'Captain Marvel' Directors Explain Why They Used The Tesseract In Carol's Origin

Captain Marvel directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made several tweaks and changes to Carol Danvers' history from the comics, but one of the bigger ones had to do with how Carol's lineage and how she got those impressive abilities in the first place. Even the comics recently streamlined Carol's origin and how Mar-Vell affected her, who unintentionally gave her powers after an encounter with the Psyche-Magnetron and Yon-Rogg. For her MCU debut, though they looked elsewhere, namely the Tesseract, and now they've broken down why.

Boden and Fleck recently explained why they chose to go with something already established in the MCU as opposed to introducing things more familiar to Carol's old and new comics origin.

"You knew that something needed to give Carol her powers and I think that we were at a point when we were brainstorming with the team at Marvel and just like "why create a whole new thing? Like we have all this powerful stuff that's already in the Marvel universe. Do we really need to create a whole new energy source for her to gain her powers, we have some to choose from, and so we decided to go with the Tesseract," Boden told the Empire Podcast.

In the original origin, Carol got her powers from the combination of Mar-Vell's genetic structure and the radiation coming off of the Psyche-Magnetron, though to do that they would've had to introduce something akin to the Psyche-Magnetron and also have Mar-Vell saving Carol.

In the new origin (established in The Life of Captain Marvel), it turns out Carol's mom is actually a former Kree agent who was sent down to Earth to spy and ended up falling in love, eventually turning off her beacon and going off the grid to her former superiors. Carol then learns that she is of Kree blood herself, so when she had the incident with the Psyche-Magnetron and Mar-Vell it didn't giver her powers, but only awakened her dormant ones that were already there.

It's interesting that now the Tesseract is a part of her movie origin, and it makes a lot of sense, as the Infinity Stones are such an important and now established part of this world. If you want more of a deep dive into what having her powers come from an Infinity Stone means for her, you can head right here!

Captain Marvel is in theaters now.

Make sure to let us know what you think in the comments, and hit me up @MattMuellerCB on Twitter for all things Captain Marvel!

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