At Marvel, a female superhero finally gets to shine

When “Captain Marvel” opened Friday, it was a moment of great satisfaction mixed with lingering frustration.

The film, which stars Brie Larson as that spacefaring comic-book superhero, is the 21st entry in the interconnected Marvel movie franchise since it began in 2008 but only the first to focus principally on a woman.

By now, audiences have grown accustomed to superhero movies that put women in the spotlight. In 2017, “Wonder Woman,” based on DC Comics’ Amazonian warrior, was a worldwide hit for Warner Bros.

Marvel has built its own fortunes on a decades-old supply of costumed adventurers that doesn’t lack for women. And the studio has been criticized for its slowness to create movies emphasizing its female characters.

So what took Marvel as long as it did to reach this point? And will “Captain Marvel” be the movie that makes good on this long unfulfilled potential?

The answer to the first question, at least, lies in a tangle of social, cultural and economic factors. They parallel similar issues that Marvel has faced in making strides toward female representation in its comic books over the past 60 years — efforts that gradually helped bring Captain Marvel to prominence in the publisher’s pantheon and make the movie more likely.

The people behind “Captain Marvel” — the movie as well as the comic books that inspired it — acknowledge the problematic history that led to these more welcome developments. They also see opportunities for women to have an equal place on the page and on the screen, and for the Captain Marvel character to grow as an icon of female representation and empowerment.

“What Captain Marvel needed to be when she debuted in the 1960s is very different than what she needs to be in 2019, when she’s anchoring a major film,” said Kelly Thompson, the current author of the Captain Marvel comic book series.

Marvel, the Disney-owned home of the Avengers superteam, has become an important bellwether of diversity in Hollywood. The studio has broken ground with films like “Black Panther,” its 2018 blockbuster with a black director, screenwriters and leading actors.

In recent years Marvel has also gained a reputation for giving opportunities to filmmakers who don’t have a background in tentpole action movies. That category includes “Captain Marvel” directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who are better known for low-budget offerings like “Mississippi Grind” and “It’s Kind of a Funny Story.”

(“Captain Marvel,” written by Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, is also the first Marvel movie to have a female director and only the second, after 2014’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” to credit women as screenwriters.)

Larson, an Academy Award winner for the 2015 drama “Room,” said she was initially wary when she was approached for “Captain Marvel” and unsure if she wanted to take on such a high-profile role. But the actress, who has called for greater participation by women and people of color in the film industry and in the media covering it, said the global rollout of “Captain Marvel” could help bring her advocacy to a wider audience.

Larson said that while other Marvel heroes are weak and lowly at the start of their origin stories, “she was a badass before she got her powers.” A former Air Force test pilot named Carol Danvers, she gains superhuman abilities from an alien race, and Boden described the movie as a mystery of sorts in which Danvers must investigate her own past.

“As she gets to know herself and embrace what makes her her, she really achieves her true power,” Boden said. “Part of that means rejecting the voices of people who tell her she’s not strong enough and doesn’t belong. I feel like a lot of people will be able to relate to that, particularly women.”

The character of Carol Danvers has been on a journey of her own since Marvel introduced her in the comics in 1968. At the time, she was not much more than a Lois Lane-type love interest for a male hero (an extraterrestrial soldier who was the publisher’s original Captain Marvel).

In the 1970s and ’80s, Marvel put out its first solo female superhero comics and introduced Spider-Woman and She-Hulk, gender-swapped versions of its best-known characters who were intended, in part, to protect the publisher’s copyrights.

In a nod to the growing feminist movement, Marvel transformed Danvers into Ms. Marvel, giving her a solo series in which she battled intergalactic villains and wore a navel-baring costume.

The character would go in and out of vogue over the years, a period when many women would drift away from comics.

Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick reintroduced Carol Danvers in a 2012 series in which the character finally assumed the title of Captain Marvel and donned a jumpsuit more appropriate to her military background.

The revitalized Danvers had become a central player in Marvel’s comics universe, and the publisher successfully introduced a diverse array of characters like a young new Spider-Man, Miles Morales, who is of black and Puerto Rican descent, and a new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, who is a Muslim teen.

Most crucially, said Thompson, the current Captain Marvel author, “Marvel put their support behind these characters. You have to put good talent on their books, but you have to support and advertise for them and push them as premier characters. Let’s not ignore that part of the equation.”

Marvel’s movies, however, did not keep pace. The studio’s earliest releases were focused on establishing core male heroes like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor; though its cinematic universe had included female characters like Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) as members of larger teams, there were no solo films in development for them.

Even Marvel seemed prey to a long-standing Hollywood fallacy that while women will watch movies about men, men will not watch movies about women. “Because women are low-status in our culture,” DeConnick said, “you will aspire up, you will not cross-identify down.”

Boden and Fleck, the “Captain Marvel” directors, said it was difficult to escape the grip of Hollywood tradition, in which most genre movies still focus on male leads.

“Even looking at our own films, why did it take us five films to have one about a female protagonist?” Fleck said. “Hopefully we get to the point where these stories are being told all the time.”