'Captain Marvel' Will Feel Like 'RoboCop' or 'Terminator 2'

If you want a sense for what Captain Marvel -- the upcoming Marvel Studios superhero movie set in the early '90s -- might feel like, just look back in time to the big blockbusters of that era.

During a visit to the set of Captain Marvel, the filmmakers talked with reporters about the film's influences.

"It feels weird calling it a genre, but the genre is '90s action movie,'" said executive producer Jonathan Schwartz. "If you think about movies like RoboCop or Total Recall or Terminator 2 or Independence Day I think there are common action movie threads you can tease through those movies which are what we're trying to pick up on in this movie. [00:06:36][13.4]

After writer/director Anna Boden chimed in to agree with the RoboCop comparison, her co-writer/co-director Ryan Fleck added, "There's some Terminator 2 in there. French Connection is not so nineties, but there's a big hommage of French Connection in there."

The pair were apparently watching a lot of Gene Hackman movies while writing the film, because Boden added that there was even a little bit of The Conversation in the movie somewhere.

"There are little moments, homages to shots from our favorite movies," Fleck explained.

Pressed to talk more about RoboCop, a dark and satirical movie with a very different sense of humor than the average Marvel Studios film, Boden said that it was not the humor so much as the characterization that owes something to the Paul Verhoeven masterpiece.

"It is not a dark movie in that way, like Robocop," Boden explained. "I think that what is exciting to us about RoboCop was this idea of a character who's finding himself, and finding his past. Even though it's a dark movie, its also like extremely emotional in that way. If you remember that scene of him walking into his own home, and remembering those moments from his past life and remembering who he was -- I mean, that's big. And that was one of the first things we talked to Marvel about in terms of this character: the idea that self-discovery and reconnecting and rediscovering your humanity, and who you were. It's a huge part of this film."

Captain Marvel hits theaters on March 8th. Other upcoming Marvel films include Avengers: Endgame (in which Brie Larson's Captain Marvel will also appear) on April 26th and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th.