Annette Bening Captain Marvel

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains SPOILERS for ‘Captain Marvel’ so proceed with caution.

Fans have been speculating and it turns out some of them were right.  Marvel has been typically tight-lipped about ‘Captain Marvel’, but as the film creeps closer to its March release date, more information continues to surface.  In mid-January, the toys started to hit stores and revealed that Jude Law‘s mysterious character was actually Yon-Rogg.  Now it seems a child’s storybook has uncovered the identity of Annette Bening’s character.

Bening was glimpsed in the trailers for ‘Captain Marvel’ speaking in a comforting way to Brie Larson‘s Carol Danvers, or “Vers” as she is known to the Kree.  It was clear, even from this small clip, that Bening was playing a great leader, or perhaps a counselor of sorts.

But now we know…

Bening is portraying the Supreme Intelligence.  In the comics, the Supreme Intelligence… er, does not look like Annette Bening, that’s for sure.  It usually appears as a bloated giant green head, floating in a tube of liquid or energy, with a bunch of tentacles or tubes coming out of its top.  (It kind of depends on who draws it as to what they more resemble.)

Indeed, the Supreme Intelligence houses the intelligence of the Kree’s greatest minds and leaders, after they die.  While it was originally meant to simply be a storage unit for this knowledge, it gained sentience and took control of the empire.

Transforming this blobby green floating head into Annette Bening falls in line with a similar alteration in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2’, in which Kurt Russell portrayed Ego the Living Planet, which, in the comics, was actually an enormous planet with a face, complete with a beard.  In both cases, these castings help make these characters a little easier to take seriously, because while planet-sized heads may have seemed like a good idea in the sixties, they now seem a little… silly, to put it mildly.

What do you think of Annette Bening playing a humanized version of the Supreme Intelligence?

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, ‘Captain Marvel’ stars Brie Larson, Annette Bening, Gemma Chan, Mckenna Grace, Clark Gregg, Djimon Hounsou, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn, Lee Pace, and Rune Temte and blasts off in theaters on March 8, 2019.