Season 2 of What If…? just wrapped, and as expected, it featured even more of Hayley Atwell’s Captain Carter, who battled Strange Supreme in the finale alongside new character Kahhori. It got into hilariously overpowered but fun territory with Carter at one point wielding Infinity Stone armor and Hela’s helmet.
Captain Carter has appeared across multiple episodes of What If in both seasons to the point where she’s more or less the singular series throughline, despite it being mostly an anthology. But at this point, it seems pretty clear that Captain Carter has earned a spot in the live action MCU, at least for a role in Secret Wars, the highest profile upcoming Avengers movie (it’s still unclear what’s going on with The Kang Dynasty now, post-Jonathan Majors).
Rather than just throwing a bunch of FOX-era X-Men and Spider-Man into the film, which I suppose they can also do, Carter has been properly built up through What If, and it’s a shame that the only time we actually got to see Hayley Atwell in the role in live action was the brief “Scarlet Witch kills The Illuminati” scene from Multiverse of Madness that was a pile of fan service. We had Patrick Stewart in the yellow Professor X chair, Black Bolt from the disastrous Inhumans show and of course, the fan cast Jon Krasinski as Reed Richards. But Atwell’s Captain Carter was also there, just long enough to get cut in half by her own shield. Very cool, anyway…
Yes, it’s time for her to get a chance to break out of her animated alter-ego and appear in the MCU in a way that isn’t as Steve’s love interest or a one-off cameo played for laughs. Hell, you could make the argument that she maybe would have made a better Cap replacement than Falcon, but we’re past that now (wherever Sam Wilson may be hiding in the MCU these years before Captain America 4). Others have said that Secret Wars should also bring Chris Evans’ Cap back to reunite with Carter if she’s in the film, but no. He and RDJ’s Stark need to stay dead for the MCU to have any kind of stakes at all.
There is a kind of weird backlash to Captain Carter among certain segment of the comic book movie crowd that is of course, based on really nothing. She leads a handful of What If episodes out of a dozen and a half and then again, is in about five minutes of one MCU movie where she’s immediately killed off. I’ve seen a lot of “this is so ridiculous!!” commentary about her final battle with Strange Supreme and using all the superweapons of the MCU but I mean, come on, that is literally the point of What If, to do zany things like that. No one’s complaining that Scarlet Witch can raise an army of zombies? And it’s not like Carter would bring Infinity War armor into Secret Wars or something.
Atwell recently surfaced in an extremely high profile role in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, opposite Tom Cruise, where she will return for the sequel. She was a standout there, and I mean, a standout if you’ve ever seen her in most other things as well. Granted, it seems unlikely we’d get a full-on live action Captain Carter movie, but a role in Secret Wars where she’s not murdered? That would be nice, and well-earned.
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