Kevin Feige explains why Nick Fury waited until Infinity War to page Captain Marvel

After seeing Captain Marvel’s abilities, fans might be wondering why Nick Fury didn’t page Captain Marvel sooner. Kevin Feige revealed there’s a very good reason for that.

WARNING: This story contains spoilers for Captain Marvel.

In 1995, the Earth had Captain Marvel as its savior for just a few days. But given everything that’s gone down in the MCU since then, it’s safe to say that the Earth definitely could have used a lot more Captain Marvel after that.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see Nick Fury reach out to Carol Danvers until the very end of Avengers: Infinity War (over 20 years after they first met), just as he was being blown away to dust after Thanos’ snap. So, why did it take so long for Fury to page Carol?

For that answer, we have to look to Marvel Studio’s president, Kevin Feige. Speaking to /Film, he revealed quite matter-of-factly what took Fury so long, saying:

"Well, I’d say two things. One, she does say it’s gotta be a real emergency, right? Yeah… The other thing I’d say is how do you know he never hit it? How do we know he never pushed it before? We’ve never seen him push it before. That doesn’t mean he never did."

While Kevin Feige isn’t the master of teasing spoilers, it does seem curious as to why he might have said that second part. The fact that he even mentioned it in the first place makes us suspicious that Nick Fury may have actually paged Carol before; we just hadn’t seen in on screen.

If that’s true, the Battle of New York could have likely been the first time Fury actually paged her. Despite the small-scale attacks that happened in California with Tony Stark or in New Mexico with Thor, there had never been such a large terrorist attack on the Earth until the Chitauri descended upon New York.

Sure, Fury had his new team of heroes, but this was just a test run. We saw from the start that Fury had some pushback in assembling his team of Avengers. He had Captain America, Iron Man and even Thor as a bonus member, but there was no guarantee that they were going to get the job done when it came to defending the Earth. That’s also why we saw S.H.I.E.L.D. prioritize testing weapons with the power of the Tesseract (aka, Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S.) to protect the world from outside invaders. It’s a far cry from Mar-Vell wanting to use the Tesseract to help the Skrulls, but it’s what ended up happening nonetheless.

Still, with Tesseract-powered weapons as a backup plan to the Avengers, and Captain Marvel as a possible backup plan to all that, we’re lucky that things worked out at the end of the Avengers. Thus, it’s possible Nick Fury never had to call on Captain Marvel again, because he finally trusted his team of Avengers to be Earth’s mightiest heroes.

This scenario would be interesting to see played out in Avengers: Endgame, especially with talks of there being a scene where some Avengers go back in time to that fateful day in New York. If Kevin Feige actually is teasing a spoiler, we’d love to see a part where Fury pages Captain Marvel in New York — and Carol must explain why she never arrived during that time.

On the flip side of all that, it just may be that Fury never paged her at all until Infinity War. During the Battle of New York, he could have held back on paging Captain Marvel because he wholeheartedly trusted that the Avengers Initiative would work. Despite S.H.I.E.L.D.’s council not believing in him, Fury without a doubt believed that his heroes were worth keeping. And of course, he was right… up until Thanos arrives, that is.

Hopefully in Avengers: Endgame, we’ll get some answers as to whether Fury paged Captain Marvel before Infinity War or not. As a protector of many galaxies, she likely had a lot to deal with since she last arrived on Earth, and Fury knows that well. Not to mention, it’d be better to get those answers now, rather than wait for Captain Marvel’s sequel in a couple of years.