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kyburgdamalur:
Very briefly for followers who are less interested in comics: Brie Larson is reportedly in early talks to play Carol Danvers in the upcoming Captain Marvel movie. She’s currently 26 and will probably be 27-28 when the movie shoots. (For reference, the release date is set for March of 2019.)
There’s some very good discourse going around right now about the gender politics of casting a woman who is 26 against a group of largely male actors who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Don Cheadle and RDJ are both 51; Chris Evans is 34; Paul Rudd is 47. The counterargument I’m seeing most frequently is that Marvel is deliberately casting the new generation of Avengers young to get more years of filmmaking out of them, but that’s nonsense when at 39 Chadwick Boseman is one of the linchpins of the new phases of movies. (For comparison purposes, Elizabeth Olsen is 27. Scarlett Johansson is 31. Make no mistake, this is the same Hollywood gender policing as ever.)
Beyond that, there are some character-specific reasons why casting a young actress for Carol Danvers doesn’t make sense. When we first encounter her in the comics, Carol has already retired from the Air Force as a colonel, a rank typically attained in an officer’s mid- to late forties. By the time she makes the jump from Ms. Marvel (via Binary and Warbird and Ms. Marvel again) to Captain Marvel, she’d also worked as a security chief for NASA, a bestselling author, and the editor of a major publication, not to mention all the time she spent hanging around teams like the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Starjammers. Even taking the usual Marvel timeline weirdness into account, Carol is a woman with miles on her, and seeing her display the sort of confidence and competence that only experience grants is one of the things that makes her attractive to readers.
Movies offer an opportunity to streamline a character’s origin, and I suspect that whatever her age, a lot of Carol’s particulars are going to fall by the wayside when she makes the transition to the MCU. Her faculty as a writer and her work with various intelligence organizations while in the employ of the USAF will probably be the first things on the chopping block. Since 2012, when Kelly Sue DeConnick took over the character, the emphasis in Carol’s books has been absolutely on her background as a pilot and her love of flying. If Brie Larson or another young actress end up with the role, I don’t doubt that Carol will be an active-duty airman when she gets her powers.
I don’t have a problem with that at all, but I do think that by not casting a woman in her thirties or older, the powers that be are wasting a great opportunity to tell a story much more in line with the ideology surrounding Captain Marvel (which is, you know, that all women, regardless and sometimes because of their age, have stories worth telling).
Next up: rebooting Card Captor Sakura, only this time it’s babies!
I don’t know if I can express how worn this makes me. Sexism is bad enough, but ageism too? Seriously?
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Very briefly for followers who are less interested in comics: Brie Larson is reportedly in early talks to play Carol Danvers in the upcoming Captain Marvel movie. She’s currently 26 and will probably be 27-28 when the movie shoots. (For reference, the release date is set for March of 2019.)
There’s some very good discourse going around right now about the gender politics of casting a woman who is 26 against a group of largely male actors who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Don Cheadle and RDJ are both 51; Chris Evans is 34; Paul Rudd is 47. The counterargument I’m seeing most frequently is that Marvel is deliberately casting the new generation of Avengers young to get more years of filmmaking out of them, but that’s nonsense when at 39 Chadwick Boseman is one of the linchpins of the new phases of movies. (For comparison purposes, Elizabeth Olsen is 27. Scarlett Johansson is 31. Make no mistake, this is the same Hollywood gender policing as ever.)
Beyond that, there are some character-specific reasons why casting a young actress for Carol Danvers doesn’t make sense. When we first encounter her in the comics, Carol has already retired from the Air Force as a colonel, a rank typically attained in an officer’s mid- to late forties. By the time she makes the jump from Ms. Marvel (via Binary and Warbird and Ms. Marvel again) to Captain Marvel, she’d also worked as a security chief for NASA, a bestselling author, and the editor of a major publication, not to mention all the time she spent hanging around teams like the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Starjammers. Even taking the usual Marvel timeline weirdness into account, Carol is a woman with miles on her, and seeing her display the sort of confidence and competence that only experience grants is one of the things that makes her attractive to readers.
Movies offer an opportunity to streamline a character’s origin, and I suspect that whatever her age, a lot of Carol’s particulars are going to fall by the wayside when she makes the transition to the MCU. Her faculty as a writer and her work with various intelligence organizations while in the employ of the USAF will probably be the first things on the chopping block. Since 2012, when Kelly Sue DeConnick took over the character, the emphasis in Carol’s books has been absolutely on her background as a pilot and her love of flying. If Brie Larson or another young actress end up with the role, I don’t doubt that Carol will be an active-duty airman when she gets her powers.
I don’t have a problem with that at all, but I do think that by not casting a woman in her thirties or older, the powers that be are wasting a great opportunity to tell a story much more in line with the ideology surrounding Captain Marvel (which is, you know, that all women, regardless and sometimes because of their age, have stories worth telling).
Next up: rebooting Card Captor Sakura, only this time it’s babies!
I don’t know if I can express how worn this makes me. Sexism is bad enough, but ageism too? Seriously?
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via IFTTT
