9. Jim Carrey Was Originally Meant To Cameo... Sort Of
New Line Cinema
When Carol Danvers first arrives on Earth she ends up crashing through the roof of a Blockbuster. Loads of references to nineties cinema are littered throughout the scene, including a cardboard cutout of James Cameron's True Lies. However, there was originally meant to be a completely different cutout in that scene, and it would've tied back into the conflict between the Kree and the Skrull.
In an interview with Empire, Ana Boden revealed that, instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger getting his head blown off (a move the actor apparently agreed to), it was meant to be Jim Carrey. Carrey was synonymous with nineties comedy, and one of his most famous efforts was The Mask, a comic book movie starring Carrey in the title role.
Carrey's green visage from that film does look somewhat like a Skrull, and so the original gag would've been to have Carol mistake Stanley Ipkiss for a Skrull agent. However, it soon became clear that Marvel couldn't secure the rights to use the film in time. In Boden's own words:
"We really wanted it to be The Mask, because of the green head... The idea is that she thinks it's a Skrull. We initially tried to get that but they wouldn't clear it."
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
