Ms. Marvel Star Iman Vellani Wants Fewer MCU Team-Ups After THE MARVELS, and She Has a Point
Maybe Kamala Khan doesn’t need another room full of superheroes. Maybe she just needs a great story of her own.
Iman Vellani has already bounced around several corners of the MCU as Kamala Khan, but when it comes to the future of Ms. Marvel, she’d like Marvel Studios to pull back on the massive team-ups and spend more time developing the character, her world, and the people around her.
Vellani recently talked about the future of Ms. Marvel during an appearance on the Revenge Of! podcast, explaining why she thinks Kamala works particularly well when the focus stays closer to home.
Of course, Vellani knows plenty about superhero team-ups. After making her MCU debut in the 2022 Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, she joined Brie Larson as Carol Danvers and Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau for 2023’s The Marvels, the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel.
While Vellani enjoys seeing Kamala cross paths with other Marvel heroes, she thinks the character’s greatest strength comes from the personality and supporting cast that make her individual stories so much fun.
“I think like if we’re talking about Ms. Marvel, like I think that’s a character who really succeeds in her own world,. Like they’ve been trying to bring her into the X-Men for so long in the comics now. And I think that’s fun, and I love seeing her interact with any other superhero, but I just love her own world.”
That’s something I completely agree with. There’s obviously a place for giant MCU crossovers, especially when Marvel has spent years building toward them, but not every superhero story needs to keep adding characters to the equation.
Some of the best superhero movies and stories are the ones that keep their focus tight and give the central character room to develop.
Once a movie has to juggle several heroes, villains, supporting characters, interconnected storylines, and whatever larger MCU business needs to be addressed, individual characters can easily get lost in the mix.
Kamala is especially suited for a smaller, character-driven story. I’ve always liked Ms. Marvel, and her comics were awesome because Kamala’s personality, family, friends, community, and perspective were such important parts of what made the character work. Vellani wants to see more of that reflected onscreen.
“I love her own cast of characters and like the personality and the way Kamala sees the world. I want that just amplified through the filmmaking, so yeah, I would maybe do less team-ups.”
I’m with her. Give Kamala an adventure where she gets to carry the story instead of immediately plugging her into another superhero roster. Team-ups can be a blast, but they become more exciting when we already care about each character individually.
Vellani has continued playing Kamala since The Marvels, returning to voice Ms. Marvel in the animated series Marvel Zombies. There are plenty of directions Marvel could take her from here, particularly given the character’s connections to other corners of the Marvel universe.
Still, Vellani’s argument for keeping things centered on Kamala makes a lot of sense. A smaller Ms. Marvel story could spend more time exploring how she sees being a superhero, how that affects her relationships, and what her life actually looks like when she isn’t surrounded by some of the most powerful people in the MCU.
Hopefully, whatever Marvel has planned for Kamala Khan gives Vellani the kind of material she’s talking about. Sometimes a superhero doesn’t need a bigger team. They just need more room to be themselves.