In May 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with Iron Man. The blockbuster kicked off a film franchise that has expanded to encompass more than 30 films that have collectively earned over $29 billion globally, as well as almost a dozen TV series and specials. Although Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark ushered in the unprecedented rise of the MCU, it was Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) who welcomed Stark into a world of superheroes. Wearing his signature eye patch and leather trench coat, Fury appeared for only a few moments in Iron Man’s post-credits scene to deliver the line that set Marvel Studios’ master plan in motion: “Mr. Stark, you’ve become a part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.”
Jackson has reprised his role as Nick Fury in 10 MCU films since then (along with multiple episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and What If…?), which makes him the most prolific Marvel Studios actor save for the late Stan Lee. But nearly half of those appearances have been brief cameos in post-credits scenes, with Jackson’s most substantial supporting role being his de-aged turn as a younger Fury in 2019’s Captain Marvel. Now, 15 years after Iron Man was released in theaters, Fury is finally getting his own solo project as he becomes the star of Secret Invasion, which will premiere on Disney+ on Wednesday.
Created by Kyle Bradstreet (Mr. Robot), Secret Invasion is the first TV series in Marvel’s Phase 5, and it’s also the first MCU show since 2021’s Hawkeye that hasn’t centered on a new superhero. The six-episode limited series finds the former director of S.H.I.E.L.D. in a much different world from the one where we first saw him breaking into the home of a billionaire industrialist to chat about other superheroes. Aliens have invaded Earth on multiple occasions since then; one time, an alien from Titan transformed half of life in the universe, including Fury, into dust. (Don’t worry, he’s totally fine now.) In Secret Invasion, extraterrestrials are again invading Earth, except this time they’re not arriving from the sky in massive warships, but already occupying positions of power across the world as the shape-shifting race of Skrulls conceal themselves among humanity.
Secret Invasion largely builds on the events and characters introduced in Captain Marvel, along with a few minor appearances from the Skrulls in other MCU projects. But it’s also a story more than a decade in the making, as Marvel’s most secretive man gets six episodes (an hour each) to illuminate some of his elusive past at last—as well as the chance to explain what, exactly, he’s been doing in deep space in recent years. Leave it to Jackson to tease the premise like no one else can: “He’s up there trying to process what the fuck happened, you know? And what his place in the world is,” Jackson recently told Vanity Fair. “The death of Iron Man, the death of Black Widow—with that stuff going on, he just kind of checked out.”
In Secret Invasion, Fury is back, and he’s facing the latest threat to the world without the aid of the Avengers. Ahead of the series premiere, here’s everything you need to know about the Skrulls’ journey in the MCU to this point, Secret Invasion’s comic book inspirations, and Fury’s triumphant return.
History of the Skrulls in the MCU
In Captain Marvel, which is set in the ’90s, the Skrulls are initially introduced as villains, as the Kree seek to manipulate an amnesiac Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) into fighting against their longtime enemy. The Kree’s leader, a being known as the Supreme Intelligence, tells Danvers: “The Skrull expansion has threatened our civilization for centuries. Impostors who silently infiltrate, then take over our planets.”
In their natural form, Skrulls have green skin; large, pointed ears; and a distinctive ridged chin. They also have the ability to transform their bodies into any biological form. Their shape-shifting skills allow the Skrull general Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) to pose as a high-ranking member of S.H.I.E.L.D., while another Skrull takes on the appearance of a sweet old woman—whom Danvers promptly punches in the face:
When Nick Fury meets Danvers and she explains the nature of the Skrulls to him, he asks her the question that will be at the heart of Secret Invasion: “How do we know you’re not one of those shape-shifters?”
Despite the rocky start to their relationship, Captain Marvel and the Skrulls soon find themselves on the same side, as Talos helps Danvers uncover the mysteries of her past and learn the truth behind the centuries-long war between the Skrulls and the Kree. He also explains that the Kree have been deceiving her about the Skrulls. “My people lived as refugees,” he tells Danvers. “Homeless, ever since we resisted Kree rule, and they destroyed our planet.
Captain Marvel ends with Fury, Danvers, and Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) teaming up with Talos to help a group of Skrulls—including Talos’s wife, Soren, and daughter, G’iah—escape the clutches of the Kree. Once they’re all saved and the Kree are sent running back to their homeworld, Danvers agrees to search for a new planet for the Skrulls to call home, and she flies off into space alongside the Skrulls’ light speed spaceship.
The next time the Skrulls appear is decades later in the MCU’s timeline, when Talos and Soren are pretending to be Fury and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) during the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home. It’s a rather cheap storytelling trick, revealed in the 2019 film’s post-credits scene: The pair of Skrulls (who did very little to help Spider-Man throughout the movie) revert back to their natural forms to call Fury and update him on how things are playing out on Earth while he’s in deep space with the other Skrulls. Although many years have passed between the events of Captain Marvel and Far From Home, the Skrulls have yet to find their own world to live on. (It does make you wonder, though: If the Guardians of the Galaxy can take shelter in a massive, floating head, shouldn’t the Skrulls have found somewhere to live by now? Fury has some explaining to do.)
The most recent noteworthy MCU appearance of the Skrulls comes in another post-credits scene, this one following the season finale of 2021’s WandaVision. The Skrulls play no part in the series at large, but Maria Rambeau’s daughter Monica (Teyonah Parris) has a significant role as an agent of S.W.O.R.D., an American intelligence agency founded by Maria soon after the events of Captain Marvel that essentially serves as a version of S.H.I.E.L.D. for extraterrestrial matters. In the finale’s stinger, a Skrull poses as an FBI agent to deliver a message to Monica from an “old friend of [her] mother’s,” likely referring to either Talos or Fury himself.
The Skrulls’ screen time outside of Captain Marvel is limited, but these two appearances in Far From Home and WandaVision set up the conflict that fuels the upcoming Secret Invasion. Despite the fact that Fury, Talos, and Danvers have been attempting to re-situate this group of Skrulls for decades, they somehow haven’t found a suitable planet. Instead, the Skrulls have been living in the shadows while occasionally running errands for Fury. All the hope the Skrulls had when this alliance was formed has dissipated in the years since, and a resistance movement led by an extremist Skrull named Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) has divided the Talos-led faction, as even a grown-up G’iah (Emilia Clarke) has lost her patience and turned against her father.
Secret Invasion will reunite Jackson’s Fury with Mendelsohn’s Talos. Fury will also cross paths with or enlist the help of other humans from the Infinity Saga as he seeks to stop Gravik’s uprising: Maria Hill, who herself has grown impatient with Fury after years of putting out his fires; James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), the former Avenger who now serves as the right hand of the president; and former CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), in his first appearance since losing his job in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. (The series will also feature Oscar winner Olivia Colman, playing the role of an MI6 agent who has a history with Fury.) The key, however, will be figuring out whether everyone is who they say they are—and if we know anything about Fury, the man already has trust issues.
In the Comics
Secret Invasion draws inspiration from a 2008 comic book story line that shares the same name. Written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Leinil Francis Yu, the eight-issue series follows the Skrulls as they infiltrate the ranks of the Avengers and other superhero teams as they attempt to take over Earth after the destruction of their homeworld. The crossover event spawned several tie-in series and a 2022 sequel miniseries, and its main story features a massive cast of characters from the Marvel universe, including: Tony Stark, serving as the director of S.H.I.E.L.D; multiple teams of Avengers, after the superhero world was divided in a previous story line; the X-Men; the Fantastic Four; the Thunderbolts; and more. As the Skrull Empress assumes the identity of Spider-Woman, heroes and villains alike struggle to tell each other—and themselves—apart from the invaders.
The Disney+ show retains much of the premise of the comic series but repositions it within the current landscape of the MCU. Crucially, it also shifts its central focus from paranoid, embattled superheroes to Fury, who finally takes center stage. In the comics, Fury plays a more minor role as he leads a superpowered group known as the Secret Warriors in the fight against the Skrulls. But in the forthcoming series he’ll serve as the main protagonist, as the story is scaled down, narrowing its focus to the humans who have lived in this world of superheroes and aliens for decades. For reasons that will be addressed in the episodes to come, Fury won’t be recruiting his super friends this time. (Though it sure feels like somebody with Doctor Strange’s abilities could be helpful in a situation like this, despite his pesky tendency to nearly destroy the universe. The guy even has a third eye to lend Fury these days.)
Given the smaller scale of the Secret Invasion adaptation, many of the characters involved in the original story line won’t appear in the Disney+ series. But at its heart, it remains a story about trust, espionage, and a growing paranoia between allies and enemies, which makes it something of a spiritual successor to 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
As Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige explained in a press conference for the series, producer Jonathan Schwartz was the one who approached him with the pitch for the show as Marvel was planning its Disney+ programming several years ago. “He came in with this idea of translating the great Secret Invasion story line from the comics into a darker, grittier spy show, which we hadn’t done,” Feige said. “And this was an attempt to really dive back into things we touched upon in The Winter Soldier, but hadn’t in a while.”
Phase 5 and the Return of Nick Fury
It’s been a long journey for Nick Fury in the MCU. So long, in fact, that most of the people he recruited in 2012’s The Avengers have either died, retired, or, in Thor’s bizarre case, adopted the child of one of their bloodthirsty enemies. In Captain Marvel, Fury traveled to space, befriended an alien race, and lost an eye to an extraterrestrial cat. In The Winter Soldier, he nearly died, faked his death, and took down S.H.I.E.L.D. after it was infiltrated by the terrorist organization HYDRA. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, he saved a bunch of civilians in a floating city from an army of robots, and in Avengers: Endgame, he attended the funeral of Tony Stark.
It’s taken too long for Fury to get a solo project, but the belated series is arriving at a perfect time. Now in Phase 5, the Multiverse Saga has scattered the MCU more than ever, while elevating its stakes from the fate of one world to the fates of every world in every universe. In stories such as February’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the scale has grown preposterously large for those who don’t have superpowers or a fancy suit. Yet those circumstances offer an opportunity for Marvel Studios to tell a more grounded story that focuses on humans and spies, with the series taking notes from shows like Homeland and The Americans. (Granted, it’s also a story that involves shape-shifting aliens, but “grounded” is a relative term in a cinematic universe where any corner of the world could be collapsing and the Sorcerer Supreme might still choose to watch The Sopranos with a random stranger he just met.)
It isn’t clear where the events of Secret Invasion will land on the MCU’s ever-confusing timeline, especially with Jackson already set to reprise his role as Fury in The Marvels later this year (and expressing interest in coming back for more). The stakes of the MCU are only going to get higher as the Multiverse Saga spirals toward its next Avengers two-parter with The Kang Dynasty in 2026 and Secret Wars in 2027. But before that all happens, Secret Invasion will provide the space to examine Fury as a character like never before, while also affording audiences the chance to step away from Marvel’s increasingly ambitious bigger picture to return to the guy who helped start it all.
