Brie Larson teases all-female crossover in MCU Phase 5. Could it be 'Captain Marvel 2'?
"If enough people out in the world talk about how much they want it, maybe it’ll happen."
Ever since that scene at the end of Avengers: Endgame — you know, the one that featured all Marvel’s most badass women standing shoulder to shoulder against Thanos — fans have been wondering if we’ll ever see a movie focusing exclusively on the female heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson, added fuel to the speculation fire in a Wednesday interview with Variety, revealing that she and several of her costars had spoken with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about the possibility. However, unless Marvel plans to seriously rejigger its production schedule (which is pretty unlikely) we probably won’t see an all-women team-up until Marvel’s Phase Five, which is also when we’re expecting Captain Marvel 2.
“I’m not in charge of the future of Marvel, but it is something that we’re really passionate about and we love,” Larson said. “I feel like if enough people out in the world talk about how much they want it, maybe it’ll happen.”
Later in the interview, Larson elaborated on the cameraderie she felt with her costars while filming the iconic scene.
“To get to be with all of those women for the day and you get this feeling of, like, almost a little bit of naughtiness because it’s a secret and none of us can talk about it,” she said. “It felt like we were a part of this like coven working together for this goal.”
Her comments could apply both to the need for secrecy about Endgame spoilers, and the early stages of thinking about an all-woman Avengers movie.
Larson isn’t the first Marvel heroine to urge Feige to make a film centering on a women’s supergroup. While promoting Thor: Ragnarok back in 2017, Tessa Thompson recalled a similar conversation with Feige — maybe even the same one — at a press conference in October (via Nerdist):
“Recently I marched up with a couple other women in Marvel and were like, to Kevin, ‘what if there was a movie with some female superheroes?…like all of them?’”
There’s precedent for this kind of team-up in the comics, the most obvious being the A-Force series that ran for 15 issues between 2015 and 2016. The first all-female Avengers squad in that arc consisted of Captain Marvel, Medusa, She-Hulk, Dazzler, Nico Minoru, Singularity, and Dazzler Thor. It was a spin-off of the Secret Wars storyline that saw a bunch of heroes thrown into an alternate universe centered around with a mashup of Marvel planets known as “Battleworld.”
A potential all-women MCU movie could also draw inspiration from the Lady Liberators, from a single-issue parody from 1970’s Avengers #83 that saw a group of female heroes — Wasp, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, and Medusa — brainwashed by Valkyrie, posing as a “female liberator.” (Yes, this sounds like a euphemism for a sex device, but we’re pretty sure it’s not.)
The Lady Liberators parody in *Avengers* #83, from 1970.
We know Captain Marvel 2 is tenatively planned for Phase Five, sometime around 2023. It would make sense if that film built toward an A-Force film in its final moments, given Captain Marvel’s prominence within the squad. That means the earliest we might see an A-Force movie is 2024 or 2025. It seems unlikely we’d see the resolution of the Secret Invasion arc and a full-blown A-Force team-up in Captain Marvel 2. That’s an awful lot of ground to cover in one movie, but anything’s possible.
There’s a lot of chess pieces to move into position, spanning several movies and TV shows, for a A-Force movie to make sense. Shuri and Okoye would make a fantastic fit, but we’re not sure what their stories will be in Black Panther 2, provisionally slated to release in 2022. There’s also Jane Foster/Lady Thor and Valykrie from Thor: Love and Thunder, slated to release in November 2021, and let’s not forget the enticing possibilities raised by the upcoming Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk shows for Disney+, which we still know very little about. One thing that seems certain: don’t expect to see Scarlett Johanssen as Black Widow, as next summer’s standalone movie will likely be her last stint as the character.
Basically, there’s too many awesome MCU women to list, and it’s hard to see why Marvel Studios wouldn’t make an A-Force movie eventually. Unfortunately for fans, it might take us a while to get there.
Black Widow comes to theaters May 21.
