The question every blockbuster fan has been asking themself since
Avengers: Endgame
was released in April 2019 is “what is Marvel going to do next?” The high-grossing movie made $2.8 billion dollars in the box office and provided an ending to the 22-film MCU saga. So, what has Marvel been doing since then? A lot of television shows, for one. The MCU seems to have taken a break from the big screen to embrace streaming in its entirety with weekly episodic shows.
Starting in 2021 with
WandaVision
, Marvel has churned out eight other T.V. shows, including
Falcon
and Winter Soldier
,
Hawkeye, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel
and
Loki
. To be fair, COVID influenced this decision immensely as Disney+ and all the other streaming services racked up content and brands to cater to at-home watching. However, these shows are still lacking as substitutes for the major, screen-dominating blockbusters for which Marvel is known, mostly because they have introduced too many characters and continuously add onto the homework list of content for any film produced now. Perhaps most importantly, we are still not sure where the MCU is going with all of this new content and these new characters. What is the end goal? What are the stakes of this new phase?
Nonetheless, Marvel’s television ventures seem to be gaining in quality with shows like
Loki
gaining a second season, which was released on Oct. 5 and just finished on Nov. 10. The show has an overall 87% Rotten Tomatoes score, which is significantly better than
Secret Invasion
’s 54% and
She-Hulk
’s 77%. (Spoilers!) Loki follows a variant of the titular character as he navigates the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and learns to deal with time. The show is important to the MCU in that it introduces new stakes with the concept of different timelines and gives us a first look at Kang the Conqueror, who had the potential to be one of the major antagonists of the new phase after appearing in
Loki
and
Ant-Man
and the
Wasp: Quantumania
. Having said that, this decision is up in the air at the moment as the Kang actor, Jonathan Majors, faces serious assault charges against his girlfriend and is set to go to trial in late November.
Season two of
Loki
contained six painfully slow episodes that culminated in the destruction of the temporal loom, which was maintaining the overall flow of time, and saw Loki taking the place of Kang as the main timekeeper. This ending was admittedly pretty cool because Loki is able to restructure the entire temporal loom through magic and turn it into a universal tree (reminiscent of the Life-Tree Yggdrasil from Norse mythology) that grows to accommodate the infinitely expanding number of timelines. My main issues with the show were that it didn’t really add to the overall MCU structure, given that the TVA problem is mostly an open-and-shut case, and that we didn’t get to expand on Loki’s magical abilities, even though it is such a crucial part of his character.
On the other hand, Marvel is not doing so well in their recently released films.
The Marvels
was released on Nov. 10 and is cited as the lowest box office opening ever at only $47 million and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 62%. Again, we’ve reached the point where there are simply too many characters to keep track of or even remotely care about and way too much information required for any new movie to be enjoyable. In order to understand the overly generic plot of
The Marvels
, you would have to watch all of
WandaVision
,
Ms. Marvel
, and the
Captain Marvel
movie at the very least. The original MCU at least had every movie working towards some greater goal, and even if that goal wasn’t clear until the end of the phase, each film definitely did its part to progress the overall cinematic arc. As for Marvel’s designated Phase 4, which was supposed to be from 2021 to 2022, viewers didn’t see that arc at all and are still confused moving forward into Phase 5 from 2023 to 2025.
Looking forward in the MCU, Phase 5 is supposed to introduce teams like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men to the world of the Avengers, leading up to
Avengers: Kang Dynasty
and
Avengers: Secret Wars
. While those individuals would certainly be cool to bring onto the big screen along with the other Avengers, does the MCU really need more characters at this point? How do we explain this team-up in terms of the increasingly popular multiverse concept, especially when some
X-Men/Fantastic Four
characters have already appeared in variant dimensions (see: the Illuminati, from
Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness
)? At least we can look forward to seeing popular, recognizable characters again in new shows and movies, such as Wolverine in
Deadpool 3
, releasing in May 2024;
Daredevil in Daredevil: Born Again
, set to release in 2025; and Falcon as Captain America in
Captain America: Brave New World
, planned for 2025.
