Don’t listen to the haters, Brie Larson is one of the most valuable players in the MCU’s arsenal. She made her triumphant franchise debut back in 2019’s Captain Marvel — which earned $1.1 billion at the global box office, don’t forget — followed that up with a key supporting role in Avengers: Endgame, aka the biggest Marvel movie ever made, and she’s since blown minds with cameos in Shang-Chi and Ms. Marvel.
And yet rumors have always insisted that there’s apparently problems behind the scenes between the actress and the studio — remember those claims that Larson was clashing with her co-stars on The Marvels, when the Oscar-winner is clearly as thick as thieves with Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris. The wildest crackpot conspiracy theory, though, sprung up this past April when it went around that Emilia Clarke was being brought in to replace Larson as Captain Marvel.
This was nothing but hot air, as the confusion seemed to stem from a misreading of the fact Clarke was playing a recast Captain Marvel character in Secret Invasion, specifically Talos’ daughter, G’iah. Ironically, however, the Secret Invasion finale just came perilously close to making this gonzo bit of internet gossip 100 percent MCU canon.
As you can’t have missed by now, G’iah got an upgrade in Secret Invasion‘s sixth episode when she went from Super-Skrull to Super-Duper-Skrull by inheriting the powers of practically every Avenger ever thanks to The Harvest. Naturally, Carol Danvers’ abilities came in the most handy in her battle against Gravik, with their big fight featuring a lot of epic shots of Clarke borrowing from Larson’s iconography and making a superhero pose while glowing with fiery energy or bolting through the air like a fireball.
We have so many questions about what happens next with G’iah and whether The Harvest powers are permanent or not, but as it stands, she has to be the most powerful character in the MCU and genuinely could take over as Captain Marvel from Carol Danvers if Larson ever feels the need to exit the franchise. Given that it’s a series about crazy conspiracy theories turning out to be true, it’s the height of irony that Secret Invasion is threatening to do just that itself.