The Marvels, the highly anticipated sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel, confirmed the inclusion of two Disney+ characters with the release of its initial trailer, solidifying some fans’ worries that the film is going to come with required viewing to get audiences up to speed. After nearly five years since her debut in the role, Brie Larson returns as Captain Marvel in the Nia D’Costa-directed sequel. While her first film may have been a singular tale about Larson’s Kree Warrior turned Cosmic Hero, The Marvels promises a team-up story that Kevin Feige is already comparing to The Avengers. Bringing in welcome newcomers Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) and Monica Rambeau’s Photon (Teyonah Parris), Marvel Studios is sure to amaze fans with their first all-female team-up.
With these recently introduced Phase 4 heroes joining The Marvels in prominent roles, viewers will need to revisit WandaVision and Ms. Marvel to have the full context before going to see the film. This, with the addition of Samuel L. Jackson stating that viewers will need to also watch Secret Invasion to be fully up to speed, the constantly-growing list of Marvel’s required materials is undoubtedly contributing to general audiences' “superhero fatigue”.
WandaVision and Ms. Marvel Are Required Viewing
The Marvels will mark the first time that two heroes introduced in Disney+ streaming shows will feature in a full-length MCU film. While each of the three leads’ origin stories are some of the most revered of recent MCU history, and early reviews of The Marvels are coming in strong, the amount of homework that viewers have to do to understand the context of a sequel seems like it risks setting audiences up for a lot of work with diminishing returns.
Though The Marvels is technically a sequel to Captain Marvel, so much has happened within the film’s universe that a direct sequel is seemingly impossible given Carol Danvers’ involvement in Avengers: Endgame. The first piece of media audiences need a refresher on is WandaVision.
In addition to WandaVision being the MCU’s inaugural Disney+ streaming show, it is also the first real introduction fans get to Photon. Teyonah Parris brought an adult Monica Rambeau after audiences were introduced to her as a child in Captain Marvel. In WandaVision, Rambeau acts as a SWORD agent sent to investigate the mysterious appearance of a magical barrier around the small town of Westview, NJ. After Wanda Maximoff discovers that Monica didn’t belong in her hex, she forcibly removes Monica from her happy, sitcom life. However, this doesn’t deter Monica Rambeau. She forces her way head-first through the hex and develops light-based powers, becoming the hero later known as Photon.
Ms. Marvel tells the delightful coming-of-age story of Kamala Kahn, a Pakistani-American high school student who is Captain Marvel’s number one fan. After bonding with a family heirloom and discovering her own light-based powers (an admittedly divisive stylistic choice from fans of Kamala Kahn’s comic book origins), Kamala must figure out how to come into her own as a hero, all while balancing the typical trials of a first-generation American high school student. Ms. Marvel might be the closest thing that The Marvels has to a prequel, with Brie Larson’s cameo in the show’s final post-credit scene hinting at the events of the film.
Should Disney+ Shows be Necessary For Movies?
Such is the nature of modern MCU properties, but The Marvels is not the first Marvel film to require prior knowledge of other projects. For a studio that’s logged 36 movies and 12 streaming shows in the 15 years since Iron Man debuted, telling a new story completely independent of MCU canon is unlikely to happen any time soon. It seems as though the last film that doesn’t rely on any kind of pre-existing MCU IP was 2016’s Doctor Strange. Even then, so much happened in the MCU in the six-year gap between the first film and the second that both Avengers: Infinity War and WandaVision are integral to understanding the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
The beauty of having a connecting universe of superheroes is that the characters can cross over and appear in each other’s stories. So much of the hype surrounding The Avengers when it first came out was the excitement from fans about seeing characters that they’ve been keeping up with for years finally teaming up and building the relationships previously only shown in the comics. Many of the criticisms surrounding superhero movies nowadays are that they can’t appeal to every viewer. A film that requires a college course’s level of background knowledge to understand isn’t actually accessible.
The Disney+ shows are great – and set the bar for what the studio could accomplish with short-form storytelling – but the studio’s roster of applicable media is already overcrowded with four and a half phases worth of released films. The Marvels looks like it’ll break new ground on the MCU’s level of connected properties, as well as be a worthwhile follow-up to Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but it shouldn’t set a precedent for more required reading for audiences.
The Marvels is set to release on November 10th, 2023.