With a worldwide haul of over $450 million, Captain Marvel just had the sixth highest grossing opening weekend of all time. And her pivotal role in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame will only increase the character’s star power even more. So, a sequel to Carol Danvers’ first solo MCU movie starring Brie Larson is pretty much inevitable. Nothing concrete has been announced, but the first movie left a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions, as well as plenty of teases for the character’s future, so a sequel is pretty much inevitable.
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With that in mind, here are 8 Ideas For Captain Marvel 2.
Follow on where the first one left off
There’s a more than two-decade gap between when we last saw Carol at the end of Captain Marvel and when she returns to Earth in Avengers: Endgame. At the end of Captain Marvel, Carol left to find a new home for the Skrulls and get her revenge against the Kree Starforce. Ronan says he’s determined to bring her down and we never really saw that epic showdown. There’s nothing stopping the Captain Marvel sequel from still being a prequel to most of the MCU. It could show us what Carol was up to in those years as she completed her mission.
Give her another MCU sidekick
Part of what made Captain Marvel work so well was the buddy dynamic between Carol Danvers and Nick Fury. It would be fun if the sequel could give her another MCU sidekick. We’ve seen from Thor: Ragnarok that it works. It would have to be someone familiar with space travel, but more importantly, someone who would make an interesting partner for her.
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Maybe she could bump into a young Gamora on her travels and they could go on an adventure together. Or Rocket would play well against Carol’s dry wit. So would Peter Quill. If Captain Marvel acted as Fury’s origin story as well as Carol’s, then Captain Marvel 2 could reveal Quill’s backstory with the Ravagers and how he ended up going solo as the “legendary outlaw” Star-Lord.
A cosmic adventure with Captain Marvel and the original Guardians of the Galaxy
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 went out of its way to establish that Peter Quill and co aren’t the first Guardians team. The O.G.’s are introduced throughout the movie and later decide to get back together in a mid-credits scene. James Gunn even cast big names like Sylvester Stallone and Miley Cyrus to play the roles to big up their importance in the MCU. At some point between 1995 and Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel could’ve joined them for a cosmic adventure – and it could make a great sequel. It would act as a Guardians spin-off and a Captain Marvel sequel – two birds with one stone!
Training Monica Rambeau to be a superhero
The heavy involvement of Monica Rambeau and her obsession with “Auntie Carol” made up a huge part of Captain Marvel, and there’s hopefully a good reason for that beyond their characterization. In the comics, Monica goes on to become the superhero Photon. We already saw “Photon” teased as Maria’s nickname painted on the side of her plane, so it would be fun to see Carol train Monica to become Photon in the Captain Marvel sequel. This could echo Yoda’s training of Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, except with more otherworldly action, because Carol isn’t old and feeble.
Set the sequel in the distant future
Captain Marvel shook things up with the ‘90s setting, so the only way for Captain Marvel 2 to shake things up even more is to be set the far into the future. We’ve seen Carol’s adventures 25 years ago, so let’s see her adventures 25 years from now. Her appearance in Avengers: Endgame pretty much confirms she doesn’t age (or at least, she doesn’t age much), so this would be a great way to explore that.
Lashana Lynch already suggested this as her idea for the sequel: “Just like with this origin story, we’ve gone back in time before she had her powers and then as she got her powers and that slight journey just after that, I think it would be nice to see everyone – no matter what characters they are – way in the future. In like, 2050.”
It would be like Steve Rogers waking up in the present day and finding all his friends and family are either old or dead – but Carol will actually have to watch them get old and die.
Do it as a time travel movie
The great thing about Captain Marvel is that she’s always finding she has new powers. She’ll fall 30,000 feet towards the desert floor and that’s how she figures out she can fly. She’ll fly head-first into a galactic armada and that’s how she figures out she can punch spaceships out of orbit.
It seems that time travel could be one of those undiscovered abilities. Samuel L. Jackson has all but spoiled as much: “She can time travel, so maybe she can get ahead or behind or whatever, and figure out what all that is.” So, maybe just go all in and do Captain Marvel 2 as a time travel movie.
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The MCU likes to go with genres they’ve never tried before, which is why Captain Marvel is basically a ‘90s buddy cop action comedy (and Ant-Man’s a heist movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a paranoid ‘70s political thriller etc.). It would give a chance to include the scene where Carol punches a dinosaur from the original draft of the first Captain Marvel movie.
Fill in more of Carol’s backstory on Earth
We didn’t get a traditional origin story in Captain Marvel, due to the title character’s memory being wiped. We got a vague idea of her life on Earth from various flashes. We know she was an Air Force test pilot who couldn’t go into combat because she was a woman and so she settled for testing out new planes with her best friend Maria Rambeau. We know she used to go for beers at the same bar with the same arcade game and jukebox and get harassed by sexists all the time. We know she fell over a lot as a kid, but always resiliently got up afterwards. We know she was not popular at the military academy due to her gender. But we didn’t get a rounded depiction of what her day-to-day life was like. It would be great if the sequel could fill in those gaps in the timeline.
Bring in some actually villainous Skrulls
It was an interesting plot twist to have the Skrulls turn out to be good guys in Captain Marvel, but there are some bad Skrulls out there and they’ve been used as villains for some of the most iconic stories in Marvel history.
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Their ability to shape-shift makes them the ideal villain, and we didn’t get a chance to really explore that in Captain Marvel. So, the sequel should bring in some actually villainous Skrulls for Carol to contend with. She’ll find the nice ones a safe home and then be attacked by an army of evil ones, maybe even disguising themselves as the other Skrulls to really confuse her. Can Skrulls disguise themselves as other Skrulls?