As you may’ve heard already, Captain Marvel opens with a tribute to the late Stan Lee that, according to co-director Anna Boden, is leaving audiences in tears. But in the midst of the film itself, Carol Danvers’ MCU debut also finds time to feature a mandatory cameo from the legendary comic book creator, and according to a source close to We Got This Covered, Lee’s scene is of an unusually meta nature.
To explain this moment, we have to take you back to year 1995, when a little film called Mallrats first came out. Though the Stan Lee cameo wouldn’t become a regular occurrence in superhero cinema for a few more years, Kevin Smith’s cult comedy sees the writer make a brief appearance playing himself, and in Captain Marvel, the tradition apparently comes full circle.
To elaborate, it’s said that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s ‘90s-set film features a scene where Carol passes Lee while he’s sitting on a train, and from the sound of things, he’s once more playing himself. In fact, he’s reading a script and practicing lines for his appearance in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. When Carol approaches the man, she pulls down his script and they look at each other for a moment, before Lee goes back to repeating his lines.
Based on all we‘ve heard, Captain Marvel has quite a few nods to the ‘90s scattered throughout its runtime, another example being the famous trailer moment where Carol crashes through the roof of a Blockbuster. We’ll find out what other in-jokes and nostalgic Easter eggs the movie has to offer when it arrives in theaters on March 8th, but after that, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has confirmed that Stan Lee still has at least one more cameo to go.