Kevin Smith Reveals How Stan Lee's Captain Marvel Cameo Was Fixed

Screen Rant

Kevin Smith Reveals How Kevin Feige Fixed Stan Lee's Captain Marvel Cameo

By Chris Agar

Published Mar 12, 2019

Kevin Smith reveals how Kevin Feige fixed up Stan Lee's touching cameo in Captain Marvel through the magic of post-production.

This post contains SPOILERS for Captain Marvel

Kevin Smith reveals how Kevin Feige and company fixed Stan Lee's cameo in Captain Marvel. The entertainment world bid a tearful goodbye to the comics icon last year, but Lee had shot a few more of his trademark movie cameos prior to his passing. This means viewers have a few more moments with Lee to look forward to, the first of which came in this month's Captain Marvel. At long last, Lee finally got to play himself in one of the films, appearing briefly onscreen as he read the script for Smith's 1995 film Mallrats. While Captain Marvel searched for the Skrulls on a train, Lee was rehearsing his line, "Trust me, true believers."

While this does create a paradox within the MCU, it was still a fun bit and an incredibly moving scene for Smith, who is a lifelong fan of Marvel heroes. Smith has already shared his emotional reaction to the cameo, and now days later has provided a behind-the-scenes anecdote revealing how Lee's Captain Marvel part was completed via the magic of post-production.

In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Smith explained that the Captain Marvel cameo was shot a few months before Lee's death and he was "physically weakened" due to his poor health. As a result, Lee's voice wasn't "quite there" and Feige needed to call Smith to see if there were alternate takes from Mallrats Marvel could use for ADR purposes. Smith didn't have them himself, but referenced Feige to Universal. This story begins around the 4-minute mark of the below video:

This is just one alteration that was made to Lee's Captain Marvel cameo before the film was locked. Earlier this week, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck revealed they added in a reverse shot of Carol Danvers smiling at Lee as she sees him, which operates as a fourth-wall break. The idea behind it was to have the Captain Marvel character encapsulate the feelings of the audience in that moment, and just about everyone who's watched the movie cracked a grin when Lee showed up. Obviously, the cameo means a great deal more to Smith personally than the average moviegoer, but for many reasons this will probably go down as one of Lee's most memorable MCU cameos. His passing was at the forefront of viewers' minds when they sat down to see Captain Marvel, and it was nice to see Lee providing some levity like he always did.

Lee has two more cameos coming up in Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home. Obviously, details surrounding both of those are being kept firmly under wraps, but it'll nevertheless be interesting to see what takes place in them. Oftentimes, Lee is a source of pure comedy, but there have been instances where he's been given some dramatic dialogue (his line in Spider-Man 3). Since these are sadly the final times fans will see Lee on the big screen alongside the characters he helped create, it would be great if they weren't just throwaway gags and left more of an impact. Calling Tony Stark "Tony Stank" is funny, but someone like Lee deserves a touching and fitting sendoff.