Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel have a lot of similarities beyond their respective heroes’ military titles. They’re both franchise starters that introduced extremely important characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Both characters are soldiers of their respective governments who learn to distrust authority and embrace their own moral code. Both movies are period pieces that establish what the MCU was like before the main timeline of the rest of the movies. Both characters also wind up working with Nick Fury, and both film involves a hunt for the Tesseract.

But despite these similarities, there are some very big differences between Captain America and Captain Marvel that go a long way towards explaining the reception of each of these two films. All of the issues really stem from the way each movie introduces their respective title characters, and how one immediately reveals its hero as a character we like, and the other basically keeps the character a complete mystery for much of the film. The video below by ScreenCrush’s Ryan Arey breaks down all those similarities and differences:

If you liked this video comparing Captain America and Captain Marvel, check out some more of our videos below, including our essay on what makes Iron Man works (and makes Man of Steel not work), our theory about Obadiah Stane and Hydra, and our video on a great deleted scene from Avengers: Infinity War. Plus, there’s tons more over at ScreenCrush’s YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe to catch all our future episodes.

Gallery — The Evolution of Every Avengers Costume, From Movie to Movie:

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