With The Marvels landing in theaters on November 10, the talent attached to the latest MCU film has begun speaking about their experiences with the project. Director Nia DaCosta is one such person, and she recently told IGN that some of her inspirations for the movie were games and games-adjacent media, particularly Square Enix’s 2005 CGI film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
During a recent press tour to promote The Marvels, the 33rd entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel, DaCosta detailed what specifically about Advent Children sparked her fancy. The answer’s pretty short, as she told IGN that “a couple of scenes” will harken back to the 2005 CGI film.
“One of my references when I was pitching for [The Marvels] film was Advent Children,” DaCosta said. “A couple of scenes from that, because it’s just amazing. [It’s an] amazing movie [that] has really great fight scenes and has a really great ending sequence with the main character being thrown into the sky by all the other characters.”
Released almost two decades ago now, FFVII: Advent Children takes place just two years after the events of the 1997 PS1 game and sees the Remnants of Sephiroth attempt to revive the silver-haired menace. Although it received middling reviews, fans generally reflect on Advent Children fondly, particularly for expanding the game’s complex lore and delivering some stellar fights. Toward the film’s end, in a big battle between Bahamut and Gang Cloud—Barret, Cait Sith, Cid, Cloud (and all his swords), Red XIII, Tifa, Vincent, and Yuffie—our blue-eyed, blonde-haired blade-wielder is alley-ooped into the sky by his besties to deliver the final blow on the legendary dragon summon. This sequence is one of the “couple” DaCosta was inspired by, so maybe, when The Marvels drops, we’ll see Captain Marvel (played by Brie Larson) either throw someone else or get thrown herself into the air to finish the movie’s big-bad with one swift strike.
Advent Children wasn’t the only source of inspiration for DaCosta. She told IGN that some more recent “cinematic” games also got her creative juices flowing.
“I actually didn’t want [The Marvels] to look like a video game in the sense of what you think of when you think of a video game, like it’s more linear, but, obviously, they’re so cinematic now as well,” DaCosta said. “Like, think about The Last of Us cutscenes or Horizon Zero Dawn cutscenes. But it’s a very different style, so, for me, it was from the best kinds of games, the best, sort of, stories that you get—that’s sort of what inspires me to play, and, I think, inspires people to watch movies like this.”
While The Marvels might not look like a video game, DaCosta’s comments suggest that we’re now in an era where the mediums of film and gaming are in constant conversation with each other, indicating that gaming’s got its digital fingerprints everywhere. Case in point: Nintendo now plans to release a live-action Zelda film co-produced by series creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Into the Spider-Verse’s Avi Arad. One question for this project remains a mystery: Will the film give our Hero of Time a voice? Hm…
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