Yahoo Movies Captain Marvel needs to solve this big continuity issue
While Captain Marvel won't be an origin story, it will be set before the majority of Marvel movies in the 1990s.
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige previously explained that the reason for setting it in the '90s was because it allowed them to "play in an area we have never played in before", something which executive producer Jonathan Schwartz expanded on recently.
"It's giving Carol [Danvers] a place in the cinematic universe that she can carve out for her own, where she wasn't one superheroine out of many," he noted.
That's all well and good, but it does raise one potential continuity issue that Captain Marvel will have to address. Why did it take Maria Hill (and half of the universe's population) fading into dust for Nick Fury to contact Captain Marvel?
Let's recap for those who need it. In the post-credits scene for Avengers: Infinity War, Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) and Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) are in New York as chaos reigns around them. Fury whips out his special pager and sends out a code red just before he too vanishes (mid-"motherf**ker").
The page falls to the ground and we see Captain Marvel's familiar red, blue and gold starburst.
Feige has since explained that Fury called on Captain Marvel at this specific moment because she is "more powerful than any character we've introduced thus far".
"So that alone tells you that there's a reason Nick hit that button at the end, when he realised that they were up against something far bigger than they had ever been up against before," he added. "And having her on your side is hopefully going to change the balance of power in a way that they desperately need."
Again, we get it, but surely if you had someone that powerful on your side, you'd have called on her before now? Like when that pesky Loki led a Chitauri fleet to New York, or that time when a whole country got lifted into the sky. Captain Marvel could have come down and sorted it out in a shorter time than Marvel fans wait in the cinema for post-credits scenes.
So, her solo movie simply has to explain why the Avengers had to wait until half of the universe's population – including plants and animals, remember – had faded into dust before calling on her for help.
Captain Marvel is the first superhero that Fury meets, so that's got to stick in the mind and it can't just be that he forgot he had this special pager until Thanos popped up. That means there is some other reason why she's been MIA... and there could be a clue as to why in the setting for the solo movie.
When the movie starts, Captain Marvel is a member of an elite Kree military team called Starforce, before she finds herself back on Earth to battle with the Skrulls.
However, we're guessing that she won't end the movie on Earth, as that will make the continuity issue worse if she's been around this whole time, just down the road from Avengers Tower.
So we're thinking that the movie will end with Captain Marvel heading back to space, although perhaps on her own and not with Starforce. Before she leaves, she'll give the special pager to Fury (after all, it's very much '90s technology) and maybe specify that she'll be MIA for a certain amount of time.
Or it could be that Fury just didn't view the previous events as dangerous enough to contact Captain Marvel, as it can't be easy coming back and forth between Earth and space.
In reality, the reason for no former reference to Captain Marvel is likely because she wasn't thought about for a movie until now, but given the complex timeline Marvel has set up for its movies, it now has to retcon her into the MCU.
However it does it, the movie has to somehow address why Fury hasn't contacted Captain Marvel in the MCU before, otherwise fans will never forgive them this faux pax. We'd even probably take her saying, "Don't contact me unless people start disintegrating", to be honest.
Captain Marvel will arrive in cinemas on March 8, 2019 in the UK and the US.
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