When I went to the cinema to watch The Avengers in 2012 it felt like a dream come true. Now that dream has turned into a nightmare. I'm here to take a walk down memory lane, examine my own past with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and ask how it is we got here.
Part One - Secret Origin (Yes I am aware this is a DC reference.)
My origin is a weird and complex one. I could probably start this column with a long and meandering story about how I fell in and out of love with comics over the course of my childhood, from picking up Dark Horse's Thrawn Trilogy series during trips to America, to how I kind of ignored the first Spider-Man and X-Men films when superheroes didn't interest me, to getting into Judge Dredd through second hand copies of American reprints.
We'd be here all day, however, and ultimately most of this is not pertinent to the subject at hand. Suffice it to say I have always been into comics. My parents started buying me and my brother The Dandy and The Beano as soon as we could read, but the real keystone here is when my Dad took me to the local second hand book shop to buy a big batch of Marvel Comics. Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange. I fell in love with this weird world from the get-go.
Even though reading superhero comics with any decent regularity was difficult in 1990's Britain, it wasn't hard to keep up to date thanks to the surprisingly faithful animated adaptions that graced the TV screen frequently during those years. Spider-Man, X-Men, the Marvel Action Hour and, of course, Batman The Animated Series, had all brought me up to speed by the time I was old enough to start buying issues with my own disposable income.
It also left me with pretty strong opinions on the explosion of superhero films that were soon to follow. From the Mid-90s through the 2000s, big tent-pole adaptions would show up every couple of years. Batman got in early of course, but it was the Raimi Spider-Man films and the X-Men trilogy that really paved the way for the golden age of the cinematic superhero.
Despite all this, it was a commonly held frustration amongst long time superhero readers how willing these movies were to throw the baby out with the bathwater. All the weird, crazy stuff I fell in love with was frequently sanded off, simplified or discarded entirely. Neither Doctor Octopus nor the X-Men would wear brightly coloured costumes, but instead black leather. Characters like Bane and The Juggernaut were simplified into being generic henchmen.
Magic and aliens were avoided almost entirely.
While me and my fellows understood why they altered things to appeal to a broader audience, there was also a sense that the producers were failing to understand what made the superhero genre so magnetic. Indeed, the failures and disappointments of many of the late 2000s sequels like Spider-Man 3, X-Men 3 and Rise of the Silver Surfer were almost certainly in part due to the producers being unwilling to engage with their source material's more fantastical elements.
I was at university at the time these films hit, and as a superhero fan surrounded by movie buffs it felt somewhat embarrassing that my favourite medium was starting to be seen as a bit of a laughing stock. Characters I knew and loved were being dismissed by my peers as juvenilia.
This is the reason why I never went to go and see Iron Man at the cinema in 2008. My favourite character from Marvel comics when I was a kid. I just kind of figured it would be bad.
We all know what happened next.
Part Two - A Golden Age From Page to Screen
The road to The Avengers all went by in a bit of a blur. Iron Man was a hit. It was THE hit. Not only was it a smash with both fans and general audiences, but there was also a palpable feeling that we finally had a film that wasn't embarrassed to be a superhero film. While Batman Begins, and later The Dark Knight, rationalised and grounded the Caped Crusader, Iron Man brashly painted its hero's science-fiction robot suit in racing-stripe red. The film was more than willing to fully adapt, with some updates, the protagonist's bizarre origin of building his superhero persona in the back of a cave with box of scraps.
Iron Man did, however, still have one foot within the idea of 'realism.' Elements like the Mandarin and his magical Nine Rings were reinterpreted into a terrorist group that had almost nothing in common with the villain. Despite Obadiah Stane mostly staying true to his character, the name Iron Monger is never used once in the film. Much excitement came from the post-credits scene of an eye-patched Samuel L Jackson teasing the Avengers, but there was still a great degree of trepidation on how this was all going to pan out.
The Incredible Hulk likewise left me with unclear expectations. As with Iron Man, it wasn't afraid of its more fantastical elements, but certain creative decisions, like choosing to have the Abomination look more like a generic monster than the big lizard in the comic, gave me pause. Not long after, Iron Man 2 started paving the road to The Avengers, but wiped out most of Whiplash's character backstory, and couldn't even commit to giving Black Widow a Russian accent.
Up next on the docket was Thor and Captain America. In comparison to Iron Man, these were two characters with much wackier concepts, with source material as far removed from 'realism' as you could get. There was a general assumption, especially with Thor, that the adaptions would take point from the then-ongoing "Ultimate Marvel," line of comics, a series that had launched in the wake of the Raimi Spider-Man movies and had gone on to great success.
The Ultimate line, in short, took the same approach as adapting Superhero comics to screen, but then applied it to a new range of comics. Backstories were simplified, costumes were redesigned and the entire world was modernised and made more grounded. For Thor, this meant that the God of Thunder who had come to walk the Earth in the original source material, was now an enigmatic Norwegian vigilante who had some connection to a mysterious power hammer.
The Marvel films up to this point had drawn much inspiration from the Ultimate line, even going so far to adapt the Ultimate version of Nick Fury verbatim rather that the original James Bond pastiche from the comics. Were I a betting man I would have almost certainly counted on the new Thor film veering closer to Ultimate Thor rather than the wacky blonde He-Man type that the character originated as.
Imagine my surprise then, when Thor came out as a big, in your face, sword and sorcery fantasy film.
We like to rag on the first Thor film quite a lot nowadays, but it can't be understated how surprising it was to see a film adaption happily depict its protagonist in a near comics-accurate costume and have him go around having adventures with magic and aliens.
Now, before I give Thor too much credit, it is worth noting that it still felt the need to tiptoe around things to placate general audiences. The film famously claimed that Thor came from a place where "magic and technology are the same thing," as if the idea of gods from Norse mythology being real was a step too far, but despite all this, Thor was a big win for comics purists who argued that the film adaptions didn't have to dial back the camp and whimsy to work on the big screen.
If Thor managed to nail its punch then Captain America: The First Avenger managed to execute a perfect follow through. Like Thor, there was a great deal of fear that a character as ridiculous as Cap could never be done on the big screen without significant changes, and while The First Avenger does thread some careful needles in an effort to make its premise sound plausible, it is a film that is dedicated first and foremost to taking a superhero adventure from the pages of the comic and putting it up there on screen.
The shield. The Red Skull. Bucky. Being frozen in ice for decades. All the stuff a fan of Cap would want to see in a Captain America film was there, with no real sense of embarrassment. If fans had any fears that these films were going to pull their punches, The First Avenger laid those fears to rest.
Even so, by the time 2012 rolled around we were yet to be convinced that The Avengers could be executed to any real degree of satisfaction. I remember talking to a friend at the time, an even bigger fan of Marvel Comics than myself, saying "It's going to be shit isn't it?" Doing a fun Captain America film was one thing, pulling off a never-seen before crossover movie was quite another.
Yet, they did it. The success of The Avengers is so oft discussed that it has now passed into pop-culture legend. The camera pan around Captain America and friends has become meme mythology. You don't need me to go over what made it work and why it was so good. For fans like myself, what was once thought impossible was now reality. The experience of reading those wacky comics all those years ago was now immortalised within mainstream culture. We'd done it. Everything else was gravy.
Part Three - From a Certain Point of View
For the rest of the decade Marvel Studios would undertake one of the most successful winning streaks of all time. It frequently became a running joke when articles would appear claiming that the public was suffering from "Superhero fatigue," that the next Marvel film would break box office records.
This period in history has frequently been re-written into an era where Marvel Studios could do no wrong. Every entry was a slam dunk. Whatever they were doing, they were doing it right. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, and a major part of MCU history that people forget about is how rocky the road actually was. Far from effortlessly steering the series to major success, the real story of Kevin Feige was Marvel being repeatedly dealt a bad hand.
When old KF took the reins he had a roster of B-List characters and a general sense that the public wanted 'grounded' 'serious' storytelling, in the wake of stuff like Batman Begins and Casino Royale. The success of Iron Man was basically a fluke, given that the film had no real script and was mostly being written and re-written by John Favreau over the course of its production, but a strong, charismatic cast, led by fresh-out-of-rehab Robert Downey Jr, and some of the best visual effects seen at the time, turned lead into gold, and Feige had the good sense to use Iron Man's success to build momentum for the projects he already had on the docket.
It was these kinds of heat-of-the-moment decisions that became Feige's crucible in which to forge what the MCU would become. He would frequently butt heads with Ike Perlmutter on the Marvel board over the direction of the adaptions, had little control over the TV output, and had to mediate over disagreements like the recasting of James Rhodes and Scarlett Johansson's appeals for a raise in pay.
Maybe most pertinent to this discussion, however, is how Feige chose to deal with Ant-Man. Ant-Man had started production way back in the days of Raimi's Spider-Man films. Originally to be directed by Edgar Wright, the film was supposed to be self contained, taking place over two time periods, with both Hank Pym and Scott Lang as joint-protagonists. Once the MCU had hit it's stride, Wright was ordered to re-write elements of the script to fit into the wider universe, something that he bristled against and eventually quit over.
By all accounts Ant-Man should have been a disaster, but under new director Peyton Reed it went on to be one of Marvel's greatest hits. Feige had taken that bad hand and turned it into a winner. Just one crisis of many, not just averted, but reworked to his benefit.
The reality is that in the wake of The Avengers it wasn't all plain sailing. The intervening years saw plenty of duds like Thor: The Dark World and Age of Ultron, and on top of that had a chaotic and uneasy relationship with its TV spin-offs, which were kept at arms length and are mostly forgotten nowadays.
Yet Marvel Studios was able weather most of these problems thanks to having a smash hit, like Ant-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy, for every dud, and fans were willing to stick by the MCU due to the general feeling that the writers and producers were still dedicated towards fidelity to the source material. When changes were made, there wasn't a sense that it was due to embarrassment or to dumb the material down.
All in all, the bumps in the road were forgotten, and as the MCU only grew in prominence, the future continued to look bright.
Part Four - All This and Heaven Too.
The road to Endgame was one of mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, the good ship MCU was sailing straight and true, the duds were becoming rarer and the hits were only getting better. There was no sense that the Infinity Saga was going to fail at the final hurdle. Too much good will had been earned to even contemplate that.
And yet, it is through those years that the cracks in the road would finally start to form. The more popular the MCU became, the less privileged I felt as a fan of the comics. I got genuinely irked when the opening logo animation was changed from flipping through pages of the comics to a montage of characters from the films. It felt like the MCU was discarding its connection to the comics and forging an identity beyond it. Rightly or wrongly it felt as though these characters weren't for people like me any-more, weren't for fans of the comics, they were for fans of the films. It was a cruel irony, but maybe a deserved one.
The 2010s would also see Marvel Studios come under scrutiny for dragging its heels on representation, an issue that remains a millstone around its neck to this day. It was becoming increasingly clear that the MCU being nearly ten years in and only having one female-led film and one non-white led film was pretty inexcusable, as well as the fact that the writers and producers became particularly cagey when pressed on depicting gay relationships.
Even for a British white guy like myself I could see this was a problem, and especially noticeable give the strides that the comics of both Marvel and DC were making in terms of representation at the time. Both Black Panther and Captain Marvel were pushed back to make room for the newly re-integrated Spider-Man and an Ant-Man sequel, calling into question Marvel Studios commitment to diversifying their stories.
The years of 2017 - 2020 are an interesting period for the MCU because on the one hand it was arguably when it saw its biggest successes, Ragnarok, Black Panther and Guardians 2 (which I actually didn't like, but I can't deny was well regarded,) but is also an era filled with missteps. The TV side of the franchise would become completely unmoored, with Agents of Shield unofficially exiled into its own continuity. Controversy would continue to dog Feige when he is forced to sack, and then reinstate, James Gunn over decades-old tweets. The LGBTQ issue would see its biggest punchline yet with the hyping up of the franchise's first on-screen gay character, only to reveal it as an unnamed gay man mourning the death of his husband.
As I sat there watching this unfold, I examined the MCU with a more critical eye, but I remained optimistic. As long as Marvel Studios could stick the landing with Infinity War and Endgame, they'd gain enough good will to fix these hiccups, I reasoned. Once the ongoing story arc was concluded they'd have a clean slate to rebuild the universe anew, make room for a more diverse roster of characters, and delve even deeper into their back catalogue.
Part Five - Which Way Western Man?
It came as no surprise that Infinity War and Endgame were smash hits. Despite my reservations, I knew that too much was riding on their success for them to bork things at the eleventh hour. Nowadays the final battle of Endgame has become somewhat of a cudgel to beat down on Hollywood's overuse of CGI, but I can't deny that seeing Cap raise the hammer and declare "Avengers.... Assemble!" to rally a cast of hundreds is one of the greatest cinematic events of my lifetime. Grown men were crying in the cinema.
I remember vividly at the time, before I went to see Endgame, overhearing a conversation at work between two co-workers. They were enthusiastic MCU fans, and exactly the kind of people who wouldn't have been seen dead going to see a superhero move ten years earlier. They were talking about how Endgame was a definitive end for the characters, and were genuinely confused as to why more films were supposedly being made. "I guess they'll just have to end it here," one said.
I sat back eavesdropping and smiled. As a fan of the comics, I knew that true superhero stories never end. The story will always go on. There'll be new heroes and new villains, and Marvel had more than enough characters to keep going, even outside of those in a legal quagmire. Black Knight, Machine-Man, even major characters like She-Hulk had yet to be introduced . There was more than enough for the films left to cover, and I'd be seated for every one of them, ready for another adventure.
However, it wasn't a major crisis event from the comics that would change the trajectory of the MCU, but instead multiple real-world ones. The sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney, the rise of streaming networks, and, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Any one of these events would have shook the foundations of Marvel Studios, all three together would become an apocalyptic, but not insurmountable, problem for the franchise.
Feige had been dealt bad hands before. He'd become adept at handling them. That's the real story of the MCU. Yet Feige's luck couldn't last forever. Or maybe it wasn't luck. Maybe he was overambitious. Maybe he was careless. Maybe he was being left behind by a changing world. Whatever the reason, as the decade turned, Feige's magic touch evaporated, but those bad hands would just keep on coming.
I confess I always thought that the 2020 gap would turn out to be a benefit to the MCU. All things considered I had grown quite burned out after Endgame and struggled to maintain any enthusiasm with Far From Home. I figured that a break of a year would leave me eager to jump back in when the cinemas reopened. However, even by mid-2021 I, like a lot of people, was still cagy about going to the movies during a pandemic, and once the underwhelming reviews for Black Widow I was in two minds about going to see it.
What finally made me decide to give Black Widow a miss was when I found out how they had decided to adapt Taskmaster. A beloved character from the comics, and indicative of the kind of camp and whimsy that many adaptions struggle to deal with, Taskmaster's depiction in Black Widow could only really be described as 'in name only.'
While the MCU had made sweeping changes to characters in the past, this was the first time it really felt as though they were flushing the source material down the toilet. It is the kind of cynical decision that I considered to be beneath the MCU up to that point, and more than anything didn't bode well for the future.
Black Widow was followed by Shang-Chi, a much stronger film by all accounts, and probably a better opener for the new era, but also one not strong enough to shake off the blow of Black Widow. Shang-Chi was overly long and lost itself in an overuse of CGI. What could have been a small scale hit like Ant-Man became an overly fantastical slog by the end. Still, audiences such as myself cut it some slack, and were excited to see where the franchise would go with the character.
As of time of writing Shang-Chi hasn't been seen since.
I think it is safe to say that one of the reasons Marvel Studios screwed the pooch on the post-Endgame era was the inability to stick by their new cast of characters. Way back in 2012, the relatively small cast of protagonists were ducking and weaving into each other's narratives, but after Endgame our new protagonists would go unseen for years on end, with no clear sense of what their place in the grander narrative was.
Eternals was up next, which I also decided to skip. The reviews were underwhelming and I sort of resented the film a little for drawing attention away from Dune, which at the time was not a sure thing and many expected to flop for being too grand and too weird. More than anything though I just found the Eternals an odd choice for a feature film when many other, better, and more beloved characters were still awaiting their live action debuts.
Things started to look up again with No Way Home, a certified slam dunk that somehow managed to crib ideas from the highly acclaimed Into the Spider-Verse animated film but otherwise do its own thing. One consequence here, however, is that Marvel Studios was starting to become addicted to cameo overuse. Now that Toby McGuire and Andrew Garfield had come back to play their own iterations of Spider-Man, the genie was out of the bottle and cameos of older actors, no matter how tenuous, became justified under any circumstances.
It is Multiverse of Madness, however, that made it clear how far Feige had sailed the ship off course. While a fairly decent film, and one I genuinely enjoyed, it is in many ways the inflection point of all the problems that would later plague the franchise.
First of all, it is where the series decided to go all in on incorporating the idea of "The Multiverse," into the storyline. This was immediately interpreted as a bad move.
Pretty much any comic fan I talked to at the time agreed that the MCU was simply not ready to start delving into the multiverse concept. For a film like No Way Home, a one off, a special event, sure, but as a main part of the ongoing story it was just bringing in needless levels of complexity. DC comics first introduced its multiverse during The Flash of Two Worlds in 1961, twenty years after the character's debut. It was absurd that they were going to start introducing parallel timelines while we were still waiting for iconic characters like She-Hulk and the Fantastic Four to show up.
Yet far more insidious and demoralising was the idea for the film to follow up on plot elements introduced in WandaVision, Disney Plus' first MCU streaming show. I do not think it can be understated how the brand synergy with streaming really damaged the MCUs reputation amongst general audiences.
Let me make this as clear as I can. In spite of all the buzz around them most people did not watch the streaming shows. Most people didn't have Disney Plus. Sure, enough people watched them to justify their production. Enough people watched them to keep wiki articles on 'what you missed' up to date, but by and large the vast majority of the audience that were sitting down two or three times a year to watch an MCU blockbuster were not going to be watching several 8 - 10 hour-long series on a streaming service.
I had not seen WandaVision, and the expectation that I ought to have only bred resentment. I don't think that this is an unreasonable reaction to have. In order to partake in the MCU previously, one only had to pay for a cinema ticket and spend a few hours of their time, now, Disney was splitting up the fandom into groups of haves and have-nots, where monthly fees and hours of your time needed to be handed over before you could be considered a 'real' fan.
Hell, I'd have happily bought the shows on DVD, but Disney knew that if they walled them off as a streaming exclusive they could exploit their audience's fear of missing out. The naked cynicism could not be ignored.
Now, I've heard a defence of the streaming shows with the argument that this is no different to the comics. Marvel comics constantly have continuous plot-lines and crossovers that most readers cannot be expected to fully keep up with. This argument misses the fact that live action TV shows and movies made for mainstream audiences are supposed to be more accessible than niche products like decades-long-running comic strips, but also, that is an element of the comics that sucks and everyone hates anyway! Why would you want to replicate that?!
All in all, for me, being outside the Disney Plus club is what really dampened my enthusiasm for the future of the MCU. It was hard to get invested in an upcoming film when there was the very real possibility it would involve a character or a plot point from a TV show I hadn't seen and didn't want to have to watch. This was made worse when characters I was genuinely excited about, like Ms Marvel and Moon Knight, were getting paywalled behind a subscription fee.
The next few years were pretty rough for the MCU. Love and Thunder was a bafflingly odd entry that somehow managed to be TOO camp and whimsical. Wakanda Forever was pretty good but couldn't help feel like a compromised vision in the wake of Chadwick Boseman's untimely passing. Quantumania was for the most part genuinely awful, both in the ways it misunderstood what audiences liked about those films, but also, again, abandoning its fidelity to the source material with its butchering of the MODOK character.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 was surprisingly a great film, bringing a slight reprieve to the slump, but Ms Marvel's cinematic debut in The Marvels felt like a squandering of her character, being a mess of competing ideas from both the streaming shows and the films. The misses were outnumbering the hits. With 2023 coming to a close, it was becoming more and more undeniable that all was not well on the good ship Marvel, and those articles about superhero fatigue, once the butt of many a joke, were now looking prophetic.
It didn't help that all of these films felt as though they were singing from the same hymn sheet. They all tended to involve some combination of the following elements: An opening prologue making fun of the post-Endgame status-quo. A villain with a sympathetic backstory. A mid film section where the characters are spirited away to a parallel universe or magical realm where celebrity cameos would sit and spout plot-exposition. A grand finale involving gratuitous CGI where the protagonist tries to talk the villain down, who nevertheless is hoist on their own petard when their doomsday device goes wrong. An ending with the protagonist walking off into the sunset with some kind of child or younger apprentice.
The days of something as weird and offbeat as Ant-Man, or Iron Man 3 were long gone.
After dumping Jonathan Majors as Kang in the wake of his domestic abuse allegations, whispers were abound that Feige was making ready to right the ship. The master had dealt with bad hands before, he could learn how to play this one.
It was, however, too little, too late.
Part Six - All the Doughnuts in the World.
2024 would be the first year when one, and only one, MCU film would play at the cinemas. There was a sense, once again, that absence would make the heart grow fonder. That Feige and co would be able to use that time to turn things around and win us all back. Maybe he will, but for me, 2024 delivered a one-two punch that killed my interest in the MCU stone dead.
Five years prior, in 2019, Disney purchased 20th Century Fox. For someone like myself this led to mixed feelings. On the one hand, the prospect of Disney reclaiming iconic characters like The X-Men and Fantastic Four, long exiled due to contractual reasons, led to a great deal of excitement. On the other hand, yet another company being swallowed up into the Disney blob did not bode well for human economics and creativity.
Still, there was a hope that if we got a good X-Men film out of this, one that was more loyal to the source material, then it would have somewhat of a silver lining.
In 2024, the X-Men, kind of, would make their MCU debut, sort of, bizarrely, in Deadpool and Wolverine.
I really enjoyed the first Deadpool back in 2016, which I think is a perfect example of how being faithful to a character's source material can be more of an asset than a complication, but that enjoyment was short lived, as I did not enjoy Deadpool 2 at all, found it over indulgent, tonally incoherent and more of a vehicle for Ryan Reynolds than something faithful to the character.
Despite all this, Deadpool and Wolverine really went out of its way to reassure fans that it had their best interests at heart. Hugh Jackman was back, in the yellow suit! This movie would be directly integrated into the MCU, fleshing out the multiverse stuff! The movie was going to be packed with cameos from characters you haven't seen in years!
I walked in to Deadpool and Wolverine primed to hate it, and maybe that's a me problem, but it was damned from the start anyway, as even before I sat down in my cinema seat I was hit with the news that Robert Downey Jr had been cast to play Doctor Doom in the next Avengers film.
There's been plenty of discussion around why this casting decision is considered by many a bad idea, and I'm not going to waste time here getting into it, but for me, it symbolised one thing. Marvel Studios had given up on its faithfulness to the comics.
The promise once that the MCU was going to hew close to the source material, to not be embarrassed of its origins or make sweeping changes to dumb things down for audiences now seemed long dead. Even if RDJ is playing some kind of version of Doom that is close to the comics, the casting decision alone is distracting and displays a desperate lack of confidence in their own product.
With a metaphorical head wound after the Doctor Doom news, Deadpool and Wolverine was the worst thing to follow it up with. A smug, back-slapping cavalcade of endless cameos, in-jokes and references. It is arguable the most 'Have your cake and eat it too,' film that exists, attempting to roll its eyes at its own existence. At the climax, I felt as though I was experiencing a monkey's paw curse, the finger curling with the arrival of the Deadpool Corps.
I felt like the naive youth forced to smoke ten packets of his uncle's cigars to teach him a lesson. "So you wanted Marvel to become mainstream did you? You wanted costumes faithful to the comics did you? You wanted crossovers and cameos and in-jokes did you? Well here is is! You can't complain now! This is what you always wanted! Are you not entertained?"
Deadpool and Wolverine feels like ironic punishment from the gods for wanting the shared-universe concept to succeed in the first place. It is the natural end point. It is like being forced to eat all the doughnuts in the world. At the end of the film, I was just about done with the MCU. If Feige was going to right the ship, I no longer had the patience to wait for it to turn.
Part Seven - The Superhero Story Never Ends
I didn't bother going to see Brave New World. I skipped Thunderbolts. I did, however, go to see Fantastic Four: First Steps, which I thought, was, well, fantastic. But the success of First Steps was bittersweet. A genuinely entertaining and self-contained film that felt loyal to its origins but also like a breath of fresh air in comparison to its camo-packed contemporaries. First Steps was, in some ways, marred by the knowledge that it was connected to the MCU at all, with it's stupid references to Multiverse shit that they should have learned to drop already.
In the wake of Superman, another absolutely fantastic movie that properly understood its source material, I found myself wishing that First Steps had likewise been a fresh start. I could see myself getting excited for the Marvel world again if this was going to be the new status-quo. I'd be first in line for an Iron Man or X-Men film set in this 60s-ish tech utopia. Alas, with Doomsday around the corner, and given what we now know about the returning faces, from Chris Evans to Ian McKellen, it is pretty clear that the MCU is not going to be striking out in a bold new direction and instead will be strip mining its own past.
It has been pointed out repeatedly by many fans online how absurd it is that it has been over a half-decade since the Fox acquisition and there still hasn't been a brand new X-Men adaption yet, and that, in fact, the MCU may never have its own true X-Men proper, re-using the Fox iterations instead.
Truly, Feige has sailed the ship off course. Doomsday will probably make megabucks, but I sure as shit won't be seated, and neither will most of the folks I know who once never missed an MCU entry. My colleagues at work? I barely hear a conversation about the Marvel films these days. For many of them the story really did finish with Endgame.
The MCU will no doubt lurch on for another good few years yet, but in what form is anyone's guess. Whether it tries to consolidate around a fresher cast of characters, or reboot itself with recast versions of its original roster, it now has no choice but to be saddled by the baggage of the Multiverse years, and that's the kind of baggage I have no interest in trying to keep up with.
It is easy to look back and suggest that with a few changes it didn't have to be this way. If they had hit the ground running after Covid with a better focus on the new characters. If they'd gotten Black Widow out of the gate pre-Endgame instead of trapping it in development hell. If they'd gotten Black Panther off the ground early enough to make its sequel Boseman's swansong. Yet even with a stronger start and a better sense of identity, this doesn't change the fact that the MCU is a mainstream product compromised in part due to corporate bullshit.
The MCU was always going to be saddled with Disney's push into streaming. It was always going to leverage FOMO against its fans to try and coax them into subscription fees. The Fox acquisition was always going to be used to mine nostalgia instead of giving us fresh takes on these characters. We can say that Covid threw them a curveball, sure, but it is the never-ending demands of the franchise beast that truly damned it.
Maybe it was always going to go this way. The MCU is dying a slow death, or at least having an embarrassing slump, and I morn it knowing how good the highs were. I can take solace in that, I guess. Early on I mentioned that neither me or my friends really expected The Avengers to work, and were amazed that it did, and I genuinely mean that. I think we were extremely lucky to have gotten even one superhero crossover on film, never mind that it was followed by even higher highs. If everything had fallen apart after the Avengers we'd still have gotten more than we could have dreamed of.
In that way, I feel a little petulant and entitled to complain about where the MCU is right now, so I'll leave you with this. I don't know where the MCU goes from here. Maybe it'll bounce back. Maybe it'll end for good. Maybe it'll find itself supplanted by an ascendant DC film series (and I have my doubts about that buddy.) What I can say is that superhero stories never end. There'll always be another battle, another adventure. We may be witnessing the doldrums of this shared universe experiment, but we won't have seen the last of the world it is depicting, and when the day comes that the MCU baggage has been let go, I'll be eager to sit back down in that cinema seat, ready to start the adventure again anew.
The MCU is proof that dreams don't last for ever, but by that same logic, nether do nightmares.
---------------------------------------
Jack Harvey 2026. Images used under Fair Use.
No comments:
Post a Comment