Captain Marvel: why sexist attempts at sabotage will fail

Brie Larson is the brand new public enemy number one but the movie is still on track for a US bow of more than $100m

Ben Child
Thu 21 Feb 2019

For sexist keyboard warriors everywhere the mere sight of Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson must be enough to make them break out in hives. Here is a successful (Oscar-winning) woman playing the most powerful hero in the Marvel universe, according to studio chief Kevin Feige. In fact, her alter ego, Carol Danvers, might just be tough enough to take down Thanos himself in the forthcoming Avengers: Endgame.

This, to the average “men’s rights” advocate, is a concept of irredeemable outlandishness. For Danvers is a slender, sylph-like female in a natty 80s-inspired suit, while Thanos is a great, hulking, purple, musclebound male. Never mind that both are completely fictional with superpowers, the problem here is that (gritted teeth, bulging forehead vein) GIRLS WILL NEVER BE STRONGER THAN BOYS. OK?

Remember how upset they got about Charlize Theron telling Tom Hardy’s Mad Max what to do in Fury Road?

Still, Larson might have remained a relatively minor hate figure to the trolls, had it not been for her decision to go one step further than her predecessors in the crossfire – Theron, Leslie Jones and Kelly Marie Tran – by choosing to use her newfound fame to advance progressive causes that are close to her heart. In a recent interview with Marie Claire, the Oscar-winner said she was keen to use her new role as Captain Marvel to campaign for increased diversity, particularly in the movie industry. She even chose a disabled woman of colour, Keah Brown, to interview her for the magazine.

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 Girls will never be stronger than boys ... Brie Larson in Captain Marvel. Photograph: Allstar/Marvel Studios

“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white males,” says Larson to Brown in the interview. “So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive. After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of colour, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others. When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses.

“I want to go out of my way to connect the dots,” Larson added. “It just took me using the power that I’ve been given now as Captain Marvel. [The role] comes with all these privileges and powers that make me feel uncomfortable because I don’t really need them.”

Somewhere, in a fetid corner of the internet, the trolls (or possibly Russian stooges) blinked and raised themselves from their fitful slumber. The knives have been sharpened, and just a few weeks later, we have the first signal that Larson is the brand new number one enemy. Captain Marvel has been bombarded with negative audience reviews, all by commentators who couldn’t possibly have seen the movie (which has not yet had a single public screening), often labelling Larson a “social justice warrior” whose progressive views mean she doesn’t deserve the white, male dollar.

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“I somehow feel that the Skrulls are not the enemy, but that I am, since Brie Larson has been careful to state she doesn’t want the Press Tour to include types like me,” writes “JP”, referencing Captain Marvel’s extraterrestrial nemeses, while “Jonathan B” writes simply: “Tired of all this SJW [social justice warrior] nonsense”.

Others decry the fact that Larson is taking on a superhero role that was once male in the comics. “If Captain Marvel was any good she wouldn’t have to steal her name from another character,” writes “Dan R”, while “Rudy M” opines: “This Captain Marvel is a fake. Captain will always be the supper (sic) hero dressed in red with a lighting bolt in front of his chest.”

Unfortunately for the haters, this latest campaign to ruin a Marvel movie’s box office hopes seems no more likely to prove successful than last year’s effort to destroy Black Panther’s Rotten Tomatoes rating. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s film, which is set in the 1980s and features a digitally de-aged Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, is tracking for a US bow of more than $100m – which would place it among Marvel’s more successful films. Black Panther currently stands as the ninth highest-grossing film of all time, with $1.3bn in global box office receipts. If there remains a diversity deficit in Hollywood, both behind and in front of the camera, it also seems that increasingly there’s a diversity dividend for those movies that wear their progressive hearts on their sleeves.

THE GUARDIAN