OPINION
Warning: the following contains spoilers for multiple recent Marvel Studios projects
When Thor: Love and Thunder hit cinemas this month, even the most hardened of Marvel fans would be forgiven for feeling just a bit fatigued.
Over the past 18 months, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been churning out content, making up for time lost to Covid by unleashing more than a dozen projects – Thor is its 13th project released since January 2021, and the sixth movie in one year.
By comparison, it took eight years for the studio to release the first 13 movies in this franchise. That's a bit of a pick-up in the content pipeline, exacerbated by the possibilities of Disney+ that have allowed a whole new array of heroes step into the spotlight, as well as giving old favourites a new lease on life.
The MCU is now more than 100 hours long from Iron Man to the finale of Ms Marvel, and as a fan I've enjoyed that increasingly long journey. The directors and tones of each project have varied enough that they still feel fresh, even when characters like Thor and Hawkeye that have been around since 2011 are still dominating screen time, and the success of the MCU has allowed more interesting but obscure characters from the comics to get a chance at blockbuster heroism.
Yet, the more projects Marvel turns out, the harder it is to ignore the one question hanging over every second of screentime – what exactly is Marvel's next endgame?
Over the past 14 years, fans have come to expect a certain level of connectedness from the MCU. The first five movies all built towards the initial big team-up that was The Avengers, which in turn ended with the revelation of Thanos, setting up the next seven years of storytelling centred on the Infinity Stones.
It all led up to Avengers: Endgame, which rewrote the timeline, killed the big bad and took half the original heroes with it. It was a satisfying end to a storyline that had been spread across 22 movies – quite a few nerd tears were shed at those screenings, fans finally justified in slogging through subpar efforts like Thor: The Dark World to get to this perfect blockbuster ending.
Fast forward three years, the MCU is six films and seven TV shows into is next iteration – "Phase Four" – but fans are waiting for a sign of what the next big event is.
As enjoyable as it was, Thor: Love and Thunder is the latest example to highlight the aimless direction Marvel's drifting in. The movie introduced multiple new elements to the Marvel world – Greek gods, universal entities, the Valhalla afterlife – but all the characters were Thor regulars, with no crossover to the rest of the universe. Yes, the Guardians of the Galaxy were there, but were simply supporting characters, and there was no set-up or hint as to where they'll be in their upcoming Christmas special or third movie.
Previously, the post-credit scenes that Marvel made mainstream teased upcoming films or connections to the wider universe. Love and Thunder instead introduces Brett Goldstein as Hercules, setting up a plot for the next Thor movie. It follows mid-credit reveals by Harry Styles and Charlize Theron in Eternals and Doctor Strange respectively that tease a sequel, while adding more comics character to an already crowded mix.
Most of the projects released by Marvel in the past year have felt incredibly self-contained. Some would argue it's a good thing that Marvel is letting their franchises operate more as individuals instead of big-budget puzzle pieces. On the streaming side, Ms Marvel and Moon Knight succeeded in telling fairly self-contained stories, while again adding parallel worlds, djinn and Egyptian gods into the equation.
If the stories were staying fully self-contained, then this argument would be redundant. But enough of those crossover elements remain – Bruce Banner and Captain Marvel meeting Shang-Chi, White Widow being sent after Hawkeye at the end of Black Widow – to tease at worldbuilding, but they are yet to fully deliver. Ms Marvel's final few minutes dropped corporate mandated dialogue about "mutations" that meant nothing to the characters but sparked Twitter meltdowns from fans.
That's just the latest reminder of how much bigger this franchise is going to get. Disney's merger with 20th Century Fox brought the Fantastic Four and X-Men into the mix, with MCU mastermind producer Kevin Feige having teased those projects, while cameos in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness show that the two franchises are coming.
That movie also featured a surprise cameo suggesting the lesser-known Inhumans are set to have a role to play. The New York street-level heroes that once roamed Netflix have now been added to the world, after cameo appearances from Daredevil and Kingpin in projects last year. Plus a Disney+ special later this year based around the Werewolf-by-Night character is set to bring the "monster" side of the Marvel world into the MCU, ahead of the Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali that will focus around the vampire killer.
It would help if there was a sign of some other characters taking a backseat, but the original heroes seem to be settling in for the long haul. Neither Hawkeye, Spider-Man or Thor handed over their mantles or retired at end of their latest outings. Loki, who died in Avengers: Infinity War, is coming back for a second season of his Disney+ show. The Hulk – who first appeared in this franchise in 2008 – is back next month as mentor in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Given how death-averse the MCU has been, they can't wait until an Endgame-level event to start killing people off again.
Now, if there was one constant that has appeared the most during the MCU's latest projects, it would be the multiverse. Introduced during Endgame, the concept has been played with in Loki, What If?, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange. Loki introduced Kang the Conqueror, a major time-travelling villain from the comics, played by Jonathan Majors, who will resurrect a different version of the character in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania next year.
The role of the multiverse could mean a dozen different outcomes for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The one that fans are starting to speculate on is an adaptation of the 2015 comic event, Secret Wars – that involved the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Inhumans, and saw the multiverse depleted by "incursions" that took universes out one by one, until there was one amalgamated world left.
Incursions were name-checked several times during Doctor Strange this year, and Loki's first season ended with the multiverse cracking and splitting off into various branches. It feels like the likeliest storyline, and could be a way to introduce X-Men without explaining where mutants have been for the past 30 movies.
But how long it'll take to get there, and how many other storylines we'll need to navigate along the way, remains open for debate. Marvel has announced nearly 30 movies, TV shows and specials and movies that have yet to air, many expected in just the next two years. There's no telling just how many new characters, planets, universes and other concepts they'll introduce before we get word of when Avengers 5 will arrive or whatever the eventual endgame is.
Next week, Kevin Feige will take to the stage at San Diego Comic-Con for the first time since 2019, when we last had a big update of where all these projects were going. It's unlikely we'll get more than a few hints of where the universe is going, but Marvel better dangle a pretty big carrot if they want to keep fans on board.
We spent 50 hours at the movies over 11 years to reach Endgame – we've already sat through 50 hours the past 18 months, and if they want us to sit through double that over the coming years, they need to let us know why it's worth investing in everything they throw our way.
Ethan Sills is the New Zealand Herald's podcast production manager, and executive producer of The Front Page. You can find all the NZ Herald podcasts here
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