Captain America is no longer the only “Captain” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is now the kick-butt female superhero that MCU women-fans have been waiting on for a long time, but like all changes, this did not occur silently.

A female-led superhero movie from the MCU has been long in the making since the legendary Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) was first introduced in Iron Man 2. With this new movie, there was pushback from the mainly male audiences, whom comics where thought to be created for.

After the first showing of Captain Marvel, the film received horrible ratings from critics, and the media became weary about whether or not this movie was going to be successful. It was then found out that people were giving the movie a bad rating before they even saw it because of unknown reasons.

One of the possible reasons may be a quote from Brie Larson at the movie’s premiere. She stated that during the press conferences for her past movie, the critics were overwhelmingly white and male. Many men took this as an insult and made it their personal job to make sure Captain Marvel would fail.

They did not do very well, considering its opening weekend generated $500 million, making it the sixth biggest opening weekend ever.

Brie Larson wanted to get it across that in a heavily white male-dominated world, such as Hollywood and other professions, she wanted to see more of a diversity. She defended herself and said that she doesn’t want to take a chair away from anyone but pull up more chairs for all people.

Just as Stan Lee, creator of the MCU, stated while talking about Spider-Man, “anyone can wear the mask.” Anyone could be a superhero, and what the world needs is a bigger variety of superheros so all little kids, not matter their gender, race, religion or physique, can have someone just like them saving the day so they truly believe they can save the world too.