'Captain Marvel' Directors Compare the Movie to 'Lethal Weapon'

Captain Marvel is shaping up to be something special, and you might be surprised that the directors compare it to another fan favorite franchise...Lethal Weapon.

The anticipated debut of Captain Marvel happens in just a few short months, and as you've seen in the trailers there's a sense of fun and lightheartedness to a plot that takes place in both outer space and on Earth. For directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, it was important to keep a sense of humor throughout the film but also keep the stakes high, something accomplished through the team-up of Carol and Nick Fury.

"We approached this movie as being, at the heart of it, this mystery of self-identity for Captain Marvel," Boden told Fandango. "It has a lot of playfulness in it, and that kind of buddy-cop vibe that Captain Marvel has with the Nick Fury character was really an important touchstone for us."

"Yeah. Like the '80s and '90s buddy-cop movies, like 48 Hrs. or Lethal Weapon," Fleck said. "We have some of that. Those movies, even the serious ones, they have a really terrific sense of humor, and we wanted to maintain that as well."

You can already tell that Danvers and Fury quickly develop a friendly bond from the early trailers, helping to show another side to the pragmatic and at times mysterious Fury.

Speaking of Fury, fans will get to meet a younger Nick Fury before he's director of S.H.I.E.L.D. They're using CGI to de-age Samuel L. Jackson, but the process wasn't nearly as complicated as it could've been.

"No, there's really no difference," Fleck said. "I mean, Sam Jackson looks incredible for a guy who just turned 70. The traditional way of doing this process is you have to have a younger double, basically in every setup, who basically performs the scene after the actor, and then you kind of take pieces of their face and put it on the actor. Fortunately, we did tests and prep, and we realized we didn't have to do that with Sam, because he looked so good already. It really allowed us to work faster. That would have really slowed us down. We didn't mess up the rhythm of the shoot at all, having to wait with every setup to perform the scene again with another actor. We didn't really have to have him do anything too differently in the movie."

"I think audiences are going to forget that he's actually a 70-year-old man about five minutes into his performance in this movie, and just be on the ride of seeing this young Nick Fury, experiencing with him, you know, learning about alien life for the first time. We're so used to a Nick Fury who's seen it all, and this is the first time he's seen it at all," Boden said.

Captain Marvel launches on March 8, 2019.