Previously I wrote about how I think Disney is seeing if they can predictably manipulate the talk about some of their movies. I still think that is going on with Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. Though the more I observe the discussion around these movies the more I think there may also be some bet going on with the Disney Execs. If you remember there was a lot of talk from the people behind The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi that the problem was "people" (read men) didn't like female leads, this supposedly led to the outcry surrounding those two movies. I think someone in the back of the room suggested that maybe it was the way the female leads had been talked about, and the way the character was not fully fleshed out. This lone voice of reason was either removed from the team, or given a cookie and told to be quite. I think Disney is throwing out a lot of manipulation surrounding Brie Larson and Endgame to see if people will react in a negative way to the movie. And every review I've seen, even if they complain about Larson, says this movie does a good bit for the fans and is worth watching. I'm a bit surprised by the reaction, I was worried that a lot of people would allow their dislike of Brie Larson to have a major impact on how they talked about Endgame.

I'm going to flesh out my theory a bit more here.

I think Brie Larson was picked for Captain Marvel because of her inexperience with super hero movies. Disney would have had a bit more trouble getting Scarlett Johansson to hit some of the talking points that Larson will freely discuss. Johansson has been doing this long enough that she knows what things stand a good chance of rankling fans. Larson is young enough that she is completely inundated with the ideology that Disney wants her to display, she literally doesn't understand how some of what she says and does can come across as asinine, inane, drivel. The reactions we see from the other actors (Hemsworth, and Renner) is most likely that they simply refuse to go there and they are annoyed that Larson doesn't get why doing so is a problem. There was a day that experienced actors could take a new actor under their wing and help them learn how to deal with things like this. But now that is frowned on pretty heavily because you are "holding people back with outdated ideas". It would be nice if Larson could grow a bit from this, and maybe given some time she can. I'm not sure if there is much of a future for Captain Marvel now, unless they want to reboot Rogue from X-Men and have here steal Marvel's powers (like in the comics). The experiment for Disney here is to contrast Marvel against Black Widow or Scarlet Witch standalone films where they avoid a lot of the same types of discussions and see how they do. In fact I fully expect to see one of these movies come out with the talking points being that they focused on being true to the origin/side story of the specific character as much as possible and attempted to leave the politics out. I'm not sure it will make much difference at this point but they may try and see how people react. Again if this works they will start to use the same strategies to control discourse around other movies and use it do discredit any detractors that take the bait. This also gives them the opportunity to test the idea presented by the Star Wars department that the complaints are only because of the female leads.

Time will tell if I'm right about this, right now I'd place odds at about 50%. So I may be wrong and this is just the way Disney will be from now on.