The Marvel character that was supposed to appear as a supporting role in the Netflix series. They ended up giving him his own movie and grossing 1.1 billion

In early 1977, Marvel was a bit worried: most of their heroes were men and only a handful of heroines like the Invisible Woman or the Wasp were making an appearance. They needed more if they wanted to keep the female audience from leaving them behind, and Stan Lee wondered “Well, can we come up with a female character for which we can use the name Marvel?”. Yes, as uncreative as it sounds. Digging through the comics, they decided that the chosen one would be a secondary character of Captain Marvel, a certain Carol Danvers who had been seriously injured. With a plot excuse, they resurrected her in full force and called her Ms. Marvel. A star was born.

From Jessica Jones to Carol Danvers

Although at the time Ms. Marvel was one of the most progressive characters of her time, the truth is that in the 80s she was put into a terrifying plot where, in an alternate reality, she was raped by Marcus, the son of Immortus, and gave birth… to Marcus himself, whom the Avengers believed she was in love with and sent back to that alternate reality. As you can imagine, it didn’t sit well with her, and over the years, it has been heavily criticized that someone allowed such harm to be done to a character with so much potential. She eventually managed to survive that ordeal, became more popular than ever, and even became, as she is now, Captain Marvel. Thank goodness.

However, when Netflix chose the heroes that would make up their own Marvel Universe, long before Disney+ existed, they obviously preferred to go for “street-level” characters rather than powerful cosmic beings, due to budget issues: thus, among the four chosen, there was only one woman: Jessica Jones, who had starred in the comic book series Alias in the early 2000s. It was an immediate success, the story was very good, and Netflix decided that it would focus on the legal cases of superheroes and being a colleague of, indeed, Carol Danvers.

The characters had already crossed paths in the comics, and their creator, Melissa Rosenberg, wanted to play the game again: “When I was making it for ABC, I used Carol Danvers. But when it ended up on Netflix, the MCU separated, and so did it from the comic universe.” And although she wanted to continue using the character, Marvel warned her that there was going to be a Captain Marvel movie and prohibited her from beating around the bush. Instead, and almost at the last minute, she changed it in the scripts to Patsy Walker, which ultimately worked better than anyone would have expected. After all, she was a character without superpowers who could serve better as a mirror for Jones… And yes, by the end of season 2, she not only acquired superpowers but also became the villain of the last batch of episodes. Better not to remember them.

In the end, Marvel took longer than expected to introduce its star heroine: she was originally supposed to appear in Age of Ultron, but its director, Joss Whedon, complained that they couldn’t introduce her properly with so many characters, and they had to change the script, inserting Scarlet Witch into some sequences that were originally meant for Danvers. When she was introduced in Captain Marvel, she earned 1.1 billion for the studio’s coffers.

The good part of all this is that, finally, after a bunch of chain changes and licenses and all that boring paperwork, it is official that both belong to the same universe (or it will be in season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again). Will we finally be able to have this superhero buddy movie, or is Brie Larson’s cache so high that it’s not worth trying?