Marvel has plans for Kamala Khan, the popular Ms. Marvel - and the studio would be wise to introduce her in a Captain Marvel film. Created in 2013, Kamala Khan remains Marvel’s foremost “Legacy Hero,” a popular and beloved character. She’s an everyman hero in the mold of Peter Parker, a teenage Pakistani American from Jersey with shapeshifting powers. Khan won plaudits as Marvel’s first Muslim character to headline her own comic.

Marvel originally intended to pitch Ms. Marvel as a 10-issue limited series, and writer G. Willow Wilson even had a three-issue exit strategy in case the book was canceled due to low numbers of pre-orders. Writing on her personal blog, Wilson admitted she didn’t expect the book to succeed. At the time, it was a given that any book featuring a character without a 20-year history would fail.

But Ms. Marvel found her niche and became something of a cultural icon. In 2015, the Freedom Defense Initiative - an anti-Islamic extremist group - purchased ads to be displayed across San Francisco’s buses. In response, street artists defaced the ads with pictures of Kamala Khan, with the hero making statements like, “Free Speech Isn’t a License to Spread Hate.” A year later, the Ms. Marvel comic won the prestigious Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics at the Long Beach Comic Expo. And Kamala Khan remains one of Marvel’s most popular “Legacy Heroes” to this day, even acting as a leader in The Champions. It seems Marvel Studios has noticed Kamala’s success, as Kevin Feige has recently confirmed Marvel Studios has plans for Kamala Khan. Given he announced this while taking interviews about Captain Marvel, it looks as though Kamala could be part of the Captain Marvel franchise - an approach that makes perfect sense.

  • This Page: Kamala Khan is Tied to Captain Marvel Page 2: Kamala Khan is not a Sidekick

Kamala Khan is Tied to Captain Marvel

In the comics, Kamala Khan is introduced as a sort of “superhero fangirl,” an everyday character who idolizes Carol Danvers. Kamala doesn’t know it, but she actually possesses the Inhuman gene, and upon exposure to Terrigenesis gains fantastic shapeshifting powers. Her powerset is pretty entertaining - she can shrink, grow, shapeshift, or stretch. Inspired by Captain Marvel, Kamala took up the codename “Ms. Marvel,” and even adopted Carol’s old logo in homage to her hero.

The MCU’s version of Kamala Khan will have to be slightly different. For one thing, Carol Danvers seems to be skipping the “Ms. Marvel” name altogether, and also seems to be jumping straight to the Hala star as a symbol rather than the lightning bolt. Meanwhile, Marvel Studios is unlikely to introduce Kamala as an Inhuman. The studio passed on the Inhumans concept, allowing Marvel Television to develop it as a less-than-successful TV series. Heavily criticized, Inhumans was canned after one season. There’s no way Marvel Studios will want to imply a link to the Inhumans, a troubled idea that’s only been developed on the small screen.

Whatever Kamala’s MCU origin may turn out to be, though, the core of her relationship to Captain Marvel - a hero worship that gradually becomes tainted by the reality of experience - will no doubt remain. That means Kamala Khan’s big-screen debut really has to be in a Captain Marvel film. Given the first Captain Marvel will be set in the ’90s, it’s more likely she’ll appear in the inevitable sequel.

Page 2: Kamala Khan is not a Sidekick

Kamala Khan is not a Sidekick

The question is, how should the Captain Marvel sequel treat Kamala Khan? There are two possible approaches. The first is to treat Kamala as a sidekick, a close friend of Carol Danvers who tends to appear in the Captain Marvel movies. It’s an approach Marvel has traditionally taken with characters like War Machine, Falcon, and even Black Widow. The sidekick typically operates as a foil for the main hero, and is not expected to be strong enough as a concept to star in their own film.

The second option, though, is to treat Kamala Khan as a partner. Marvel is trying that approach out with this year’s Ant-Man & the Wasp. “Maybe you just need someone watching your back,” Scott Lang’s daughter Cassie tells him in the trailers, “like a partner.” That line of dialogue has been repeated in both trailers, hammering the point home. Wasp is no sidekick; she is Ant-Man’s equal, and frankly in some circumstances she’s actually better than him. “Ant-Man and the Wasp, teamin’ up,” Scott declared in the second trailer, proving he’d gotten the message.

That would be a better approach for Kamala Khan. She may be inspired by Carol Danvers, but the character’s core concept is very different. As G. Willow Wilson explained on her blog:

Kamala Khan isn’t successful because she’s a teenage character with super-powers. Rather, she’s popular precisely because she embodies specific concepts and ideas, and exists within a fully-fleshed-out world of her own. For Kamala to only exist within Captain Marvel’s orbit would be to diminish her, to fail to appreciate what it is that makes her work as a character and as an ideal. It’s true that Kamala’s hero worship of Carol Danvers means she’s best introduced in the sequel, but she can’t be relegated to the role of sidekick.

“We are at a point in history when the role of religion is at a tremendous inflection point. What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this. Nobody could have predicted or planned for that.”

The Future of Ms. Marvel

The future of the MCU is both young and diverse; Phase 4 heroes include Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, and Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel. Given that’s the case, Kamala Khan fits in perfectly. Established as a hero in a Captain Marvel film, she really should then go on to star in her own solo movie. This would allow the MCU to explore Kamala’s world in the kind of depth we’ve seen in the comics, to flesh out her character arcs, and to truly sell this new “everyman” hero.

Looking beyond that, though, it’s clear the Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel brands should really be strongly tied together. In recent months, Marvel insiders have talked a great deal about an all-female superhero movie, similar to the A-Force concept toyed with in the comics. That may well be the ultimate direction the Captain Marvel films take. Just as Captain America: Civil War was really an Avengers movie by another name, it’s possible the end of the Captain Marvel trilogy would actually be an all-female team film, with Carol Danvers and Ms. Marvel at the forefront of it.

In November 2017, Kevin Feige revealed that Marvel has “another 22 movies on the docket.” Incredibly, Feige recently noted that he’s already “had meetings” about films to release in 2024 and 2025. These plans are surely subject to change, especially if Disney’s proposed purchase of the bulk of 21st Century Fox is approved by regulators. The acquisition would bring the X-Men and the Fantastic Four into the MCU. Given all these things are the case, the fact Marvel has plans for Kamala Khan doesn’t mean she’s going to be introduced in the next year or so. It does, however, suggest that Marvel has seen Kamala’s potential, and we can only hope she’ll make her MCU debut soon.

More: The Spider-Man Sequel Should Introduce Ms. Marvel

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