By: Zainab Salam, Opinions Editor
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become one of the most dominant forces in modern cinema. Yet beneath the visual grandeur and pop-culture appeal lies a subtler narrative thread — one that blends the art of filmmaking with ideological messaging. The MCU pushes out pro-military propaganda, leveraging its immense cultural reach to reinforce particular narratives about American power and militarism.
The root of this relationship runs deep. Since the inception of the MCU with Iron Man (2008), Marvel Studios has collaborated with the United States department of defence on several projects. These collaborations manifested as military personnel consults, and vehicles and locations supplemented by the Pentagon. However, they are not without strings attached — the Pentagon frequently influences scripts and portrayals. This symbiotic relationship results in films that often glorify the military while glossing over the role of the US in global geopolitics and the involvement of its military in controversial military operations around the world.
Marvel operates as a covert outpost for the American military recruitment propaganda. With their movies, they regularly criticize the government and military, only to rely on and find a necessity in both. Take the Iron Man movies: Tony Stark’s storyline is that he realizes that arms manufacturing causes immense harm, prompting him to shut down Stark Industries’ weapons division. However, by Iron Man 2 (2010), Stark begins working more closely with military and intelligence officials. This encourages viewers to support more nuanced forms of militarism.
“The inclusion of Sabra in Captain America: Brave New World (2025) is not a neutral creative decision — it also functions as a pro-settler colonialism and pro-genocide statement cloaked in the aesthetics of superheroism.”
Another example of this propaganda is Captain Marvel (2019), a film developed in close partnership with the US Air Force. Marketed as a feminist milestone, the movie follows Carol Danvers’ transformation from pilot to intergalactic superhero. However, the movie glamorizes the life of military personnel, suggesting that heroism and nationalism go hand in hand. This brand of storytelling actively works to rehabilitate the image of US military power. It also paints an image of a gender-inclusive military life. Unfortunately, that is an inaccurate depiction of the reality of women in the military. The US military remains riddled with sexism, gendered violence, inaction against said violence, and an institutional culture of antagonism towards not only women, particularly women of colour, but also soldiers identified as transgender and queer.
This pattern of aligning heroism with state power doesn’t stop at American militarism — Marvel’s latest decision to include the character of Sabra in Captain America: Brave New World (2025) posits a willingness to extend that narrative to its close ally, Israel. It functions as a pro-settler colonialism and pro-genocide statement cloaked in the aesthetics of superheroism. Sabra, a Mossad agent in the comics, represents an arm of the Israeli state that has been deeply involved in the violent displacement, surveillance, and genocide of the Palestinian people. By incorporating this character into a mainstream, globally beloved franchise, Marvel effectively normalizes and valorizes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. It recasts agents of a violent apartheid regime as defenders of justice, thereby erasing the lived realities of ongoing ethnic cleansing and settler violence.
Furthermore, this inclusion reflects a broader ideological alignment within the Marvel franchise, one that is deeply entangled with settler colonial values. The MCU, in many ways, is a product of the US, a settler colony built on the ongoing dispossession and erasure of Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island. Most of its films are shot on Indigenous lands without acknowledgement given towards their communities, notably in Atlanta, Georgia, and Australia. This is against the backdrop of the systematic violence, resource theft, and cultural suppression that Indigenous communities continue to face every day. When a franchise produced in a colonial context so readily uplifts a figure like Sabra, it reveals a troubling consistency: a willingness to erase the brutal foundations of state imperialism if it fits neatly into a heroic narrative. As viewers, especially in settler-colonial states, we must question what it means to consume this content uncritically. Who gets framed as a hero? Who is absent from the screen, or reduced to a threat? When pop culture normalizes settler colonialism both at home and outside, it doesn’t just reflect our political values — it shapes them.
It’s worth scrutinizing the MCU’s values and ideologies it perpetuates. In blending high production value with pro-military and pro-settler colonialism narratives, the MCU illustrates how popular art, as a form of soft power, serves to shape public sentiment and political views in powerful ways.
