WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
If you’re anything me, you love Marvel movies and basically all things nerd. But being as big of a fan as I am, its easy to get confused with all of the lore. Especially since a lot of crucial information in the new phase of the MCU comes from various TV shows and comics. Luckily, I have a dad who’s an even bigger nerd than I am! For years, him and I go to the theater on opening night of whatever Marvel movie is coming out and I ask a million questions on the drive home. While I was wracking my brain to try to figure out what I was going to write for this weeks article and simultaneously pestering my dad with a million questions, I decided to use all of the extensive information he gave me to fill you guys on the current happenings in the MCU. Thanks, dad!
(I’m going to try to explain everything in super simple terms, so it’s easier to understand.)
Backstory on “the marvels”
First things first, let’s talk about the information you need before going to see “The Marvels”, if you haven’t already. There are a few media prerequisites you should watch to fully enjoy and understand this movie. “Captain Marvel”, “Loki” (TV Series), “Ms. Marvel” (TV Series) and “WandaVision” (TV Series). As I dive into the crazy lore this movie unlocks, you’ll see there are many other movies and shows you could be familiar with to truly appreciate “The Marvels” However, these are the minimum requirements.
This movie features three main ladies. Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers), Ms. Marvel (Kamala Kahn), and Monica Rambeau.
You can get most of the backstory on Captain Marvel from the movie, “Captain Marvel”. Carol Danvers was shown as a US Air Force pilot. During this time she befriended Maria Rambeau and her daughter, Monica. Maria and Monica became Carol’s second family. Long story short, a light-speed engine test went wrong and Carol was exposed to the energy of the tesseract, which gave her supernatural powers. She can absorb massive amounts of energy and re-direct it elsewhere, fly and is basically invincible. She is recruited into the Avengers by Nick Fury in 1987. However, she mainly defends space and other planets. Fury does not call her back to Earth to fight with the Avengers until the end-credit scene in “Infinity War”.
Ms. Marvel is fairly new to the MCU, appearing in her TV show “Ms. Marvel”. She is a teenager living in Jersey City who finds a box of family heirlooms that contains a bracelet. This bracelet ends up being super important. At the show’s end, it is revealed that she is a mutant, this is a big deal because the X-Men are mutants. She named herself Ms. Marvel because of her icon, Captain Marvel. In the post-credit scene of the last episode of the show, Kamala uses her powers and shoots into her closet, only for Carol Danvers to take her place.
Maria Rambeau is Maria Rambeau’s daughter (remember, Carol Danvers second family). She is shown as a little girl in the “Captain Marvel” movie and she is not shown again until the “WandaVision” TV Series as an adult. Basically, Wanda casts a spell over this imaginary town she made so her husband and kids could all be together. This spell, or hex, was causing a lot of problems for everyone and no one could infiltrate the town to stop Wanda, except for Monica. Before she went into the hex, she had no powers. However, something happened when she crossed into the hex that gave her powers similar to Carol Danvers and Kamala Kahns.
All this to say, the three main women in “The Marvels” movie all have similar light-based powers and it causes them to switch places every time they use their powers.
secret wars
What is secret wars? Well let me explain it to you the exact way my dad explained it to me.
This dude, named The Beyonder, has been alive for almost eternity. He gets really bored one day and decides to grab all the superheroes and villains, from all different multi-verses, and put them on a planet called Battleworld to make them fight each other, literally just for fun. This movie confirmed that they were making a secret wars soon because at the end of the movie, Monica shuts the “hole” in space and is shot into a different universe. She finds herself in a hospital bed with her mother by her side who, has no idea who Monica is and suddenly, Hank Mccoy (AKA Beast) walks in the room. What’s important about this is that he was Hank Mccoy from the Fox “X men” movies, played by Kelsey Grammar. They have already brought over Daredevil from the Netflix universe, all three Spider Man’s, Deadpool (from the Fox universe) and now the first appearance of the X-men which is planting the seeds of characters from different multiverses to appear in one big movie. It is speculated that at end of “Secret Wars”, something big is going to happen and most of the timeline will be erased. This movie is going to be huge, most of the fandom is speculating that every marvel superhero and villain, and most of the X-men are going to be in it.
The new era of marvel
After “Avengers: Endgame”, there is not much of the original Avengers left. However, they’ve been slowly building up their new young Avengers. These new young Avengers include America Chaves, Ms. Marvel, Kate Bishop, kid Loki, Wanda and Visions kids. These new characters will be the new face of the Marvel universe moving forward, probably adding a few along the way.
So, if you followed along with anything I said, yay! If not, I probably just sounded like the biggest nerd in the entire world. But anyway, I hope at least one person who read this is just as excited about this new Marvel phase as I am.