Why the Multiverse Saga in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a disaster.
Everyone knows that the MCU has massively gone downhill since the end of the Infinity Saga and the defeat of Thanos.
The end of the Avengers End Game which released in 2019 saw the swan song of Chris Evans as Captain America and Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, and in a sense Scarlet Johansen as Black Widow…even though yes of course, she did get a prequel film a couple of years later.
But whilst that main Avengers characters were bowing out and other original MCU characters were being somewhat sidelined for younger replacement characters like with She Hulk and girl Hawkeye, the rapid downwards spiral of the MCU has had less to do with the loss of these characters, and more to do with the lack of focus of the storyline.
I mean heck, the last actual Iron Man film came out in 2013, and since then we have had characters like Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man which have done great and could easily carry the next wave of Avengers films.
But with the release of the second MCU Spider-Man film we started leaning heavily into the multiverse.
Now of course, the multiverse had been spoken of previously in the MCU and Avengers End Game in particular did play with time lines and the disruption of the sacred time line which would directly lead into the events of the show Loki and introduce us to the full possibilities of the multiverse.
The problem is that everything that Marvel has done since 2019 has just teased the possibilities of the multiverse instead of embracing it fully.
Let’s break down what Marvel have done with the Multiverse to exploit this as the theme for the second saga of the MCU after the Infinity Saga, and how they have failed at almost every point to capitalise on the golden opportunity of a lifetime.
When we think back to the infinity Saga,
the first few films in the MCU had the task of introducing us to all the characters and superheroes that would eventually team up as the Avengers.
But along the way, they just started planting seeds of the infinity stones, a tease of the infinity gauntlet, and whilst every film had a formidable villain for the superheroes to defeat, they were building up the story that would introduce a tease of Thanos at the end of the first Avengers movie, which was film six of the franchise.
We’d then get him introduced slightly more in the first Guardians of the Galaxy film,
and the full introduction and usage of Thanos then came with the release of the Avengers Infinity War and End Game. These were about the 19th and 22nd films in the series.
That’s a huge build up between the sixth film and the nineteenth.
But with the infinity stones being continuously relevant, the story was also building up.
It could be argued that the MCU was doing a similar approach with the Multiverse Saga,
and that the big bad was going to be Kang, and that was derailed when Jonathan Majors got himself cancelled and then fired from the MCU, with Kang the Conqueror being replaced with the returning Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Victor Von Doom.
Kang would have been the next big bad on a Thanos level, and they had started introducing the character through multiversal variants in Loki season’s one and two and the Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania.
But here’s where Marvel made a big problem.
Unlike building up Thanos and the infinity stones bit by bit throughout nineteen movies of the Infinity Saga,
just building up Kang as a new threat wasn’t what was needed of the multiverse saga.
The infinity stones were ultimately just a prop and people weren’t going to the cinema to see the new infinity stone get showed off.
No, in the multiverse saga, the promise you made to the audience is that the multiverse would play a bigger and bigger role in the proceedings and what the expectation was, was that we would have the full range of possibilities for cross over movies, returning actors and characters from previously non MCU related Marvel films and variant versions of characters that had already been in the MCU,
either played by the same actors or fantasy casting of actors to come in as characters that are normally played by someone else.
So, what did Marvel do, and what didn’t it satisfy?
Continued on the next page
