Captain Marvel Can Time Travel, According To Samuel L. Jackson

In the wake of all of our own Captain Marvel set visit coverage today, a different report from a separate set visit includes a jaw-dropping quote from star Samuel L. Jackson about Marvel Studios' new title character. Jackson, who plays a younger version of Nick Fury in the new movie, says Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) can time travel.

Wait. What?

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Jackson revealed a heretofore unseen superpower of Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel:

"She's pretty much the strongest character — in terms of someone with powers are able to do things — in the Marvel universe. So, for Carol Danvers to be that person and for Brie to become that person, it's gonna be a dynamite thing. I mean, [the Avengers] are up against some really, really tough odds right now — we saw throughout Infinity War – so now we know that we need something that's as powerful as Thanos. And at some point, we'll find out how powerful she is and all the things that she's capable of. She's one of the few people in the Marvel universe that can time travel, so..."

In the comics, Captain Marvel possesses super strength, the power of flight, durability, the power to absorb energy, and she can shoot photon blasts from her hands. While I'm not prepared to say that she's never time traveled a single time in the comics (since the character has been around in some form or another since the late 1960s), it's clear that Captain Marvel does not traditionally boast time travel as one of her standard superpowers.

So what's going on here? Is Marvel Studios taking liberties with the character and giving her a new skill set? Is Jackson just joking around? Is he possibly confused? Let's run through those options.

Maybe Captain Marvel actually does have the power to time travel in the MCU. But if that's the case, there's going to have to be a hell of an explanation for why she doesn't use that ability all the damn time to correct the wrongs that have taken place in the MCU. Why doesn't she go back and stop Thanos' snap from ever happening, or help the Avengers during the Battle of New York, or appear to Batman in a bizarre dream and tell him that Lois Lane is the key? (Wait, wrong movie universe.) Point being: time travel is a tough nut to crack, and it presents a whole load of questions that I'm not sure the Marvel movies want to have to answer.

There's also a chance Jackson was kidding. We weren't there when he said this quote, and things like tone and inflections are often lost in transcriptions. But Entertainment Tonight was there, and their headline says "Samuel L. Jackson Teases Nick Fury's Backstory and Captain Marvel's Ability to Time Travel". If he was joking and they knew he was just messing around, I'd hope they wouldn't have put the time travel part in the headline.

Is Jackson just confused? It's impossible to know, but if this was just a slip of the tongue, it's certainly understandable – this is the twenty-first movie in the MCU, and he's been around since the beginning. It's perfectly reasonable for a somebody to mix up the superpowers of the one billionth hero to show up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I like most of these movies, and I couldn't tell you what Vision's powers are.

Maybe Jackson means that Carol Danvers is one of the few Marvel characters who's strong enough to withstand the effects of time travel? We haven't seen how that might work in these films yet – maybe only the strongest can survive passing through time, taking regular humans out of the equation and leaving things in the hands of characters like Carol, Thor, and maybe Peter Quill?

Hopefully we'll find out more when Captain Marvel arrives in theaters on March 8, 2019.