Although both Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve were hired to pen the script for CAPTAIN MARVEL some time ago, they apparently didn't get their "marching orders" until fairly recently. While speaking on the Great Big Beautiful Podcast, Perlman spoke about where they're at with the screenplay as well as the challenges of crafting Marvel's first female-led superhero movie.
"Marvel is a little bit of a house of cards in a sense that everything influences everything around it even if its very modular," said Perlman. "Figuring out where the story fits in the MCU influences things as well." By the time CAPTAIN MARVEL is released to theaters, Marvel will have twenty movies under their belt, which makes it all the more difficult to carve out a unique space for Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) in the universe.
She’s an incredible character, but I will also say that since Marvel has done so many movies already, you really have to go out of your way to make sure her story is fresh and doesn’t borrow too heavily from the other films. She’s an incredibly strong and wonderful hero, but all the Marvel characters are. So you just need to figure out how to bring her to life in a way that's unique to her story but in a way that honors the canon and also gearing out the roles that she needs to play with everything that’s going on in the MCU.
Although there are certainly plenty of great female characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, CAPTAIN MARVEL represents their first female-led movie, and Nicole Perlman admits that "theres a tendency to have that back and forth conversation of 'Should it affect the story at all?' or 'Should it affect the writing?'"
There are certain tropes you can get away without having to examine too much if you’re not writing the first female Marvel Studios lead; that could be read into a lot or that could diminish hero own proactivity, strength, and independence. There are things you wouldn’t think twice about Iron Man but you would think twice about for Captain Marvel.
CAPTAIN MARVEL is set for a March 8 2019 release.