The Marvel writers, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, have opened up about the distinct lack of super-powered heroine, Captain Marvel, in their MCU magnum opus Avengers: Endgame. The pair explained that they had always planned to feature the newly introduced superhero, but that she presented powerful problems.

""Well, she was always going to be in it but we didn't have much to go on. They had cast her and that was it. It is a tough balance to strike when you have a character that powerful who you're going to bring in, and you don't want it to seem like, well we just brought in this person who can clean the house that we couldn't clean in the previous movie. So, we had to decide on a balance between not making it feel like a cameo but not having her around so much that she solved all of the problems for everybody."

After the release of her solo adventure, Captain Marvel, earlier this year, the question was raised as to how such an overly-powered character would fit into the Endgame proceedings without solving The Avenger's problems and barely breaking a sweat. This is evidently a conundrum that the writing duo had to contend with, particularly whilst wanting the film to focus on the original team.

"It also wasn't the point of the movie, the point of the second movie was saying goodbye to the original six Avengers, so their stories were gonna be way up here. (...) It was not fair to the other six Avengers to have Captain Marvel come in and solve all their problems, it didn't seem like good storytelling."

Thankfully they managed to avoid what would have been a much-maligned scenario wherein Captain Marvel flies in, fists glowing, and fixes everything within a few minutes. This would surely have led to a very different film, indeed. Perhaps the focus would instead have been on Captain America using his new counselling skills to help Thor with his depression.

It sounds like Captain Marvel caused the exact issues that many fans had speculated she would, and we must be forever grateful that McFeely and Markus managed to work around them in a way that didn't feel too convoluted or contrived. There are even behind-the-scenes photos from Avengers: Endgame that show the character in her original outfit, as well as the fact that actress Brie Larson filmed her Endgame scenes before her own outing, which suggests that this could quite easily have become an unmitigated disaster.

Captain Marvel's disappearance remains noticeable, but the writing duo clearly took the appropriate steps to remove her in order to give fans the closure that this MCU climax needed. Besides, her being absent gave her an extraordinarily crowd-pleasing entrance into the final battle, making her lack of screentime well worth it in the end. This latest intel comes from Vanity Fair.