Audiences met Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, when she entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in both her own movie and during the Avengers war with Thanos. Brie Larson was cast as the fighter pilot turned Kree agent and seems to be the superlative casting choice for Danvers’ archetypical wayward persona. Captain Marvel has been around for decades, but the form in the latest MCU installment was bred into the comics just seven years ago.
Fans only got to see a glimpse of Denver’s powers in Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame which leaves a lot left to the imagination for fans who are familiar with her backstory. While fans have to wait to see how many more of her powers will make their way to the silver screen, she has a formidable list of abilities to choose from. To give some perspective, here are ten of Captain Marvel’s powers ranked from the least to the most impressive.
Updated on July 14th, 2022, by Shawn S. Lealos: With the MCU introducing audiences to both Monica Rambeau in WandaVision and Kamala Khan in Ms. Marvel, the next step for these characters is to unite with Carol Danvers Captain Marvel in the upcoming The Marvels movie. For those unfamiliar, before Carol became Captain Marvel in the comics, she went by the name Ms. Marvel, and around that same time, Monica became the new Captain Marvel. This connects all three of these strong female characters, with Carol clearly the most powerful of them all – at least for now. With fans getting to see more from Carol Danvers in the very near future, there are some more powers that have not come up yet in the movies that the MCU could add from the comics.
15 Decelerated Aging
While it doesn’t help much when it comes to battling bad guys or fighting in wars, Captain Marvel does have a form of decelerated aging. This basically is similar to someone like Wolverine. While everyone she knows will get older and die, she will age much slower and live much longer.
What is even more impressive is that in Ms. Marvel Vol. 2 #21, Carol learned about her healing ability based on merging with an alien known as Cru. According to the doctors working on her, she learned that her healing factor dwarfs even Wolvinere and Carol could remain in her prime forever.
14 Space Survival
Captain Marvel has the ability for self-sustenance. This means she doesn’t need to eat, sleep, breathe, or rest, thanks to her using the ambient energies in her surroundings. The ability not to need to breathe added to her immense durability means she can survive in space.
She also has the strength to fly in space, despite the lack of gravity. Much like heroes such as Thor, Carol can go into space and neither the cold nor lack of oxygen will cause her any discomfort at all.
13 Healing Factor
Carol Danvers has a healing factor that is as good as, if not better than Wolverine. She can also use absorbed energy to boost the healing factor to sustain herself in a fight no matter the damage she takes. This happened when a techno-organic alien merged with her and increased her already impressive powers.
The way this works is that Captain Marvel can rapidly heal any part of her body by focusing and bringing different forms of energy into her body. She can regenerate quickly from even devastating wounds suffered from even a nuclear detonation.
12 Ergokinetic Phasing
Ergokinetic phasing is a fancy way of describing Captain Marvel’s ability to phase through objects. This comes from her powers of energy manipulation, where she can absorb energies around her and then discharge them however she wants. In this case, it is a defensive mechanism.
Even if an enemy puts Carol into a trap that is guarded against her powers, she can even use the powers to ghost through the constructs. She basically uses her spirit projection to ghost through any binding and incarceration, and then she can escape almost anything.
11 Energy-Construct Creation
The energy-construct creation is very similar in design to Green Lantern’s powers. For Green Lantern characters, they use their rings to construct anything their mind can conjure up and then use it as a weapon. For Captain Marvel, she takes it one step further.
Carol needs to power ring or trinket, and she can create anything she wants by just absorbing the energy around her and then releasing it as an energy construct. She has used it to create an energy barrier for protection and can even make precise shapes, such as razor blades to cut through anything.
10 Super Strength
Superhero strength is a trait instilled in almost every comic hero, whether it’s Marvel, DC, or an Archie Comics character. Because of this, it’s understandable that this power might be somewhat insipid to fans. However, without super-strength, Captain Marvel’s assistance in the fight against Thanos would not have made as much of an impact.
Her strength at a minimum allows her to carry 92 tons because, as a Binary, she carries the full strength of a star. So, while this power may seem like a bit of a cinch, it’s definitely a necessary trait for her to possess.
9 Super Speed
In Avengers: Endgame, War Machine makes an inquiry about Captain Marvel and asks where she has been during Thanos’ tirade on Earth. Captain Marvel quickly answered, “There are a lot of other planets in the Universe. And unfortunately, they didn’t have you guys.”
The fact that Captain Marvel can travel at the speed of light is a helpful attribute for the superhero who crosses galaxies in order to protect planets. And, while she may show up late, it’s this ability that enables her to be “on-call” for any superhero legion, whether it be the Guardians of the Galaxy or the Avengers.
8 Flight
Carol Danvers was just an ordinary woman before her exposure to an explosion that left her armed with the powers of Kree. Before this incident, she served as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, with dreams of becoming a flight agent for NASA to appease her lure for space exploration.
The fact that Captain Marvel would come to possess the power of flight seems inevitable given her backstory. And no, she’s not the first superhero to harness flight abilities, but she is one of the few whose power of flight is not limited to the bounds of the earth, as she is just as capable of flying through outer space.
7 Immunity to Toxins
Carol Danvers was caught in the wrath of an explosion from the Psyche-Magnetron, a Kree-manufactured machine that’s initial purpose was to install superhero abilities into humans. As a result, Danvers became a Kree-human hybrid, which left her immune to toxins and poisons. This specific ability may have been incorporated into Captain Marvel’s storyline after her mentor and namesake, the former Mar-vell, met his demise from—of all things—cancer.
His nega-bands kept the harmful cells under control, however, the same golden wristlets prevented him from recovering from cancer. This new ability in the current Captain Marvel hints that her invulnerability makes her the most powerful of all the Avengers in that she might be impenetrable to earthly and cosmic ailments.
6 Super Stamina
On par with her powers of stellar strength, speed, and flight, Captain Marvel’s super stamina acts as the core that harnesses all of these powers together. While there is no doubt that Carol Danvers was in physically fit shape as an active military member, her biological stature was excessively altered when her DNA became infused with the powers of the Kree.
The ending result offered a heightened sense of stamina, which aids in her multi-universe travel as well as her cosmic awareness abilities.
5 Cosmic Awareness
The ability to host cosmic awareness stems from a superhero’s access to feel a change anywhere within the entire universe. This explains how Captain Marvel seems to know the unabating dangers happening all over the galaxy.
While this cosmic awareness is not definitely made known in the MCU, it begs the question of whether Captain Marvel was in on the Avenger’s end game that Doctor Strange foresaw in Infinity War.
4 Energy Projection and Absorption
Captain Marvel is able to utilize electromagnetic energy in large thanks to the Psyche-Magnetron that reconfigured her biological DNA. The remnants of the machine along with the powers of Mar-Vell created a power that allows Captain Marvel to bend metal objects at will. This certainly comes in handy when she meets her adversaries.
She can use this power to chuck anything from a car door to a semi-truck at her opponent. Likewise, Captain Marvel is able to absorb the power of the stars, giving her access to kinetic energy. Her body is able to process that energy and transform it to use it as she wishes, which is a power most superheroes can’t relate to.
3 Photon Fists
This has been the highlight of Captain Marvel’s superpowers in the MCU, but the films only touch the surface of what these babies can do. While a snarky Carol uses them to prove a point to Nick Fury, her photon blasts actually come directly from the internal energy she is able to access from the stars.
The power of her photon fists, while accessible at will, is difficult to control. To put it into perspective, her photon fists are not unlike the power of Thor’s Mjolnir. The only difference is that her source of power comes from within rather than an outside object.
2 Seventh Sense
In the earlier comic book versions of Carol Danvers, she was given the alias Ms. Marvel before being recategorized as the female Captain Marvel in 2012. In the former series, Ms. Marvel has what she dubbed as a “seventh sense,” which acted as a type of clairvoyance or “spidey sense.”
This supplementary sense warned her of impending danger which would come and go as quickly as her superhero garb. And while it seems that this seventh sense ability has been axed since the reinstatement of Captain Marvel, the writers of the MCU have yet to disclose whether or not this could be an added accessory for Captain Marvel’s cosmic “utility belt.”
1 Binary
Captain Marvel’s Binary powers are without a doubt her greatest asset. As the Binary, she is able to control any form of radiation or gravity. She can absorb energy, and she is able to manipulate her photonics blasts on a molecular level.
The Binary power was stripped from Captain Marvel comics after her rendezvous with Rogue, but it seems that MCU writers and producers are fixated on keeping this incredible superpower on Captain Marvel’s list of abilities as they work to make her one of the most powerful heroes in the Marvel Universe.
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