As Comic-Cons go, 2017’s was pretty light on major comic-book movie news. One of the few concrete bits of info we did get this year came during Marvel’s panel and concerns the future of the studio’s big new superhero, Captain Marvel. We already knew the film was due in 2019, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, and that Oscar winner Brie Larson has been cast in the role of Carol Danvers, heroic Air Force pilot turned intergalactic protector. And we learned last weekend that the film is going to be set in the 1990s, before the events of Iron Man, and features the Skrulls as its main villains.

After the panel, Comicbook.com got a bit more important info out of Infinity War co-director Joe Russo, who revealed, matter-of-factly, that Larson’s Carol Danvers is “not in Avengers 3.” (That’s Avengers: Infinity War for the pedants out there.) Russo didn’t confirm or deny that Captain Marvel would appear in Avengers 4, which is due in theaters just a few months after Captain Marvel in the summer of 2019.

Here’s my completely unsourced theory about all this. Captain Marvel is set in the 1990s. It involves the Skrulls, a race of shape-changing aliens. One of the biggest Skrull storylines of all time is called Secret Invasion, where it’s discovered that some of the Earth’s biggest heroes had been replaced by Skrulls for years, acting as sleeper agents ahead of a full-on invasion. It seems highly plausible that Danvers gets defeated and captured by the Skrulls, then she is rescued and/or breaks out and returns in Avengers 4. Heck, the fourth movie could even be called Avengers: Secret Invasion. How else are they going to explain Captain Marvel hanging out and doing superhero stuff in the ’90s and then missing out on three full phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? We’ll find out when Captain Marvel opens in theaters on March 8, 2019.

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