Kicking off what will be a very big week for Marvel Studios, we got a new Captain Marvel poster last night in anticipation of the new trailer debuting tonight during Monday Night Football. And it is a bright and shiny hero-stance portrait of Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, surrounded by both the vastness of space and the mysteriousness of Earth (alien ships on one side and fighter jets on the other). It’s a striking image, partially because of what it does not contain. Unlike almost every prior “pay off” theatrical poster for a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, there are no supporting cast members to be found. It’s Captain Marvel’s show, come hell or high water, and there’s just no room for the supporting players this time around.

With the exception of Universal’s The Incredible Hulk and Walt Disney’s Doctor Strange, pretty much every “main” theatrical poster (the one that drops around two-to-three months before release and has the full credits at the bottom) has followed a pretty standard pattern, with the hero at center stage, usually unmasked (because the MCU likes to emphasize the man behind the mask both in marketing and in their movies), along with a collage of supporting cast members or ensemble teammates as well as (usually but not always) an image of the hero in full-masked (if it applies) costume. Think Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Captain America, Thor: Ragnarok, The Avengers, Black Panther, Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp among others. This poster breaks the mold.

This colorful one-sheet is closer in spirit to the aforementioned Incredible Hulk and Doctor Strange posters. Those main sells had the main hero front-and-center with no supporting characters or tangential events fighting for space. In this case, the poster bases its entire sell on the fact that it’s a Marvel movie and that it’s a Captain Marvel movie starring Brie Larson. Yes, implicitly, it’s also selling the key variable of being the MCU’s first female-fronted superhero flick (Ant-Man and the Wasp was a two-hander). It’s also taking a page out of Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman marketing playbook. If this poster is any indication, Marvel and Walt Disney will be selling this one with its title hero standing front-and-center few-if-any distractions from her supporting cast.

What stood out in the Wonder Woman print campaign was how it almost entirely eschewed poster appearances for Gal Gadot’s supporting cast. The Wonder Woman posters were striking images of Diana lifting a tank, leading a battalion, standing at the ready or otherwise being a solo superhero. Yes, Chris Pine made an appearance in that one international poster, but it was otherwise almost entirely the Wonder Woman show, with no conventional character posters for the supporting heroes, various villains or related supporting characters. Warner Bros. put the entire burden of the Patty Jenkins-directed flick on the shoulders of its title hero. When it debuted to $103 million and legged it to $414m domestic/$821m worldwide, Wonder Woman (as a character and as a concept) got all the credit.

We might get character posters for the various supporting characters. There are 11 (!) billed actors on the one-sheet. We may get posters for Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury, whomever Jude Law is playing and the likes of Lee Pace’s Ronan (reminder, this is a 1990s-set prequel), Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos and Gemma Chan’s Doctor Minerva among others. Doctor Strange’s supporting cast got their own posters just a month before its theatrical release. Conversely, Marvel might place the entire marketing campaign for Captain Marvel on the shoulders of Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel. It would emphasize the thing that sets this MCU flick apart. And when the Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck-directed origin story hits big next March, Carol Danvers will be able to take all the credit.

I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing