Academy Award winner Brie Larson seems to have inspired something of an online past time in which her most vocal detractors try to cast her every word in the worst possible light. When she said in an interview that she “decided to make sure [her] press days were more inclusive,” for instance, certain readers inexplicably took that to mean that she disliked white males and didn’t want them to see or review her films.
Now, ComicBook.com reports that tons of Marvel fans are petitioning to replace Larson in the role of Captain Marvel with “a gay woman of color” for future installments of the character’s franchise within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Apparently created by someone who doesn’t know how the filmmaking industry operates – simply put: dollars talk and petitions walk – it calls on Larson not to be fired but rather to voluntarily abdicate the role of Captain Marvel and bestow it on Monica Rambeau, the eleven-year-old daughter of Carol’s fellow Air Force pilot Maria Rambeau.
Monica was played by Akira and Azari Akbar in Captain Marvel and is set to appear as an adult played by Teyonah Parris in this year’s WandaVision. She was first given the title of Captain Marvel by the media in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 in October of 1982, and has since transitioned through the codenames of Photon and Pulsar before settling on Spectrum, a title she assumed in Mighty Avengers #1 in November of 2013. She’s never been written as gay in the source material, though Marvel Studios has never been strictly beholden to the comics.
Carol, meanwhile, didn’t assume the title of Captain Marvel until September of 2012, in the pages of Avenging Spider-Man #9, having gone by the title of Ms. Marvel in her own eponymous series beginning in January of 1977 and transitioning through the codenames of Binary and Warbird before eventually assuming her current title. Of course, both characters are borrowing the mantle of the Kree warrior Mar-Vell, a gender-swapped version of whom was played by Annette Bening in Captain Marvel, who died in Secret Avengers #28 in August of 2012.
The petition has collected nearly 28,000 signatures, which may sound impressive until we examine Captain Marvel‘s box office totals: the film grossed almost $427 million in the United States alone, where the average movie ticket costs $9.26, meaning that a total of roughly 46 million tickets were sold. That number doesn’t include tickets given away by the studio, cast, or crew for promotional purposes, and absolutely dwarfs the minuscule collection of signatures, which constitute literally 0.065% of the American audience. Suffice it to say that losing those viewers is likely a sacrifice that Marvel is willing to make.
In any case, Captain Marvel 2 has no official release date yet, but Marvel recently appointed WandaVision scribe Megan McDonnell to script the sequel, which is expected to premiere in 2022.
