About the 'Captain Marvel' Poster Cat: It's Probably a Flerken Named Chewie

The first official poster for Captain Marvel might look pretty straightforward, but there’s a horrifying cat-looking alien hiding in plain sight.

On Tuesday morning, the very first Captain Marvel trailer aired during Good Morning America, but Marvel Studios concurrently released the first official poster for the film online. It reads: “Higher. Further. Faster.” Brie Larson’s titular hero is seen in her iconic red-and-blue costume, fists charged with cosmic energy.

Many fans quickly latched onto a cameo hiding in the bottom-left of the poster, where anyone can see the back half of what looks like a cat.

Carol Danvers has a history in Marvel Comics of being inseparable from her cat named Chewie (named after the Wookie Chewbacca from Star Wars). In the comics, Chewie often appears as a long-haired brown or ginger cat — but he’s much more complicated than that. While the creature looks and acts much like a cat from Earth, it’s actually of an alien species called the Flerken.

Flerken can survive in the vacuum of space, teleport anywhere, and they’ve got a myriad of toxic tentacles that can come right out of their mouths. Supposedly, the inside of their mouth holds pocket realities — basically cute little bubbles of space-time that can house all manner of interdimensional horrors. That’s also where Flerken get their teleportation powers and their tentacles.

Here’s a look at Chewie’s go-to offensive move in the comics:

A cat being featured on the Captain Marvel poster is a solid indication that Carol Danvers will have a cat, but that’s a far cry from indicating whether or not that cat is Chewie or if it’s a Flerken or a regular cat. Some Captain Marvel merchandise revealed in August — specifically what looks like a cat’s name tag — could indicate that the cat’s name is “Goose.” That name would, of course, be a reference to Top Gun (1986), the Tom Cruise-led film about Air Force pilots that Carol Danvers is probably a huge fan of in the ‘90s.

If this is true, then Goose (the cat) is probably just an Earth cat with no otherworldly powerset because Carol would’ve probably named him during her time with the Air Force. But if the cat is indeed a Flerken named Chewie that Carol has on the Kree planet of Hala during her time with Starforce, then the Flerken’s weird powerset would fit right in with the more cosmic scope of the movie.

Maybe his interdimensional prowess would even come in handy getting Ant-Man out of the Quantum Realm in time for Avengers 4?

Captain Marvel will be released in theaters on March 8, 2019.

Here’s the Avengers: Infinity War mid-credits scene, which originally teased Captain Marvel’s debut: