When Captain Marvel arrives on screens next year it will take place in the 1990s of the MCU. Considering Marvel's most recent film had a sequence in that period, one might wonder if these two heroes could cross paths. Unfortunately, if you were hoping for a Captain Marvel/Black Panther 90's era team up, now or in the future, it won't be happening. Marvel's Kevin Feige, says there are no plans to build on the MCU in the 1990s, which is not to say we couldn't see other time periods represented in the future. According to Feige...
I would say no. I mean, in terms of Captain Marvel and a young T'Chaka in '92, no. That's not where we're headed. But we would talk about the ancestral plane sequence [in Black Panther] where, towards the end of the movie, T'Challa takes the herb again and encounters his father, where he's like, "Hey, man. We've kind of screwed up, and I want to change it." There's that moment where all of the ancestors come behind T'Chaka. We would joke and go, "I want to see ... what's their story? What's that story? Who was Bashenga, the first king of Wakanda? Who's that third to the left, behind T'Chaka? What was their story in Wakanda in 1938?
The Marvel Cinematic Universe connects in some strange and interesting ways and some of the breadcrumbs that get set out lead to places that we don't always expect. However, if you thought that Black Panther's 1990s intro sequence might have, in some way, been meant to hint toward the fact that Captain Marvel will also be set in the 1990s, that is apparently not the case. Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige certainly leaves open the door to potentially seeing other Black Panthers in future movies, at least theoretically, but it doesn't appear we'll be seeing much more of the era of T'Chaka wearing the vibranium armor.
Kevin Feige tells Entertainment Weekly that part of the inspiration for Captain Marvel was to set the film during a period of time where nobody, not even Nick Fury, was aware that superpowered individuals existed. To that end, if the movie was full of superpowered people, it would likely defeat the purpose, as it would be hard to accept that nobody knew these people were around if the movie ended up full of heroes. If the Black Panther is out fighting bad guys in public, it becomes tougher to believe that Wakanda had successfully kept itself hidden until the modern day.
While seeing T'Chaka as the Black Panther would be cool, it's not like there's going to be a shortage of people for Captain Marvel to team up with in the MCU. While her exact role in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4 is unclear, we know she'll show up at some point, and when she does, she will very likely team up with the current Black Panther, and that will be just as good.
