In the months since Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home came out in theaters we’ve seen an influx of unused concept art from the most recent slew of Marvel movies. A veritable army of artists who worked to visualize the screenwriters’ ideas have taken to social media to showcase their skills by sharing sequences from early drafts of the movies that never made it to the big screen. Just last week, another alternate take was revealed, but instead of being from one of the epic Avengers adventures, this pulse pounding piece of art is from the $1 billion bonanza that was Captain Marvel!
In Captain Marvel, Brie Larson plays Carol Danvers, a United States Air Force pilot who went missing back in the late 1980s after an accident with an experimental aircraft left her with superpowers and amnesia. She’s taken to outer space where the alien Kree Empire turns her into a super soldier in their war against the shapeshifting Skrulls. When Carol returns to Earth in 1995 after a mission gone wrong, she encounters then low-level S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury and rookie Phil Coulson, whom she befriends in her quest to learn the truth about her past.
While in the final film Carol and Nick form a buddy cop-style friendship over the course of their adventure, the two never fight, let alone come to blows. But a newly revealed piece of concept art exposed that things could have gone quite differently for the famously friendly duo. Marvel mainstay concept artist John Staub recently jumped on the Instagram bandwagon to show off some of his handy dandy artwork that he produced for the film.
In Staub’s posted pieces we see that at one point during the story’s development Carol and Nick battled it out hand-to-hand combat-style inside some kind of science lab.
While neither this location nor the fight scene appears in the final flick, it’s interesting to note that Carol is wearing her classic uniform here – an outfit she does not don until the third act of the finished movie. Nick Fury also has a different look reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson’s 90s aesthetic in the classic Academy-Award winning film Pulp Fiction. The young S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is also wearing some type of cybernetic enchantment apparatus over his arms, which we would assume allow him to go toe to toe in battle with the superpowered Captain Marvel.
Overall, these little windows into our own What If…? universe of Marvel movie making have been a delight to behold over these last few months. They allow us a peek behind the curtain of the creative process that fans might otherwise never be able to see. With all the rumors swirling around Captain Marvel 2 it’s fun to play the speculation game on what could be coming based on what could have been.