A photograph of actress Brie Larson at the Captain Marvel premiere recently attracted attention.
The actress is crouched down, signing an autograph for a girl dressed in full costume.
The youngster is gazing at her, wide-eyed and seemingly overjoyed. If the penny hadn’t dropped before, that image perfectly encapsulated why today means more than another superhero film hitting the cinema – because it’s important for young girls to see themselves as heroes.
Captain Marvel is a milestone because it marks the first female superhero to get a standalone film from Disney’s Marvel Studios.
It tells the origin story of Carol Danvers, played by Larson, an Air Force pilot who finds herself with alien superpowers.
If the film reflects the comics – which early reviews suggest it will – Danvers is the hero to beat in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and could prove instrumental in saving the universe from villain Thanos in the next instalment of Avengers.
Yet the road to Captain Marvel’s release was met with resistance.
It took overthrowing film executives, including one Marvel chief who cited a couple of decade-old box office flops as evidence that no-one would want a woman to take up an entire comic book film.
No one blamed Green Lantern or Daredevil on the fact they were made by men, yet one dodgy Catwoman film was supposed to be indicative of the extent of what a woman could achieve on the big screen.
But studio bosses gave Captain Marvel the go-ahead anyway.
In the meantime DC’s Wonder Woman came along, happily putting the notion to bed that leading women don’t sell cinema tickets by raking in more than £625 million at the box office and introducing the long overdue notion a female hero could save the world on her own.
Danvers’ introduction to Marvel cinema is significant because the entertainment industry has long wrestled with its toxic treatment of marginalised people.
People of colour, the LGBT+ community and women have long been neglected by Hollywood’s straight, white, able-bodied default. Are studio executives finally realising that diversity is not a dirty word?
As Larson herself pointed out, the big screen is most people’s window to the world.
She said: “When I was growing up, before I could afford to travel – and I was also kind of a loner – movies were the way that I viewed the world. They made me understand what other countries were like, and what it was like to live in other places.
“Part of my life’s work is to add more of a variety to what they experience on screen is, so more and more people can feel like they’re being seen.”
The social impact of popular culture shouldn’t be be downplayed.
Black Panther, which has been widely hailed as a love letter to black culture, was a milestone in big-screen representation and a high-profile challenge of institutional bias.
The internet was flooded with footage of giddy schoolchildren being taken to see the film in school trips, overjoyed because they were finally going to see themselves in likes of Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa) and Letitia Wright (Shuri). The fact the film made box office history was no coincidence.
“Marvel has done a great job in terms of representation in terms of people of colour,” said Henry Simmonds, who stars in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “Now they have a woman in the lead who is possibly the strongest hero in the Marvel Universe.”
If the war on representation has largely been won, there are still battles to be fought on the fringes.
Captain Marvel was targeted by so-called review bombers, who tried to sabotage the film’s online ratings before it had even been released because of comments that Larson made about increasing diversity in the blockbuster world.
But most think it is a triumph to see more powerful women on screen. Turkish-American composer Pinar Toprak, who scored Captain Marvel, hailed the film’s release.
“I think of myself when I was growing in Turkey and I had Superman to look up to,” she said.
“Any gender, any race, any religion, there’s an actually really incredible, awesome female hero to look up. That’s a really inspiring thing.”
Captain Marvel’s release is important because of the message it sends: that women can occupy powerful roles and hold up Hollywood by themselves. Goodness knows it took long enough.
- Captain Marvel opens at cinemas across the UK on Friday
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