The Multiverse Saga ends with Avengers: Secret Wars, set for release on May 7, 2027.
What are your predictions for the next saga?
Not soon enough. The drop in quality has been obvious to everyone. Alternate universes and time travel can be such narrative cop-outs. And that’s in a superhero universe where death already means almost nothing!
Edited.
I’ll give you the drop in quality, I think the quick churn has resulted in lower quality films and TV shows.
However the multiverse? Alternate universes? Time travel? Despite the name this phase has barely touched on it.
Let’s start with the films,
- Black Widow? No multiverse, just a story that took place in the past.
- Shang-Chi? No multiverse. Maybe a cliffhanger for one, but could just be space stuff.
- Eternals? No multiverse. Just space stuff.
- Spider-Man No Way Home? Full multiverse. People love this film.
- Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness. Full multiverse. Again, people love this film.
- Thor Love and Thunder? No multiverse. Space and gods.
- Black Panther Wakanda Forever? No multiverse.
- Ant-Man Quantumania? Technically not multiverse, but full Kang so I’ll count it. Now we have a film with issues. But also, are we already prepping to ditch Kang at this point? Might explain the issues.
- Guardians Volume 3? Deals with Gamora, a little multiverse. But in general film is well liked, Gamora isn’t ever the issue.
- The Marvels? No multiverse during the film, but ends with a setup for one. People are excited for mutants anyway.
- Deadpool? Full multiverse. Again, loved.
So out of 11 films we have 4 Multiverse films, and apart from Ant-Man we’re all big fans of them. It you want to argue Doctor Strange also has issues, fine, but it still comes out to a decent enough film.
Now let’s look at TV,
- WandaVision? Not multiverse. It does tease us as an audience about it and the post credits will eventually lead into the multiverse, but hard to call this one of them. Plus, well loved.
- Falcon & Winter Soldier? No multiverse.
- Loki? Both seasons. Full multiverse. I really enjoyed this. I’ve heard some folks didn’t. Again we’re walking past Kang issues by season 2, so difficult to say if this went as intended.
- What If…? Both seasons. Full multiverse. Again I had fun. Some good episodes. Some weaker episodes. But also a show that exists outside of everything else.
- Hawkeye? No multiverse.
- Moon Knight? No multiverse.
- Ms. Marvel? A little multiverse,a little time travel. The issue here is that the villain/ending is rushed.
- She-Hulk? No multiverse.
- Werewolf by night? Not multiverse.
- Guardians Special? Not multiverse.
- Secret Invasion. Not multiverse. Hopefully someday not canon. Ouch, but the issue isn’t the multiverse.
- Echo? Not multiverse.
- X-men 97? Multiverse and a bunch of stuff. Generally well received.
13 shows, 11 if you want to exclude the specials, back up to 13 if you want to count season 2 of shows.
Less than half however you want to count it. What If… is a variety show, X-Men is a continuation. Loki is the real focus here since it has the Kang story. Ms Marvel is setting up Mutants.
So when we look at it all we have,
- The Kang Arc, Loki season 1 sets up strongly for, Ant-Man is the first film for it and for some reason (Hint: Kang actor) finishes it, and then Loki season 2 confirms it.
- Doctor Strange Arc, Spider-Man & Madness get him exploring, with a setup to do more (it’s odd to me we don’t have this next film yet either)
- And to be generous, the Mutant Arc, which is really just the Ms. Marvel and Marvels setup.
We’ve barely touched on the multiverse. You can call them narrative cop outs, but they haven’t even done it. The issue isn’t the multiverse. The issue is the weak stories.
And we can’t just say that the multiverse doesn’t have good stories. Most of the MCU films that have multiverse in them are really enjoyable. Maybe we’re just tired of the multiverse? Not a chance. You know what film I’m looking forward to the most? Spider-Man Spider-verse! That’s a great story.
However, at this point, it’s clear Marvel is moving on from the Multiverse and into mutants. Honestly , that’s fine and probably for the best. I’m disappointed, not that we’re moving on, but that this era had such a bad run. Luckily the Disney CEO behind it is gone, so hopefully things will improve going forward.
Doctor Who is doing a successful TV series since the 60s about time travel, and the Spiderverse movies, Loki, Deadpool & Wolverine as well as Everything, Everywhere All At Once show that multiverse done right can work exceptionally well. The problem, as always, is lazy scripts.
Very good points. It seems the writing is the problem…
I don’t think the multiverse is the issue. It’s things like:
Covid delays fucking up the release schedule. No Way Home was supposed to come out after Multiverse of Madness
Disney overreacting about James Gunn’s edgy teenage tweets. GOTG 3 was supposed to be before Love and Thunder.
Disney pushing for content for Disney+ spreading Marvel too thin.
Chadwick Boseman dying.
Shoehorning a Black Widow movie that should have been made a decade earlier.
Johnathan Majors turning out to be a douchebag.
From the start I knew the multiverse saga was going to be a tool to pick and choose what to keep once they got the X-men rights back. I’ve been enjoying most of it, but yeah I’d like to go back to paying attention to the one universe please.
It hasn’t even been much of a saga… only 3 of the movies and two shows (out of how many?) utilize the multiverse.
Edited after smoking a joint: It’s almost like in sports when a team takes a season to rebuild after losing their major players.
They aren’t going to put those toys back in the box, they just love using them too much and don’t understand how that Pandoras box removes all stakes from their films. I was done being invested with MCU once it became clear was a fucking time heist cop.out to the problem of Thanos winning Infinity War and killing half the cast.
I don’t care, as long as it’s Squirrel Girl.
Avengers: Vertical Integration, Prioritizing The Shareholders’ Returns
The Thor holds Deadpool and cries saga, obviously.
The Multiverse Saga was too long. Hopefully they learn brevity of media with the Mutant Saga.
Ends about five years after it should have.
They’ll probably scrape Dark Reign off the floor where they left it.
The multiverse is great as long as they all stay separate. Just have different actors play the same characters in smaller more stand alone movies without the need to tie everything together into some sort of massive plot. We could have many fun stories from all the different multiverses. Just make it fun 🤩
A saga about nothing.
That is to say - standalone movies, mostly, with some tidbits for people who’ve seen everything or know the lore. Not setting up dominoes for a decade later. Just sprinkling in bonuses for anyone paying attention.
Then they could really lean into how all these characters barely coexist, in their own stories. Spider-Man has decades of stories that mostly take place in a few boroughs of NYC. The X-Men are always doing their own thing upstate, and Peter might hear about them on the news, but there’s not some grand crossover coming because they don’t hang out together. The unlikeliness of ever even meeting Iron Man can be a running gag.
So embrace how television handles the long stories, nowadays, by making superhero movies more episodic. None of them need to be So-And-So Begins. Throw in a flashback if you really need to explain to any living person what Captain America’s deal is. Chances are pretty good they already get it. Let people pick up any of these movies, whenever. Give them a self-contained story where the premise takes five lines of dialog and using your damn eyeballs.
This can still have multiverse bullshit! You’re free to start a movie with “the distant future, 1997” and show a laser battle. Just resolve that shit in that movie, instead of making it a cliffhanger for a teaser for a crossover for blaaah.
Now this I can agree on.
