This major change to Captain Marvel’s origin from the comics should give her a few new cosmic abilities
(Spoilers ahead for “Captain Marvel”)
While “Captain Marvel” may generally be devoid of anything that could be considered direct plot setup for “Avengers: Endgame” — aside, obviously, from introducing a character who will have a major role to play in that film — it does bring in a pretty huge change from Carol Danvers’ comic book origin story that could have major ramifications for “Endgame” and the future of the MCU.
In the comics, Carol gets her Captain Marvel powers by accident, just like in the movie. But in the comics version she falls into a machine that, more or less, can bring thoughts to life. And since she was knocked into the machine during a fight between Mar-Vell and Yon-Rogg, what she was thinking about caused the machine to turn her into a Kree-human hybrid being with fantastical abilities.
In the movie, Carol still gets her powers during a fight between Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and Mar-Vell (Annette Bening), but the mechanism is totally different. Back in the ’80s, Mar-Vell disguised herself as a human scientist and was working with the Tesseract to try to build what is referred to as a “lightspeed engine.” It’s not totally clear what that means, since the Kree and everybody else already can do faster-than-light space travel, but we’ll come back to that.
Also Read:’Captain Marvel’: So Where Did Carol Go for 25 Years Before ‘Avengers: Endgame’?
The big detail here is that this engine is powered by energy derived from the Tesseract, like those Hydra weapons in “Captain America: The First Avenger.” And so when Carol shoots the engine (to keep Yon-Rogg from possessing it) it explodes in her face, infusing her with Tesseract power, much like Scarlet Witch and Vision, whose abilities come from the Mind Stone.
It’s not clear yet what exactly it means that Carol’s power comes from the Tesseract — for most of the movie her powers are limited by a piece of Kree tech on the back of her neck. Once she’s free of that device at the end of the movie we mostly just see her utilizing the standard array of Captain Marvel abilities.
