Avengers: Endgame - How Every Main Character Will Be Totally Different
11. Captain Marvel
Then
This one depends somewhat on a little presumption, but we have enough in the marketing for Captain Marvel's own movie to know that we're supposed to believe in her as the new Great Hope. In fact, ever since she was announced as coming to MCU, we were all primed to expect her to be the most powerful entity we'd ever seen.
The trailers we've seen so far seem to suggest that much to be true: putting aside the narrative detail we don't yet know, we've seen her blasting energy out of her hands almost casually, fighting a space armada seemingly and going Super Sayan. In other words, fundamentally, she's been presented as the real deal.
Now
Even despite all of the hype, Captain Marvel cannot come into Endgame as a God-like power who can click the universe back to being fine. Something has to change, because otherwise, her appearance removes all dramatic tension from the film. If someone is THAT powerful, there's no way they can fail.
Luckily, that's not going to happen, because the Russos have already revealed (to CinemaBlend) that they have a plan to hamstring her to level the playing field in the interest of the story:
"It's always a concern of ours about overpowering characters, because the reason that people relate to these characters is their humanity, and that they’re flawed. And the reason we love working so much with Captain America was that he was limited, and his heart was his superpower, you know? So we're all acutely aware of the dangers of having an overly powerful character. [But] we like sensitive storytelling, so… we found a thoughtful way through it."
In other words, they're going to make her vulnerable and compromise her powers in some way. So she might be super powerful, but something will be in the way of her realising those powers fully:
"That's what kind of fires us up, I think, on a storytelling level, to be honest with you. Because when you do have powerful characters, you have to work that much harder to find their vulnerabilities and complexities. And Joe was mentioning on a storytelling level… and keep the stakes high! Because that’s where those characters are vulnerable. And actually, that makes for great drama, and you run in that direction. As storytellers, that's been one of the most fun things we've had working with these characters is figuring out ways into them where they are vulnerable and they aren't all powerful."