The MarvelsSave

The film opens with three separate storylines establishing each of the three leads. Carol Danvers — Captain Marvel — is in deep space investigating a series of unstable wormholes that have been disrupting cosmic travel routes. Monica Rambeau, now a S.A.B.E.R. agent specializing in dimensional-energy phenomena (and the daughter of Carol's late best friend Maria Rambeau), is investigating a parallel anomaly from Earth's orbit. Kamala Khan, a sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American Captain Marvel superfan from Jersey City, has just received a mysterious bangle from her grandmother and is testing the strange light-construct powers it grants her in her bedroom. The three women suddenly switch places mid-action when their powers activate simultaneously, with Carol appearing in Kamala's bedroom, Kamala in Carol's spaceship, and Monica in the void of space.

The three figure out that their entangled energy signatures are now linked: every time any of them uses their powers, all three swap locations. The mechanism is connected to the bangle Kamala wears and to the missing twin of that bangle, which has fallen into the hands of Dar-Benn — a Kree warrior commanding the remnants of the Kree Empire that Captain Marvel destabilized in her first solo film. Dar-Benn has been using the bangle to systematically tear cosmic resources from other planets to repair Hala, the Kree homeworld whose biosphere has collapsed since Carol's earlier intervention against the Supreme Intelligence. She blames Carol for the catastrophe and has dedicated her life to stripping other worlds of water, atmosphere, and starlight to feed Hala.

Carol, Monica, and Kamala have to coordinate their entangled powers to stop Dar-Benn before she can destabilize a third planet. They train together aboard Carol's ship, gradually learning to use their entanglement strategically — choreographing fights so that one of them appearing in another's location actually helps rather than disrupts. The film's most playful sequence is a musical-number infiltration of an Aladna royal court, where Carol's secret husband Prince Yan reveals their political marriage of convenience and the team has to perform a song-and-dance number in court costume to maintain his cover. Park Seo-joon plays Prince Yan in what becomes a brief but memorable appearance.

The team confronts Dar-Benn at a planet she is in the process of strip-mining. The fight is intense but Dar-Benn escapes after stealing significant additional cosmic energy. She heads next to Earth — specifically to S.A.B.E.R. station, where Monica's mother Maria Rambeau had been the commander before her death from cancer years earlier. Dar-Benn intends to absorb the station's energy reserves and then continue her cosmic harvest. The team intercepts her at S.A.B.E.R. station. Nick Fury, who has been running the station's command, helps coordinate the evacuation of trapped Skrull civilians who had been refugees there. Dar-Benn, in her final moments, attempts to absorb the entire sun's energy.

Dar-Benn is killed. The cosmic damage from her absorption attempt has, however, opened a tear in space-time that threatens to swallow Earth. The only way to close the tear is for Monica to fly into it and use her dimensional-energy powers from inside. Monica volunteers. She enters the tear. The rift closes. Monica is gone. The team's grief is interrupted by Kamala's quiet realization that Monica is alive somewhere on the other side. The film closes on Carol returning to Earth and quietly approaching the home of an aged Maria Rambeau alternative — except this is not Maria. It is a different timeline, and the woman in the photograph on the mantle is alive and adult and bears a strong resemblance to Monica.

The mid-credits scene is the film's most shocking reveal: Monica wakes up alive on the other side of the dimensional tear in a hospital. The woman attending to her is a recognizable face — Hank McCoy / Beast (Kelsey Grammer reprising his role from the X-Men film franchise). The implication is that Monica has crossed into the Fox X-Men universe, formally bridging the MCU and the Fox X-Men films at a structural level. Beast informs Monica that she is in an alternate reality and that her sudden arrival has triggered a cosmic-scale anomaly. The post-credits scene shows Kamala recruiting the next-generation Young Avengers, going to the Avengers compound to find the new generation forming.

The Marvels grossed $206 million globally on a $270 million budget — the lowest-grossing MCU film in history. The financial disappointment was widely interpreted as a sign of audience superhero fatigue, post-pandemic moviegoing patterns, and the picture's challenging task of integrating three different lead characters with different prior story histories (Carol from Captain Marvel, Monica from WandaVision, and Kamala from Ms. Marvel — a Disney+ series most theatrical audiences had not seen). Director Nia DaCosta, the youngest woman ever hired to direct an MCU film, brought a tonally different register that some critics praised and others found jarring next to the franchise's typical action structure. Iman Vellani's Kamala Khan was the breakout: her enthusiastic teenage fan-perspective gave the picture its warmest material, and the character has since been positioned for a continued lead role in the Young Avengers project announced for 2026.

The film's box-office failure prompted significant industry discussion. Was it a sign of broader Marvel fatigue? A consequence of the Disney+ series prerequisites alienating casual audiences? An artifact of poor marketing? The answer was likely all three. Brie Larson's role was significantly smaller than in her first solo film, partly to share screen time with the other leads but also reflecting Marvel's apparent uncertainty about how to keep building Carol's story after her central role in Endgame. Teyonah Parris's Monica Rambeau was given the film's emotional weight (her final cosmic sacrifice), but her transition from a character-actor in WandaVision to a co-lead in a major theatrical release left some audiences without enough context. The post-credits Beast cameo, while exciting to fans, also signaled a major plot redirection that may not pay off until the X-Men's full return to the MCU later in Phase 6 or 7.

The Marvels did, however, contain genuine highlights even within its disappointing reception. Iman Vellani's enthusiastic charm in nearly every scene she appeared in helped the picture maintain a warmth that distinguished it from the more somber Phase 4 entries. The Aladna musical sequence — a deliberate, knowing absurdity in the middle of a cosmic-scale superhero film — became one of the year's most-discussed cinematic moments. The cat-Flerken sequence aboard the S.A.B.E.R. station, in which dozens of seemingly ordinary cats absorb evacuating personnel through their hyperdimensional mouths to safety while a Barbra Streisand song plays, was widely cited as one of the funniest setpieces in any MCU film. The film's blend of unconventional tonal choices with conventional superhero structure ultimately produced a divisive but distinctive entry that has since gained a small but devoted defender community among Marvel fans.