Captain Marvel Screenwriter Hints At “Sassy, Smartass” Carol Danvers

It’s been an awful long time coming – too long, perhaps – but Captain Marvel is about to interrupt 10 years’ worth of male-oriented standalone movies from Marvel Studios.

Production is well underway on the 2019 spinoff, which has Anna Boden – the MCU’s first female director, incidentally – calling the shots behind the lens with her Mississippi Grind cohort, Ryan Fleck. They’ll be directing from a script that was recently fine-tuned by Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss Carol Danvers and her long, meandering journey to the silver screen.

Pegged for release on March 8th, 2019, the Captain Marvel movie is just over a year out from its theatrical launch, and Robertson-Dworet believes it’ll serve up a humorous take on the MCU template.

Captain Marvel has a very funny voice, and it’s more of an action-comedy, more like what we were talking about doing in the first draft I wrote for Tomb Raider…. [but] that tone survived in Captain Marvel. I love funny female characters, so as Tomb Raider got more serious, I got even more committed to the idea of Captain Marvel being hilarious.

But the Tomb Raider scribe isn’t just bringing a sense of humor to Captain Marvel for shits and giggles; she’s extracting Carol’s comic sensibilities from the source material:

That’s not just me inventing that. Carol Danvers is one of the funniest comic book characters. She’s so sassy, she’s such a smartass, she won’t take sh— from anyone, and the comic books do an amazing job at capturing that voice, and it was important that the entire Captain Marvel creative team [kept to that].

And though Robertson-Dworet acknowledged the success of Wonder Woman, the screenwriter went on to stress the importance of carving out a new path – lest Captain Marvel retread familiar territory.

Certainly we were writing after Wonder Woman had come out. We already saw one example of what a superheroine looked like on screen. So we wanted to carve our own path and make sure we weren’t retreading the same territory, and showing all facets of what women are capable of.

Once Avengers: Infinity War has its time in the sun, and Ant-Man and the Wasp pays a visit to the Lang residence this July, all eyes will begin to turn toward Captain Marvel as it prepares to take flight on March 8th, 2019.