‘The Marvels’ director Nia DaCosta on why family is at the heart of the movie

The superhero team-up movie The Marvels rockets into theaters Friday, November 10. Brie Larson returns as Captain Marvel, and this time she has some similarly powered friends, including Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, and Monica Rambeau — played respectively by Iman Vellani and Tayonah Paris. Director and writer Nia DaCosta tells ABC Audio the film is about “how family is what helps you take on the world.”

“Carol [is] someone who has the universe on her shoulders … And I think when we meet her, she’s forgotten a little bit about what she’s out there for,” she explains. “You know, she’s really isolated and she doesn’t have family in the way that, say, Kamala Khan does.”

“And the Khan family in this film sort of represents what she and Monica could have, for example,” DaCosta continues. “I feel like a lot of people can relate to that, like working really hard and trying to do well for your family, but forgetting to spend time with your family maybe. And I think that’s kind of central to this film.”

The Marvels marks the Candyman director’s first foray into the Marvel universe, and she’d been wanting to work on a Marvel movie since she saw Iron Man in theaters when she was 18 and just starting film school.

“I saw that movie and I was like, ‘This is amazing,'” she shares. “And then as it became clear that this is going to be a universe, a connected universe, that kind of culminates in these big event movies called The Avengers, I was like, ‘Oh, wow. Like, I would love to do one of those.’ Because I grew up reading the comics and reading different heroes titles … And so that was that was the big draw for me to the cinematic version of that.”