"Marvel is desperate"...?
I totally understand that Marvel isn't riding the exact same wave of success they once were. (Having said that, the Multiverse Saga has made nearly **ten billion dollars** in just five years.)
But this argument all over social media that Marvel is "desperately running back to the Russos and Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr" is *way overblown* if you actually look at the timeline of events that led to this.
* 2018: Joe Russo *literally said* he and his brother would happily direct Secret Wars. That same year, Marvel started developing several multiverse-related projects for Phase Four.
* 2021: Deadline reports Chris Evans was coming back to Marvel. Evans denied it. (But so does everybody when asked about Marvel rumors.)
* 2022: Avengers: Secret Wars is announced *without* a director. Important note: **Marvel never explicitly said Kang would be the villain of Secret Wars.**
* 2022-Early 2023: Kevin Feige reportedly began talking with RDJ about coming back to Marvel sometime *before* Majors was arrested and *before* Quantumania released.
* 2024: Deadline *again* reports Chris Evans was coming back to Marvel. This was *after* his Deadpool & Wolverine appearance, so it wasn't in reference to that film.
**The Multiverse Saga was conceptualized and began development at the height of Marvel's success and popularity.**
"Desperation" was not a factor in their decision to build a narrative arc tailor-made for legacy actors and characters to return and/or crossover into the MCU. Regardless of how many hits or misses they had this saga, the return of OG Avengers in new and old roles for the finale was inevitable.
Or do people honestly believe Marvel would bring back:
Evan Peters, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, Patrick Stewart, Ryan Reyolds, Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Dafne Keen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Alan Cumming, Ian McKellan, Rebecca Romijn...
...but ***not*** *Chris Evans* or *Robert Downey Jr.* for the big finale? Really?
Yes, *obviously* they are pivoting from Kang. But that doesn't mean everything from this saga is suddenly irrelevant and they're now scrambling to throw together a plot and "win the audience back". (Again, it's worth noting that "the audience" has given Marvel *at least* $1.3B every single year this saga.)
Incursions, variants, multiversal war, the Void, sorcery and the occult, heroes meddling with reality...these are all ideas that *easily* transfer from a Kang movie to a Doom movie. It's an easy pivot *because they were already adapting a comic arc where* *Doom is the final boss.*
**TL; DR:** The penultimate movie of this saga might look different than how Marvel originally envisioned it when they announced their "five-year plan" in 2019, but the Russos, Evans and RDJ were always coming back. And we have no good reason to believe otherwise when you look at how they've been building up to Secret Wars and how they've utilized the multiverse this whole time.
But this argument all over social media that Marvel is "desperately running back to the Russos and Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr" is *way overblown* if you actually look at the timeline of events that led to this.
* 2018: Joe Russo *literally said* he and his brother would happily direct Secret Wars. That same year, Marvel started developing several multiverse-related projects for Phase Four.
* 2021: Deadline reports Chris Evans was coming back to Marvel. Evans denied it. (But so does everybody when asked about Marvel rumors.)
* 2022: Avengers: Secret Wars is announced *without* a director. Important note: **Marvel never explicitly said Kang would be the villain of Secret Wars.**
* 2022-Early 2023: Kevin Feige reportedly began talking with RDJ about coming back to Marvel sometime *before* Majors was arrested and *before* Quantumania released.
* 2024: Deadline *again* reports Chris Evans was coming back to Marvel. This was *after* his Deadpool & Wolverine appearance, so it wasn't in reference to that film.
**The Multiverse Saga was conceptualized and began development at the height of Marvel's success and popularity.**
"Desperation" was not a factor in their decision to build a narrative arc tailor-made for legacy actors and characters to return and/or crossover into the MCU. Regardless of how many hits or misses they had this saga, the return of OG Avengers in new and old roles for the finale was inevitable.
Or do people honestly believe Marvel would bring back:
Evan Peters, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, Patrick Stewart, Ryan Reyolds, Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Dafne Keen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Alan Cumming, Ian McKellan, Rebecca Romijn...
...but ***not*** *Chris Evans* or *Robert Downey Jr.* for the big finale? Really?
Yes, *obviously* they are pivoting from Kang. But that doesn't mean everything from this saga is suddenly irrelevant and they're now scrambling to throw together a plot and "win the audience back". (Again, it's worth noting that "the audience" has given Marvel *at least* $1.3B every single year this saga.)
Incursions, variants, multiversal war, the Void, sorcery and the occult, heroes meddling with reality...these are all ideas that *easily* transfer from a Kang movie to a Doom movie. It's an easy pivot *because they were already adapting a comic arc where* *Doom is the final boss.*
**TL; DR:** The penultimate movie of this saga might look different than how Marvel originally envisioned it when they announced their "five-year plan" in 2019, but the Russos, Evans and RDJ were always coming back. And we have no good reason to believe otherwise when you look at how they've been building up to Secret Wars and how they've utilized the multiverse this whole time.
Commentaires
Each time, like now, you have the old guard passing the torch to the next gen. Because that's how the hand off works.
It's entirely to be expected.
That 'marvel is desperate' stuff is coming from half haters needing to hate and half people that just don't consume as much media as some of us old nerds so they don't have that media literacy.
Not a single one of us has seen Disney's or Marvel Studios books, so we have no idea how much money they are or aren't making. Undoubtedly something is going right or they wouldn't put so many eggs in the Doomsday/Secret Wars basket.
It's just so bizarre that certain people claim nobody cares about all these new characters while simultaneously wanting these next Avengers movies to be about said characters *and* also somehow make billions of dollars.
*"Marvel is making literally the most logical choice after losing their original big bad...what desperate dumbasses."* Like, what?
People are not going to theaters as much anymore. However if you make a shangchi or marvels, Spiderman, fantastic 4, thunderbolt, or capt America that you produce for 150 to 200 million and they make a more modest return of 700 to 900 million world wide.
A movie doesn't have to make 200 millions to be a success.
One of the reasons this saga was shorter in terms of year is because we had more content, i have no doubt the saga would've lasted a bit longer if they had stayed to just releasing 1-3 projects annually.
Sam has had 2 appearances, both as a main character, in 7 years. Steve had 7 appearances in 7 years as a main character. There has been 1/4th as much character development for Sam as there was for Steve over that time, and the only character who has appeared more than him is Wong with 4 appearances, 2 of them just cameos in one scene. People can feel how thin the writing is for this universe now and how there's no faith in any of the replacement characters from the executives -- even when they crack a billion dollars.
Everybody has certain expectations about what this saga “should have done”, without considering that maybe they wanted to structure this story differently, especially if they knew ahead of time that the big finale was going to lean on legacy and nostalgia.
Also remember that this saga was only supposed to be like *five years long*. A TV show and a movie and then two Avengers is pretty good development time for Sam had they not been given a bunch of bad luck with COVID and the strikes and Majors’ firing.
What they were trying to do was basically what Phase One did—which was also *across five years*: Introduce a bunch of new characters and cross them over in an Avengers movie. It’s just the size and scope of the universe is much bigger than it used to be.
So in this scenario Shang-Chi only getting one movie is the same as Thor or Cap only getting one movie in Phase One.
I have made the argument that i think they wanted the Avengers movie to now serve as the finale to the overall Saga and not the phases anymore, they are now the "series" finale, not the season finale.
But i do think maybe a good alternative so we could've still had a team up to cap the phase is if instead of having an Avengers movie every 2 years (based on how Phases 4-6 were originally structured) maybe they could done other team up films like maybe move up Thunderbolts into the Phase 4 slot and Champions into Phase 5 for argument sake.
One thing we tend to forget is how this saga was cursed with delays, and how that was going to impact the gap between characters appearances, like we would've had seen Shang-Chi again by now for example.
Ant-Man 3 ended with a Colosseum of Kangs. Like, you can't write something that genuinly don't feel oike a bad rewriting.
Okay then.
There’s still all the other story elements that are ripped out of a comic where Doom is the villain.
I actually did, but they require to recast Kang and Marvel dosen't want to do it
>There’s still all the other story elements that are ripped out of a comic where Doom is the villain.
Him being white or having iron man's face are not those story elements. That is what makes me seriusly angry. For the next 10 years people will think Doom is an Iron Man's variant.