The Secrets Captain Marvel Reveals About Nick Fury And The Avengers

Captain Marvel has finally arrived in theaters--and is earning big bucks at the box office--marking the final release before Avengers: Endgame arrives. The new movie provides a retro-origin story for Carol Danvers herself, just as you'd expect, but it does much more than that. It not only introduces the Kree and Skrulls, but also serves as a deep dive into the history of both Nick Fury and the Avengers Initiative.

Even after watching Captain Marvel, there is a lot we still don't know about the untold stories surrounding the MCU's shadowy past, and that's undoubtedly by design; some things will always remain mysteries, while there are future movies to fill in the gaps. But with our newfound knowledge, we can start putting some of the pieces together and getting some answers--hell, we've even got some answers to questions we wouldn't have thought to ask in the first place.

Do you know what Nick Fury's taste in music is like? How about his middle name? Don't worry, because you're about to. (Beware, there are spoilers ahead.)

Sure, it may seem inconsequential written out like that, but we're heading straight for Avengers: Endgame in a matter of weeks, so every little bit counts, no matter how small--and make no mistake, some of it is very, very small. Other things--what happened to Nick Fury's eye?--are ultimately unimportant but still might be something you've been wondering for years.

Of course details about Fury and the idea for the Avengers aren't the only things to come out of Captain Marvel--go check out what those major Skrull changes could mean, where the Tesseract has been, what's going on with Goose the cat, and what actually happened in the post-credits scenes. Then, once you've brushed up on all your facts and figures, start working on polishing up your Endgame theories.

Infinity War's mysterious post-credits pager has an origin story and it's actually pretty mundane. Throughout Captain Marvel, Carol proves that Kree technology is amazingly adaptable and powerful, able to modify Earth's clunky '90s tech like payphones without much trouble. She modifies Nick Fury's normal, mundane pager to give him the ability to contact her when he needs it, mentioning that it should reach her across extreme cosmic distances. Not bad for something so outdated by today's standards!

We got a first real look into Fury's MCU backstory in this movie, and while most of it remains mysterious, there were some significant hints dropped about his time as a spy and government agent before he joined SHIELD. This probably isn't all that surprising, considering just who Nick is and what we've seen him do over the last 10 years of movies, but still, it was nice to hear it straight from the source.

You can now scold the ex-director of SHIELD with the authority of a disapproving mother by using his full name: Nicholas Joseph Fury.

We get to spend some time with both Fury and Coulson in all their digitally de-aged glory, which gives us some idea of their shared history. Fury's obviously Coulson's superior, so he started with SHIELD a bit earlier, but we see enough to realize that they were both relatively junior agents around Captain Marvel's time in the mid 1990s, meaning they probably took up their positions within a few years of one another.

And who can blame him? Sure, the cat he hangs out with in this particular movie just so happens to be a vicious, cosmically powerful Flerken, but look, sometimes these things just happen. If only Samuel L. Jackson, the actor, felt the same.

Directly related to his love of cats, Fury's eyepatch finally got an origin story--and it's really weird. Rather than losing his eye in some sort of badass firefight or crazy superhero-adjacent action sequence, Fury now wears an eye patch because he got scratched in the face by a Flerken. No wonder he's kind of secretive about it.

Carol may not be an official member of the Avengers just yet, but she not only helped inspire Fury to start forming the project back in 1995, she also gave it the name. Fury came up with the name "Avengers," after seeing a photo of Carol before the accident that caused her to leave Earth--Carol "Avenger" Danvers was apparently her callsign in the Air Force. Prior to the photo, Fury was going to call the project the "Protector Initiative," which, we have to admit, does not sound as catchy.

The name "Project Pegasus" might not ring any bells if you haven't gone back and revisited some of the older MCU movies in a while, but it's been whispered about since all the way back in Iron Man 2. We've known from the start that it was a joint effort between SHIELD and the US government to study the Tesseract after it was recovered from the ocean by Howard Stark--but it turns out mankind wasn't alone in their efforts. We can't be sure just how long the Kree had been monitoring the Tesseract before Mar-Vell became directly involved with the project, but she certainly had a hand in some of the project's biggest advancements before her death.

Interestingly enough, Carol is never called Captain Marvel directly through the movie, but the name "Marvel" is dropped more than once--sometimes when talking about Mar-Vell herself, but also while Fury is professing his love for the '60s girl group the Marvelettes. He even does a fantastic rendition of "Please Mr. Postman," one of their major hits.