Last week, Marvel Studios dumped a load of announcements on movie fans about its Phase Three projects. Among the good news was the announcement of the first recent Marvel movie to feature a female lead, “Captain Marvel.”

Appropriately, the current Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, is the first female character to take on the name and powers of flight, enhanced strength and the ability to shoot energy bursts out of her hands.

She is also, in her non-superhero life, a pilot.

Basically, she sounds awesome.

There’s no word yet on casting, but the movie, set for release in depressingly far-away July 2018, does have the opportunity to cast any number of late-20s early-30s actresses.

According to Vox, an internet blogging platform, Danvers entered the Marvel comics universe as a love interest and transitioned into the Ms. Marvel comics with a similar power set as above, but an unfortunate tendency to develop a headache, commit thrilling heroics in an altered mindstate, then snap back into her Danvers persona without any idea what she’d just done.

After a seriously disturbing rape-centric storyline as part of the Avengers and a new super-identity as cosmic entity “Binary,” Danvers became part of a universe where the hopes and desires of superheroes became reality, according to Vox.

It makes a kind of comic-book sense, then, that Danvers operates in this incarnation as “Captain Marvel,” the name of her first love interest.

Danvers has undergone a series of screwed-up storylines in the male-dominated comic industry, but her current series defines her through her ambition.

Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has given the character a sense of agency that she lacked in previous years. And although Deconnick told ABC News that she doesn’t know any more about the movie than the average fan, her influence on the character recently defines an interestingly flawed, eminently watchable character better than years of comics before her.

There’s only one caveat to this announcement that I can see: apparently Marvel thinks it’s off the hook for female-led movies now that it has one in the works.

Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios president, told Entertainment Weekly that the chances of Scarlett Johansson getting her own standalone Black Widow movie are extremely low.

Apparently, since Marvel is currently trying to start a bunch of new franchises, Black Widow’s individual story is once again being put on the backburner.

“The plans we have for her throughout the rest of the Avengers saga is very, very big,” Feige said. “So instead of taking her out, instead of doing a prequel, which we haven’t done yet, we’re continuing the forward momentum and continuity of the cinematic universe of which Widow is a key, key part.”

A great many of the male Avengers have managed movies set in between the Avengers installments, so that argument doesn’t go very far with me. But for now, adding a new woman to the Marvel movie-verse can’t be a bad thing.

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