Captain Marvel clearly cut some scenes featuring Ronan the Accuser and the Kree Starforce - but why did Marvel choose to do that? Both the promotional photos and the trailers for Captain Marvel attempted to persuade viewers that the Kree were a race of noble warrior heroes, defending the cosmos against the ruthless Skrulls. Carol Danvers was to be introduced as a member of the Starforce, an elite Kree task-force who were fighting on the front lines of the Kree-Skrull War.

Of course, anyone familiar with the comics saw through the deception quite quickly. Marvel had openly admitted that their script was based on “The Kree-Skrull War,” a comic book arc where neither race were really the good guys. All of Captain Marvel’s teammates were villains in the comics, and Marvel’s refusal to confirm the identity of the Starforce Commander led most to deduce that Jude Law was playing Yon-Rogg, one of Captain Marvel’s greatest foes. It wasn’t hard to work out that the Kree weren’t the heroes Carol thought they were.

Surprisingly, there’s some evidence that the Kree Starforce were originally a bigger part of Captain Marvel’s plot - and so was Ronan the Accuser. In September 2018, a series of story details about Captain Marvel were revealed to kickoff the film’s marketing campaign. Crucially, first look images showed Yon-Rogg and Ronan standing side by side in what can now be recognized as Starforce’s tower on Hala; another image showed the two Kree military leaders greeting the assembled Starforce members for a briefing of some kind. It’s clear that Ronan originally worked more closely with Starforce, perhaps even joint-commanding the mission to Torfa.

Over on Reddit, now-deleted comments from user BrandonAUS - who claims to have worked on Captain Marvel as a visual effects artist - confirmed that scenes had been cut:

Amusingly enough, according to BrandonAUS, the person Yon-Rogg most admired - the form the Supreme Intelligence took while conversing with him - was Yon-Rogg himself. Meanwhile, Steve Behling’s tie-in novel Starforce on the Rise fleshed out the relationship between the different members of Starforce and contained a number of gags that fit perfectly within the film itself. They, frankly, seem to have been tailor-made for the big screen.

“An entire sequence I worked on the VFX for was cut where Yon-Rogg has a chat with the Supreme Intelligence before he gets sent to go find Carol and the Tesseract. As well as the current ones with Vers and the [Supreme Intelligence] being trimmed a lot. It is very common for things to be cut in movies. I am waiting for my art book from the movie to show up to see if they have any of the original Supreme Intelligence concepts in there.”

So why were these scenes cut? There are usually three reasons for cuts like this. The first is to tighten up the narrative; the focus in the Starforce scenes is really on the relationship between Captain Marvel and Yon-Rogg, meaning the other relationships are largely secondary and Ronan would have been unnecessary. The second is to improve the overall flow of the film; extended scenes on Hala would have meant Captain Marvel took longer to get to Earth, slowing the main plot down. Finally, some of those scenes were probably superfluous; Behling’s gags all tease Vers’ humanity, but that was pretty clear by the time of the Mindfrack device anyway. Hopefully, the Captain Marvel home release will include some deleted scenes showing the Starforce in action, and exploring the relationship between the unit’s different members.

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