Although Captain Marvel was expected to make her MCU debut in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, she didn't end up appearing towards the end of the comic book movie as originally planned. At an event for the home release of THE AVENGERS sequel, Marvel producers Kevin Feige and Jeremy Latcham explained why they decided not to add her to the film.
Feige: It was in the script at one point, it might have been one draft. Was it… It might have just been Captain Marvel. And we shot a plate and thought we may add her in there but the truth is it just didn’t seem appropriate to have this new person in a new costume come out of nowhere at the end of this story. It would have been a disservice to, what by the time the movie was coming out, a character people already knew was coming anyway.
Latcham: Really early in development there was a notion of there being a ton of new people. But then it was like, we haven’t really introduced them, we don’t know where they are going to come from, and Joss really didn’t love the idea. It was an early discussion and then it just became Captain Marvel. And then that felt weird, to just have one new person and the guys go “what?”
Feige: And also what does Captain America say? ‘They’re not the 27 Yankees’. Well if Captain Marvel is there, what are we saying about her? The notion that they need to be, certainly Wanda and Vision, and to a lesser extent Falcon and Rhodey, need to learn what it means to be a team, even if the most dysfunctional team in the history of teams.
It might sound like Marvel may already have an actress in mind for Captain Marvel, since she was almost in AGE OF ULTRON, but according to Feige, they’re “not that close” to casting Carol Danvers, and “There won’t be any announcements about that this year."
I think right now we’re scripting the film, figuring out who we want Carol Danvers to be, and really what the structure of the movie will be and what her part will be in some of our other Phase 3 films. And it would be next year that we start to really think about casting.
Latcham added that "We have really amazing writers on the movie. Meg [LeFauve] and Nicole [Perlman] are great, and I think getting the character right first is going to lead the charge. We want to make sure we know who it is before we can start figuring out who should play it.” The duo went on to talk about how they are fully aware of the actresses fans would like to see play the superheroine.
Latcham: For me, we always have a clear sense of who we want to cast and who we’re interested in. We have amazing casting directors — Sarah Finn, who’s been with us since ’Iron Man’ — but at the same time, when a fan list comes out…
Feige: We look at it!
Latcham: We read it, we go through it, we read the comments, we look at who people like. Sometimes it’s really enlightening. Sometimes it’s the exact same person that they’ve been saying over and over again that we don’t think is right. It’s always fun to kinda go through it and see what people are up to.
Hmmm…any guesses as to the person Feige and Latcham don’t think is right that fans keep suggesting?
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON hits shelves tomorrow, and CAPTAIN MARVEL will be in theaters on November 2, 2018