood of content is starting to get about as easy to follow as a two-minute speed read of The Odyssey.
The specific problem that Marvel keep running into concerns the events of the very first Avengers movie. That film saw extraterrestrials invade earth en masse, a fairly major inconvenience that one would assume might attract the attention of every superpowered justice freak on the planet.
Just saw @captainmarvel. Great movie BUT being the comic book and movie nerd that I am, there was a serious plot hole in this movie. It has to do with the @Marvel timeline. Don’t ask me about it unless you’ve seen the movie. Must see though. #CapitanMarvel
— Dwight Nixon (@PhotogDwight) March 9, 2019
But that’s the thing: despite the fact that the planet was in mortal peril, barraged by waves of crab-whale mega-monsters, according to Captain Marvel, the titular heroine was kinda just chilling. The new film establishes that she was already a do-gooder by the time of the invasion, but decided to take a back seat and let the original Avengers line-up do their thing. Which a lot of people have a bit of trouble understanding.
To his credit, the head honcho of the Marvel cinematic universe, Kevin Feige, is well aware of these problems. He reckons he has a solution to them too, which he put forward in an interviewed to Collider.
“[Captain Marvel] does say it’s gotta be a real emergency, right?” Feige said, referring to a pivotal moment in Captain Marvel where Cap tells Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury that she’ll be around to help the earth if ever he needs it. This obviously centres on a Nick Fury judgement call, and I guess there is a strong juxtaposition from his point of view compared to New York being invaded by aliens and watching himself literally dissolve into thin air. One is very clearly a more pressing matter than the other.
IS THERE A? PLOT HOLE? IN CAPTAIN MARVEL? OR AM I JUST DUMB?
— Stan Six™️ ? (@foxesandarrows) March 8, 2019
Anyway, Feige’s second argument is that it’s entirely possible that Fury did call for Marvel’s help, and she just ignored it. “We’ve never seen [Fury] push it before,” Feige said. “That doesn’t mean he never did.”
She’s probably a busy lady. Who knows what she was up to?
This also sets up the potential Captain Marvel sequels — will we have the pager being used in the early naughties, maybe due to the large amount of cargo pants?