This is a largely self-indulgent blog about where Marvel/Disney went wrong and why they have nothing in their armoury that suggests they're going to reverse the trend. From the fall out from Endgame to geopolitical problems to simply lacking a definitive way forward, Marvel is entering it's own Endgame.
There's an awful lot of comics and film related shite on You Tube. Fan films and lots of conjecture and theories floating around; it's like a poor man's Movers & Shakers at times but without my knowledge and masses of wishful thinking. However, just occasionally I see something that makes me think and one of those things was an almost throwaway comment about some things the Russo Brothers said at a recent comics convention. This was regarding the Test Screenings of Avengers: Endgame.
Test screenings are where a selected or invited audience see a pre-release version of a film and offer feedback to the producers in the form of questionnaires and in some cases this results in reshoots or changes. I think we've all heard about these but I don't know anyone who has been in one or even knows how exactly they work. Apparently the analysis of Avengers: Endgame returned an intriguing amount of responses - allegedly almost 20% of the people who saw the film thought it was a great 'jumping off' point, while a smaller percentage thought introducing time travel into the MCU was a bad decision - many responders called it 'Confusing.' This wasn't considered to be negative enough feedback to make any changes and the film literally was released without any changes to the story, just some small changes to the end of the film.Now, fast forward a few years to arguably Marvel's best television series - Loki, which essentially sits outside of the MCU timeline and features the Loki from Endgame, who is a variant of the original Loki? It's literally all about time travel and it only exists because of that last Avengers film. The biggest problem with Endgame is it's an emotions film; there is no logic to it and if you analyse it, it is a giant mess. If you can recall the Ancient One's conversation with Bruce Banner and watch Loki you know there's a sacred timeline and any alteration to this causes branches in said timeline and creates variations. Except Doctor Strange's mentor was quick to point out that if the Time Stone is used it will create a multiverse and that would be a very bad thing. Plus there's a kind of emphasis that the Time Stone exists can't actually be used because it poses a threat to reality. This alone creates more problems than it solves, although Doctor Strange does use it in Infinity War to scan millions of alternate futures to work out how to stop Thanos; it's used to see into the future rather than as a physical time altering device.
However, it isn't the Time Stone that causes the problems; it's the Quantum Universe, which offers a thin, almost weedy, explanation as to how time travel can work. So in reality the Time Stone is a MacGuffin, it's almost a red herring as it is used once in the two Avengers films, by Thanos to reverse the destruction of the Soul Stone so he can complete his Infinity Gem collection. If there's another physical use of it, I don't know when it happens. It doesn't even come into play at the end because Tony Stark is adamant that if the Avengers are successful in their mission and can reverse the Blip/Snap, everything that has happened has to remain - this alone is the first major error in this time travelling mess. In many ways the Infinity Gems are barely used on their own, only used when they're all together, which in many ways is another red herring.
The problems Endgame causes are almost insurmountable - just the presence of the film does more damage to the MCU than any other thing or film. It not only defies the Ancient One's wishes, it rides roughshod over it and creates multiple timelines and makes events at the end of Endgame completely wrong - yes, it might have been an unbelievably awesome conclusion to the Infinity Saga but it's also a massive pile of shit, creating an MCU that, at the moment, is actually a variation. The moment in Infinity War when Thanos reverse time to retrieve the Vision's gem he creates an alternate timeline.
Tie into this the fact Captain America spends the rest of his life in the past with Peggy Carter, thus preventing her from having the life she originally had creates the next alternate timeline. Factor in that there's two Nebulas, a living Gamorra, the aforementioned living Loki [who as many others have commented was completely written out of character in Avengers Assemble] and you start to realise what Marvel did was open a can of worms that the average film goer wouldn't dwell on, but hang over it like the foul stench of an uncleaned toilet. Then there's Thanos, who is dead but his past self is able to travel to a future he doesn't exist in and play a crucial part in this finale; he may well have been erased at the end, but regardless of Bruce Banner's weak explanation about time travel and how the present is always the present and it doesn't matter what you alter everything will still have happened - the Grandfather Paradox can't really exist in his theory - common sense and logic go out of the window. If there's a Thanos out of his own past, surely his past self would know what is going to happen, unless of course he just creates another alternate timeline...
There are a number of other very clear changes to the past, present and future - thus creating a multiverse from the mid-1950s onward and while we never see Steve Rogers return the Time Stone to the Ancient One in 2011, I imagine she's not very happy about what the Avengers created. This is the biggest flaw in the culmination of the Infinity Saga and personally I hate it. I think Avengers: Endgame ends up being a bit like Christopher Nolan's Tenet, where paradoxes are essentially laughed at in the face. It almost suggests that paradoxes can't exist and time carries on regardless - which it might do for Steve Rogers, but what about Peggy Carter, the man she marries or that Rogers exists in a time when he would have been needed but turns his back on being a hero so he can do a lot of catch-up shagging? It doesn't make sense, especially given the kind of man Rogers was portrayed as. However, technically speaking if Steve Rogers spent the rest of his life with Peggy Carter, thus creating a different timeline, he should not have existed any longer in the sacred timeline and not been able to give Sam Wilson his shield; but let's not get bogged down with too much minutiae; Endgame did, after all, just do what it wanted and threw logic out with the baby and the bathwater.
Actually let's dwell on it, because if Iron Man and Captain America both knew that Loki stole the Cosmic Cube during Endgame, meaning they had to travel back in time further to retrieve it from the 1950s, they were aware that that a previous version of Loki was now loose in the MCU and both would have known from Thor that 'their' Loki died at the hands of Thanos; so therefore what was there to stop them from 'time-napping' Natasha from the Battle of New York and bringing her back to their present day? If Gamorra died and an older version of her was now existing in the MCU then surely they could have done the same with Natasha? Surely they could have even done it with Tony Stark; grab a Stark from before his demise so he can carry on living? The reason this would work is because there were instances with others where this happened; it wasn't like at the end of Endgame they decided that the rogue Loki needed to be found and killed and Gamorra should also be killed because she was dead on the sacred timeline. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Obviously actors contracts played a big part in this, but if you're left with enough to time to think about it, you see that Endgame was selectively flawed and the execs simply hoped it wouldn't lead to so much handwringing from die hard fans - they might know cinema, they don't seem to understand comics and in the case of the MCU this is inextricably interwoven.
If the Multiverse was created in the early 1950s as that was the earliest point the modern day Avengers went back in time to then one of the reasons I've got such a bug up my arse about this is during the third episode of season two of Loki, Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Ren Slayer (why does she have that character name?) says she had been running the TVA - Time Variant Agency - for eons, which doesn't make an awful lot of sense and neither does the presumption that Kang the Conqueror was the creator of the TVA because there's no suggestion that Kang was created as a result of the actions in Endgame. I'm probably overthinking this, but if you cast your mind back to season one of Loki when we were introduced to a huge number of variant Lokis, this actually doesn't make any sense because these would all have been created prior to events in Endgame - it made funny TV, but it also made no sense. Plus the TVA exists because of a paradox Kang himself created even though we have no real idea how he was created (yet).Now a Loki exists in the MCU, Thor doesn't know but who cares. I know the general consensus has been to overlook the flaws in the narrative of Endgame but, if you can selectively have heroes still alive to enable a Guardians of the Galaxy film or a Loki TV series, then why can't you have Black Widow or Iron Man, or even an earlier version of Captain America brought back from the past to replace those that died or retired so valiantly? You realise this means anything that happens in Loki won't resolve what has been created, which means it becomes a pointless TV series [like so many others] and if you want to be brutal, nothing and everything since Endgame means anything because it all takes place in an alternate timeline. The sacred timeline possibly ceases to exist the moment Thanos turns back time because the Time Stone has been used and there is no sacred timeline any longer...
Let's put to one side that most of the films since then have been inferior and with a couple of exceptions most everything else have been critical flops. In fact, because of the creation of a multiverse, however and wherever it is, pretty much anything that has happened can be altered; nothing has any real consequence because with the creation of time travel in the MCU nothing can be sacred any longer - the Time Stone might no longer exist, but the Quantum Realm does, rendering the Time Stone as a plot device only. Therefore the TVA presumably only exists because lots and lots of other people have used the Quantum Realm to travel back and forth in time long before and after the Avengers did... That alone dilutes the entire idea and makes Endgame a right old mess and a half. No wonder people found it confusing.
This is why the MCU struggles on a logical level; it struggles enormously with the fact there isn't a Steve Rogers, Tony Stark or Natasha Romanov. The fact that Tony Stark wasn't prepared to let Bruce Banner click his fingers and return everything back to where it was - five years earlier - created its own paradox, on top of all the other paradoxes. This might seem like nit-picking, but the events in Endgame whether they make sense or not have essentially created a problem that cannot be solved. It's an absolute shower of shite film that not only was quite extraordinary, it made every superhero film that followed it like a poor encore, it also killed the franchise.
Like I said, Endgame was an emotions film; it dispensed common sense with 'ooh look favourite characters have been killed/retired' - it swaps logic for sensationalism and by doing that makes everything that comes after it as moot. Plus when you kill off the three cornerstones of your universe, it doesn't matter who you introduce, one of the reasons the MCU's first 20 odd films were so successful was because of Steve Rogers, Tony Stark and Natasha Romanov. Without them there's no Avengers, without them there's no backbone, no cornerstones. No real interest. Endgame wasn't just a confusing mess, it effectively took the three main reasons the MCU was popular out of the equation. It gave people no reason to stay loyal to the brand - imagine if Heinz stopped making beans, but carried on making everything else? Would they be as successful? Forget all the absolute bollocks the story was, it created problems and then Marvel walked away from it.I think, deep down, a lot of people did view Endgame as the perfect jumping off point; many might have stuck around to see what happens next, but what happened next was always going to be inferior. You can't really top Endgame in terms of its scope and the massive battle to end all battles - nothing reaches the emotive levels it created and there's not a superhero film since that feels like it's doing something new or different.
Moving on to other issues that face the MCU and the superhero genre in general...
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| This is what was foreseen as the MCU timeline back in 2019 when Feige announced the acquisition of Fox and pre-Covid19 - how things have changed... |
Now we're entering a critical 'phase' in the longevity of the MCU; we're a number of years and films from any potential conclusion to this Multiverse Saga and nothing on the schedules until The Kang Dynasty really looks like it's going to solve the problems that Marvel created by not listening to it's test screening audiences of nearly five years ago - time travel is a bad idea. If a fifth of them watching felt it was a good jumping off point, there's not a lot you can do if your main stars don't want to be in your films any more, but if almost as many think it was confusing then you stop that in its tracks, you don't carry on regardless making things even more complicated and churning out films that don't advance the overarching story.
The Marvels has already had extensive reshoots because of executive shuffling at the top of the management and Test Screening reactions have been poor. This is a film that among other things has a huge Bollywood style musical number taking place on the Planet Aldana [a place where everyone talks in rhymes and often break out into song and dance routines] for Carol Danvers marriage to Prince Yan - this might appeal to certain audiences, but I expect it's one of the reasons why the film has been projected to have a catastrophically bad opening weekend - key to a film's overall success. Also, it's main star has joined a long list of other MCU stalwarts and declared she's had enough of the criticisms personally aimed at her, she's grown tired of the genre in general and simply doesn't want to be Captain Marvel any longer. So you can add Brie Larson to the list that includes Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Chris Evans, Elizabeth Olsen and others who won't be coming back and when you consider comments made by Mark Ruffalo that he believes his time playing the Hulk is coming to an end than all you're left with is a new generation of actors and heroes, none of which set the world alight and aren't the icons the MCU needs. The Young Avengers anyone? A team made from TV characters and younger versions of existing heroes? Sounds riveting [he said with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek].There is also the fact that Ms Marvel hasn't been a huge success in the USA, but has been in Muslim countries; this is a point we'll be dealing with in the next paragraphs...
There are rumours that not only was the fourth Captain America film title changed because of fears about the potential Nazi connotations, but another three months were spent reshooting loads of the film. That suggests that whatever they were doing originally wasn't good enough for the franchise and this will have been before it even got to test screenings - Marvel must have seen that Sam Wilson as Captain America was not going to prove as popular as Chris Evans, but what can they do about it?
The addition of half the 2008 Incredible Hulk cast - minus the actual Hulk - suggests the nostalgia route that the MCU is taking isn't just a coincidence - we'll get onto Deadpool and the X-Men in a bit - but if Marvel can't see a way of introducing new and interesting heroes, then all they can do is bring back things from old films - whether they're 'MCU' films or from further back.
Now, with the current crisis in the Middle East and growing anti-Semitic and Islamophobic problems across the globe and Shira Haas's addition to the cast of Captain America: Brave New World as Israeli superhero Sabra, the MCU could be alienating a large percentage of the world's largest religion from wanting to see the film. Sabra's presence is in this film is going to at some point focus on Israel - Muslim countries have been huge in the world wide response to the MCU; Disney has already proved that it will pander to their Chinese audiences and as it is a moneymaking machine and I cannot imagine it would alienate the world's Muslim community, even if there's nothing Islamic in the Captain America film - however, if the film is seen promoting Israel in any sense at all, multi-millions could stay away from the cinemas and some countries might ban it altogether - Disney hates that when it happens.
Captain America: Brave New World has been pushed back in the schedules, originally it was set for a March 2024 release, that is now July and if rumours are correct (and when it's scheduling they usually are) it might not hit the cinemas until September or October of next year; whether this will be because of reshoots or just the ongoing strikes (the writers one has been settled but the actors one looks like it could rumble on for ages yet). is unknown but the longer the Israeli/Palestine atrocity continues the more the divisions will widen and the more problematic CA:BNW becomes... If Marvel panders to the Chinese, are they going to ignore the Islamic world for Israel, which doesn't really represent a huge market for a multi-national film company?Then there's the suggestion that CA:BNW might be the first part of a two-handed affair with Thunderbolts following on directly from it, with Harrison Ford voicing a new Red Hulk. There's also suggestions that this could be Bruce Banner's last outing as the green Hulk with Mark Ruffalo's aforementioned comments looking like they could come true. Maybe Marvel/Disney thinks the New Avengers line up (which won't feature any of the originals and will no longer feature Brie Larson) will succeed. I think anyone will be sceptical about this approach and just who would they have?
But wait, there's even more problems on the horizon...
The Fantastic Four film, scheduled for May 2025 still hasn't got a working script; there have been no actors cast and Marvel executives have stated there is real concern about the project, not just in how they do it but whether it will arrive too late to save the franchise. It's already been pushed back in the schedules and as one writer for Marvel stated recently in a comment on his Facebook page, "For all the faults the Fox films had, their depiction of the FF was pretty much spot on. The reboot threw all of the team's Marvel history out of the window and failed miserably and now the MCU has to decide how it's going to pursue this project or whether it's worth pursuing at all..."
Does the MCU/Disney just start again with an origin story or do they do something radical? They can't go the nostalgia route because three of the four stars of that film are much older and are no longer viable for the roles and there's Chris Evans who is obviously Captain America; so they have to recast the characters and they desperately need to have a film that takes over the MCU; becomes the new Iron Man, Cap and Black Widow - it needs to be the new #1 and even before a word is placed on a page that is almost impossible. I wouldn't be surprised if the FF film isn't pushed further back in the schedules or even shelved for the foreseeable future. The Fantastic Four have always been Marvel's First Family, how can they become that if they're introduced into an extant universe? Reed Richards is supposedly the most intelligent man on the planet, where was he when the earth faced all of its life-threatening moments in the past? How come he's never been mentioned by Tony Stark or Bruce Banner?
Which brings us to the X-Men proper. Kevin Feige announced four years ago that now Disney owned Fox, there would be that long-awaited X-Men return to the MCU, but that hasn't materialised and there's nothing on the schedules that even hints at it - other than Deadpool 3, which even if it does introduce us to new versions of the X-Men and mutants in general, it falls straight back into the 'where the fuck have they been all these years?' category, so the wait for the X-Men might be a lot longer than anyone expects. Feige also recently said, "As we move forward and dive deeper into the Multiverse Saga, you never know when timelines may just crash or converge" which sounds to me like a cop out.
For the X-Men to work properly it needs to be given the air the original comic series had; it almost has to fail to be resurrected into this brilliant thing and that, in film and TV time, means four or five years of visual development. Oddly enough the Multiverse saga would be an ideal place to introduce the X-Men, the same as it would be (and has) introduced the Fantastic Four, but the multiverse is also something that fans of the MCU are growing tired of already - probably because there's been so few actual references to it it outside of Doctor Strange and Spider-Man films. The best you can hope for is films like Deadpool 3 bringing back existing X-Men characters because Marvel has absolutely no idea how to introduce a new team and integrate them into the existing MCU without, again, falling into the Eternals trap and I start sounding like a stuck record. Plus you've got X-Men '97 the animated series returning - this suggests it's all they have.
Let's not even think about Blade, another film beset by scheduling, scripting and actor problems. This has also had a number of reshoots and no longer looks as though it will have any links to the Black Knight as hinted at in the much-maligned Eternals and frankly I can't really understand why it would. This is scheduled to appear in February 2025 - that almost 18 months after it was originally mooted. Disney has just announced that a number of TV series are being pushed back in the schedules of Disney+ and to say there's a buzz about Agatha Harkness: The Darkhold Diaries (now in it's third or fourth name change) or Ironheart would be a lie. Daredevil: Born Again is now set for the summer of 2025 and that's been changed, moved and fiddled around with. Proposed films such as Armour Wars, The Young Avengers, and another Shang-Chi film, not to mention a fourth Sony Spider-Man (possibly featuring Venom) are all in limbo and execs are not going to be keen to move forward if any of 2024's proper MCU films flop. There is a worry that even Deadpool 3 needs to match the first two or things will get seriously wobbly...
And then there's the far more existential problem of superhero films falling out of vogue. Yes, I know this has been said for the last four years, but at some point that forecast is going to come true. There's has been an almost relentless conveyor belt of superhero films over the last 25 years; a stream that has increased since 2010 and if there's not a Marvel or DC film (or television series) there's someone else having a bash at doing the genre in their own way (I'm thinking Fast Color, Super, Green Hornet, Glass, Megamind, Kick-Ass 1 & 2, Chronicle, Big Hero Six and Incredibles 2 just cluttering up the place along side all those Marvel, DC and the largely woeful Sony films and the animated stuff that often gets overlooked). There has been over 100 genre films made since 2000 alone, that's over four a year; on average one every three months for 23 years. That's too many and too many of them have been inferior and probably only two of them in the last five years have been good proper enjoyable films.So with a genre that needs serious resuscitation will there even be an Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in 2026 or an Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027 and just who are the Avengers going to be? Are there any superheroes left in the MCU who could be classed as a box office draw? The Hulk? Maybe. Spider-Man? (after a fashion given that Sony own the film rights and aren't going to relinquish them unless Disney buys the company?) Can you think of any current Marvel superhero that fits into the Avengers roster who will carry a film the way Robert Downey Jr or Chris Evans or Scarlett Johansson could? No, you can't, so that makes the two proposed Avengers films either needing to be the salvation of the MCU or the absolute end of the big studio superhero genre. My money's on the latter... |
| We pretty much now know this proposal for future Marvel projects isn't going to happen; in fact Marvel hasn't released a definitive Phase 6 and later graphic at all since the one with the FF movie and the two Avengers films. 'Everything is fluid,' said one Disney exec... |
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