Will the Marvel Cinematic Universe Ever Truly End?

the Marvel Cinematic Universe has a third act problem heads up this video contains mild spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3. the Marvel Cinematic Universe whether you love it or hate it it's an unparalleled achievement in modern storytelling beginning with Iron Man in 2008 the MCO has elevated characters like Captain America Tony Stark The Hulk and even the Guardians of the Galaxy from comic book icons to the most recognizable and beloved characters in global popular culture it's a franchise built on a simple premise everything is connected and nothing ever ends it's a Perpetual dopamine drip that continues even after the credits roll and during the credits themselves the MCU has made staying put in your seat absolutely mandatory for the sheer thrill of seeing Nick Fury recruit someone for The Avengers Initiative Jay Jonah Jameson Crossing cinematic universes or even something as silly as Stanley regaling the Watchers with Cosmic Tales of his Cameo Capers hey Audrey I've got so many more stories to tell the promise of the MCU is a Perpetual story engine spandex clad superheroes battling Sky portals hallways and hordes of CGI enemies add infinitum and while James Gunn recently brought his Trilogy to a satisfying conclusion in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. it's made explicitly clear that these characters will return for future Adventures whether you want it or not but can the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever truly end or will it like many of its movies Lumber to a messian inconclusive halt with a carnival Barker's promise of more to come and if it does how can it reach a satisfying conclusion rather than just simply fading away into dust like so many Peter Parkers that's the biggest question especially with the premise of a massive reset button in the form of Secret Wars looming on the horizon given the current state of affairs both narratively and at the box office a reset might be exactly what the MCU needs if it wants to survive and thrive in the long term because at the moment it feels like the MCU itself has a third act problem as nerdist's news editor Ro rusack so eloquently put it the Marvel Cinematic Universe is always thinking about the future but the future never arrives because as soon as we hit upon that future we once glimpsed we're already on to the next future until the time to tell the actual story is always later rather than right now individual story arcs come to a close but more often than not they feel like their mere interludes to introduce the next villain he's the next entry set up the next World shattering event the result can feel a bit like treading water and sometimes that treading does yield satisfying results like the unexpectedly delightful self-contained Christmas caper of Hawkeye other times it feels like you're drowning in a sea of ant-mans as things like quantumania move their characters into position for the next big sequence like mere action figures absolutely in this attempt to create a sense of constant narrative motion can be a double-edged sword because it creates the artificial sense that every piece of the puzzle is absolutely crucial despite producers and directors claiming that each entry completely stands on its own the closest We've Come to an actual end of the MCU is Avengers end game and that defied the odds and brought 21 other interconnected films to a satisfying conclusion the experiment very well could have ended there but the implication was an ellipses rather than a period and that's simply because we knew that phase 4 was around the corner but you wanted more now despite literally being divided into three concrete phases the infinity Saga feels like it can be split into two discrete Parts the crescendo and the peak now the crescendo was a time of endless Exposition the novelty of post-credit scenes and the shocking cohesion of how everything gelled together in Avengers although the Saga waxed and waned through its second phase the sense that it was all building towards this universe shattering Showdown with Thanos proved enough momentum to navigate those narrative doldrums after all Thanos himself put it best I am inevitable that Crescendo built towards the peak that was the height of the mcu's powers in phase three that's where we felt the full might of this well-oiled cinematic machine working in unison to propel us towards a two-part climactic battle across space and time to save the universe as we knew it it's the kind of mic drop that's difficult to move on from because how do you create larger Stakes than killing half of all life in the known universe by revealing all the unknown universes that were having the time of their lives just out of frame laughing too dubbed the Multiverse Saga this current overarching MCU story dangles the incredibly tantalizing possibility of seeing disparate universes alternate versions of beloved characters and one-off stories that couldn't take place within the bounds of the main MCU Cannon despite some lackluster fight scenes arising from the realities of producing television during the height of the pandemic Loki did a tremendous job at firmly establishing the scope of what the Multiverse Saga could entail it laid out its potential in a horribly animated cartoons and even gave us a glimpse at the end of time itself with he who remains Creepy Citadel while One Division proved there are plenty of dramatic depths to Plum from familiar characters Loki was the first time we felt the potential of what the Multiverse could offer with that said Spider-Man no way home is perhaps the most successful example of the Multiverse concept thus far the most anticipated movie since end game brought 20 years of Spider-Man storytelling to a head it showed us a pack of Peter Parker's battling some of the greatest villains in comic book movie history and while it wasn't a perfect movie it balanced the fan service inherit in bringing back fan favorites it paid homage to its forebears and it created real consequences for characters in the movie and in future films and yet despite its ostensibly Limitless potential for storytelling facilitated by an endless array of universes the Multiverse Saga feels like a bit of a slog Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness primarily showed us a slideshow of alternate realities before letting onto maximoff kill off a handful of Thoroughly spoiled cameos in a decidedly brutal fashion and as satisfying as it was to see the Illuminati and learn about incursion events from a lore perspective it felt like Marvel didn't push the envelope far enough what if which should have been the least restricted canvas on which to tell these stories of multiversal Mayhem basically amounted to what if this Marvel movie you've already seen was slightly dim different it had no real meaningful changes there's this strange undercurrent of corporate hesitance to undermine the status quo and that ultimately robs the Multiverse Saga of the sense of momentum the infinity Saga had instead we're stuck in a state of inertia that edges closer to entropy with each passing project shows like wand Division and Loki were allowed to take bigger swings but the movies meanwhile are left as these big lumbering interludes films like Thor love and thunder and Ant-Man quantumania kind of feel like reminders that the engine of story is still turning but there's something stuck in the gears it's grinding progress to a screeching halt now maybe this is a sense of impatience but after 32 movies countless TV shows and specials audiences are champing at the bit for that same feeling of propulsiveness that accompanied each entry in the infinity Saga the Multiverse Saga feels as though we're in the third Act of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in some sense stumbling along towards this conclusion the drive to make everything so increasingly interconnected with Disney plush shows and corporate overzealousness to increase streaming subscriptions led to far too many MCU entries in too little time the resulting overexposure diluted what made the MCU special to some viewers and contributed to a sense of superhero fatigue among certain audiences I'm tired and while I don't personally have superhero fatigue and I assume most of you don't either the off-cited fear of audiences waning interest has manifested at the box office for a Time nearly every Marvel movie would crack the billion dollar Mark worldwide although the MCU still opens at number one at the box office with each new movie Spider-Man no way home was the last Marvel film to pass the billion dollar Mark and that was back in 2021 others like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness earned a still very respectable 955 million dollars worldwide but given the fact that Marvel Studios had at least one movie make more than a billion dollars each year from 2017 to 2021 it feels a little auspicious hey right you didn't pay for that this could partly be because audiences movie going habits have changed in a post lockdown world where everyday expenses are higher than ever and that's also to say nothing of the fact that these movies also do gangbusters on streaming platforms but as we start to conclude cinematic trilogies it's hard not to feel like an end is in sight well maybe not an ending but certainly A New Beginning this isn't to say that we need something like end game that leaves major characters like Tony Stark and Natasha Romanov dead and buried the perfect example actually is what James Gunn just did with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. over on Nerdist staff writer Eric Diaz explored how Guardians volume 3 shows us that death is not the only viable ending and despite endless pontificating about which members of the Guardians would die no one actually bit the dust well I guess rocket technically did for a minute there but he got better rather Our Heroes Journeys have come to a natural end and Gunn leaves us with the promise of more to come without explicitly spelling out what those new adventures might be so for the Marvel Cinematic Universe live the Marvel Cinematic Universe must die and then emerge as something familiar yet new because as we mentioned earlier the core premise of the MCU is one never-ending interconnected story it's a constant River of narrative into which seemingly disparate streams flow some may diverge into tributaries but they will ultimately feed back into that main Unstoppable narrative torrent and while Sony continues to make their own deeply strange quarter of the Marvel Universe with titles like Venom morbius and Craven Disney's acquisition of fox means that two key supergroups the Fantastic Four and the X-Men can now play in the sandbox from which they were conspicuously missing the MCU has already weathered the departure of franchise stars like Robert Downey Jr Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans and it feels like even more departures could be on the horizon because the way things stand right now it feels like the MCU is actively sunsetting many of their current superhero stories Thor is off with his new adopted daughter the Guardians have a brand new crew Peter Parker's been magically undocked and there is a whole crop of teenage superheroes waiting in the wings to take over Young Avengers who can eventually become Earth's Mightiest Heroes themselves because how many more times do you think that Chris Hemsworth is going to Suit Up to Play Thor how many more outings is Spider-Man does Tom Holland realistically have in him these actors do owe much of their Global popularity to the Marvel Cinematic Universe but they also have creative and artistic aspirations of their own and to be tied into a single role for so long can be stifling for some and that's why Marvel should once again take a cue from the comics and use the events of Avengers Secret Wars as a passing of the torch across their decades-long histories both Marvel and DC have found themselves at times buckling beneath the crushing weight of History all those years of Storytelling created confusing convoluted mythology that could be impenetrable to Casual Raiders and the uninitiated just ask any X-Men fan for a brief explanation of psylocke's backstory then grab a box of tissues as their nose begins to bleed the good news is Marvel's already laid out the arc texture of phases 5 and 6. we already know what those Adventures are building toward and that is Avengers Secret Wars with a whole Council of Kang the Conqueror is ready to wreak havoc on the Multiverse and incursion events threatening whole universes this is the perfect way to lower the curtain on this era of Storytelling most famously DC did it back in 1985 with crisis on infinite Earth to simplify its convoluted Cannon and the event that Avengers Secret Wars is based on was intended to unite its successful Ultimate Universe with the main Earth 616 Canon and quick side note the Ultimate Universe was actually a creation intended to give younger audiences and new readers an easier access point to the Marvel Universe it was motivated in part by the X-Men and Spider-Man movies coming to theaters in the early 2000s in other words it's a tried and true method for giving yourself a clean slate and that slate doesn't work or you just love making terrible decisions just give it a year or so like Marvel reborn then go back to the status quo Secret Wars Jonathan Hickman and Assad Riddick seminal 2015 comic event series was basically the end point of the Marvel Multiverse in its current form when the dust cleared it wasn't so much the death of the Multiverse as The Rebirth of the Marvel Universe and that's the needle the MCU must attempt to thread keep some familiar aspects but make this universe that can sometimes Buckle under the weight of nearly 20 years of History feel a bit lighter more accessible and most importantly new because if the MCU can't find a way to make their projects feel fresh exciting and important again they'll just keep plotting along toward yet another inevitable Showdown with yet another big purple villain until audiences simply get tired I'm tired and to see this Grand experiment in interconnected storytelling end with a whimper rather than a bang that would be the darkest timeline of all it's a third act problem from which there truly would be no solution anyway folks there you have it that's our assessment of the overall state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Guardians volume 3. now look we're obviously still massive fans of the MCU we spend a tremendous amount of time over thinking basically every aspect of it and if you want to keep overthinking it too we've got you covered over on Nerdist for now though tell us what do you think do you agree with our assessment is hitting the reset button the best way forward let us know in the comments below and for the latest and greatest the world of Pop Culture make sure you stay tuned to nerdist.com foreign

Channel: Nerdist

Views: 28,940

Keywords: Nerdist, Marvel, MCU, Dan Casey, Nerdist News, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Endings, Video Essay, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Endgame, Avengers, Infinity War, Phase 5, Phase 4, Phase 6, Secret Wars, Thanos, The Multiverse Saga, Problem, Analysis, Critique

Id: rg9tUOEmNx4

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023