The Marvel Cinematic Multiverse

[Neon Ignition]

The difficulty, I'm assuming, is that by definition of the plot it suggests the three leads will share little to no screen time together s I'm guessing we'll get a lot of Fury etc

[Neon Ignition]

https://comicbook.com/movies/news/spider-man-4-sam-raimi-rumors-thomas-haden-church-reveals/

It's light and likely nothing but Thomas Haden Church has said he's heard rumours Raimi may possibly make Spider-Man 4 with Tobey Maguire

[Brad]

FFS why can't Brie have another movie of her own? Ms Marvel was awful.

[teddymeow]

Second trailer for The Marvels which... doesn't really add anything to the prior one and it still looks really cheap

Bonus points for using Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys.

I like the look of the film. Me and the boy have been researching the Infinity Saga and, for the most part, they're better films than what came after.

I've not bothered watching GotG3 or the majority of the series.

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah, I haven’t seen GotG3 yet. The last film I saw was Ant-Man Quantumania and unfortunately it’s very poor. And I’ve just finished Secret Invasion and it was a dull series with a dull ending that kind of wastes what could be a cool gimmick. One plus about the show though, it has some lovely cinematography in places. There are some beautiful shots with lovely lighting. But really not worth watching at all.

[Neon Ignition]

GOTG3 is good but it's notable that it's a closing entry to a pre-Endgame era sub-series made by the same exiting film maker, it cements that a particular style or era of MCU film is over. In 12 months time we're going to be 2/3s of the way through Phase 5 so it seems likely that the next Avenger films are going to have to prop themselves up rather than act as anticipated culminations of the films preceeding them. Too much of the remaining slate is focused on introducing a metric ton more of new characters rather than building a relationship to them.

[Dogg Thang]

And the couple that I saw that featured pre-existing characters weren’t great. Thor was an unfortunate movie. Ant-Man was ambitious but so messy. And Black Widow was entertaining but can’t really contribute beyond that one movie.

[Neon Ignition]

That's the same with GOTG3, because Gunn made it himself its focused on paying off for fans in terms of those characters and their arcs so whilst it's one of the strongest Phase 4/5 films it's also nothing to do with Kang or the MCU plans moving forward so a bit like Endgame it woudl be easy for fans of the previous films to watch it and think "so that's the ending" and move on.

[Dogg Thang]

Leaving just Shang-Chi to keep me interested and yet no sign of a sequel.

[Neon Ignition]

Yep, insane that the earliest outlook on that might be just shy of a decade after the first one. I watch all of them as they come out but in terms of actively interested I look at the known line up and I'm curious about Deadpool 3 though it's not for anything MCU related. Secret Wars might be the most interesting one on the schedule and that's years out and wrapping this saga up. It's what makes the fan thirst for bringing mutants and the X-Men in so funny, they'd be so epically underserved as things stand if they did it.

[teddymeow]

And the couple that I saw that featured pre-existing characters weren’t great. Thor was an unfortunate movie. Ant-Man was ambitious but so messy. And Black Widow was entertaining but can’t really contribute beyond that one movie.

Ant-Man 3 was fun while watching it and then, once I left the cinema and was back in daylight and fresh air, I couldn't remember a single thing about it other than Bill Murray sounded bored.

Thor 4 was, and this is a technical term I learned during my media studies course at college, woeful ****e! Christian Bale was absolutely wasted as Gorr.

Even "big hitters" like Wakanda Forever haven't had a second viewing despite my love of the first one. It was just messy and sorely lacking and charm or charisma (RIP Chadwick Boseman).

Shang Chi was good. It was fun which definitely helped. It had some nice, quippy, rapid dialogue like RDJ brought to the films that Iron Man featured in.

Hawkeye was excellent. Again, Renner brings a charm to the role that helps raise it above the weaker series of MCU fodder.

It really doesn't feel like Marvel have much of a plan for this phase. As it stands, the Avengers who will be in the upcoming films maybe don't have the same pull as the OG line up?

[Neon Ignition]

Yep, that's really going to be the issue moving forward it seems.

*Takes deep breath*

So, in Phase 1-3 we had:

-Iron Man
-Hulk
-Thor
-Captain America
-Black Widow
-Loki
-Winter Soldier
-Guardians
-Hawkeye
-Ant Man
-Wasp
-Wanda
-Vision
-Loki
-Peggy Carter
-Nick Fury
-Rhodey
-Pepper
-Spider-Man
-Zemo
-Abomination
-Falcon
-MJ
-Doctor Strange
-Wong
-Valkyrie
-Black Panther
-Captain Marvel

Barring the ones brought in right around the time that Infinity War/Endgame were releasing that was around a decade in time with the main central heroes recieving trilogies to develop their characters and/or multiple central appearances in other branded films to progress them from origin to the final battle outcome Bearing in mind we've only really lost two of these characters and yet it feels like they're pretty vacant from the franchise at this point.

Over Phase 4 and 5 so far we've introduced:

-Yelena
-Red Guardian
-Taskmaster
-Shang-Chi
-Sersi
-Kingo
-Phastos
-Gilgamesh
-Thena
-Starfox
-Pip
-Morbius
-America Chavez
-Clea
-Shuri Black Panther
-Kang
-Cassie
-Agatha
-Monica Rambeau
-US Agent
-Valentina
-Renslayer
-Mobius
-Sylvie
-Kate Bishop
-Moon Knight
-Scarlet Scarab
-Black Knight
-Ms Marvel
-She-Hulk
-Titania
-Echo
-Ironheart
-Blade
-Fantastic Four

And the merging of
-Venom
-Spider-Man (Maguire)
-Green Goblin
-Doc Oc
-Sandman
-Spider-Man (Garfield)
-Elektro
-Lizard
-Daredevil
-Kingpin
-Madame Web
-Punisher
-Deadpool
-Wolverine

I feel like it would be entirely understandable for many to read the latter list and not know who many of those characters are despite likely having seen them on screen already. I know that post Endgame The Avengers remains an active team in the MCU but I genuinely couldn't tell you who is on it barring Ant-Man because Quantumania referred to him being so so often.



The MCU Impact Of "Secret Invasion" - Dark Horizons
I haven;t watched Secret Invasion yet but this post-show breakdown of how its story may feed into future series and films feels like a 1-0-1 in how they need to back to the Phase 1-3 model.

[Asura]

And the merging of
-Wolverine

Hate to ask as I fear the answer, but are the existing X-Men movies now, officially, retroactively part of the MCU due to multiverse shenanigans?

God I really hope not.

[Neon Ignition]

Hard to know at the moment, seems to lie mostly on how Deadpool 3 handles things but if you were to take the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 seriously anyway then Deadpool would always have been XCU adjacent anyway. I'm guessing that the Wolverine in Deadpool 3 will turn out to be an alternative universe version like Professor X was in Multiverse of Madness. There seems to be an understandle wish to not undermine the ending in Logan.

[Dogg Thang]

Even though I generally agree with your core point, I feel like those lists aren’t exactly fair in their comparison. The early phases introduced way more unlisted characters who could be considered to be on a par with people you’ve included in your second list. And some of them haven’t really been introduced (a FF multiverse cameo and some post-credit teasers that nobody will remember).

Really, I think it all just comes down to the thing we all knew was happening and probably couldn’t happen any other way - starting from scratch essentially. I don’t think that’s a real problem though. The problem is that the films just haven’t all retained the level of quality to be entertaining enough on their own.