As the first Marvel movie to hit theaters after Stan Lee’s demise, fans were wondering how Captain Marvel would honor the iconic writer. That question was answered as soon as the familiar Marvel Studios intro sequence began playing onscreen. The entire sequence highlighted Lee’s cameos throughout the MCU before ending with a title card reading “Thank you, Stan.” While speaking with /Film, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige explained how the tribute came to be.
“We’ve been thinking for a number of years, very rarely and not that often, what would we do if, what would we do when, and we had certainly hoped it would be decades from now,” said Feige. “But that the films themselves are the tribute, the films themselves are what we worked so hard on to do right by his creations and the creations of all of his collaborators and co-creators. And because Captain Marvel was the first one since his passing, we want it to kick the movie right away off with a tribute that feels celebratory as opposed to mournful.”
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“We’d been told by people close to Stan that he didn’t want people mourning or being sad, he wanted to celebrate,” continued Feige. “That was something that came together soon after he passed. And our visual development group did all those beautiful sketches at the top of it. Then of course, we put in all the cameos…There’s even some B-roll of him with our cast and our filmmakers. It’s not just clips from the movies in that logo.”
Lee’s Captain Marvel presence obviously wasn’t limited to the opening credits. He was able to film one of his trademark cameos for the film before he passed away. As Carol Danvers searches a train, Lee appears to be practicing his lines from Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. According to Feige, this was the logical thing to do.
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“That was the idea a long time ago when the script was going together,” said Feige. “How do we integrate 1995 Stan? And the idea while making this movie and developing this movie, we sort of had lists of everything that happened in every year of the early nineties. And his cameo Mallrats was a big one…I don’t remember exactly who had the idea. I think it was [co-directors] Anna [Boden] and Ryan [Fleck] who had the idea. That he was looking at a Mallrats script, and I spoke to [Mallrats writer/director] Kevin Smith and got his sign off on.”
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