I absolutely LOVE Marvel. I want you to remember that while I spend the next 500 words complaining about why it does not feel the same anymore.
I fell in love with Marvel because of my dad’s obsession with Iron Man. We binged all three Iron Man movies when I was in middle school, and I was left wondering if there was more to these stories. That’s when I found the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline of movies online. I started with “Captain America: The First Avenger” and the rest is history.
I connected to each of the Avenger’s persona. I fell in love with Stark’s sarcasm, Natasha’s wit, Thor’s arrogance, Banner’s humility, and Steve Rogers’ kind heart.
When I say Marvel doesn’t feel the same anymore, it doesn’t mean I dislike the new characters. I just feel that somewhere in between saving the world for the third time and introducing like 47 new characters…I stopped caring about who was saving it and why.
Avengers: Endgame
“Avengers: Endgame” is essential to the MCU timeline because after more than 11 years of world building, Marvel gave us an ending. Half of the original Avengers that we’ve grown to love are now simply gone.
And yes, each original Avenger has a successor of some sort. But if that’s the case, why aren’t the people loving Sam Wilson as much as they loved Steve Rogers?
Marvel now has to build up new characters, plots, and narratives to keep their audience engaged. More than that, Marvel has to develop a new generation of characters that people are emotionally invested in without having over a decade’s worth of movies to back them up.
The Multiverse
In “Avengers: Endgame,” Stark creates a time machine that is crucial to defeating Thanos and saving their universe. This then led to the concept of the multiverse: a reality that incorporates an infinite number of parallel universes.
We see the exploration of the multiverse in “Loki,” “What If…,” and “Spiderman: No Way Home.” The multiverse introduces an infinite number of possibilities for new timelines and new movies!
However, it also creates a small problem. The MCU has historically created conflicts through the consequences of a character’s actions. Now, the multiverse can undermine those stakes because these possibilities can always change. A new or old character can pop up out of nowhere and ‘save the day.’ So do a character’s actions really matter anymore?
And if there are infinite versions of every single story, how much weight can any one version carry?
Spiderman: Brand New Day
Despite a slew of not so great movies, audiences (including myself) loved “Spiderman: Brand New Day.” I kept racking my mind about why I loved “Brand New Day” yet “Eternals” made me want to pull my hair out.
I realized it’s because after “Avengers: Endgame,” Marvel kept trying to make its villains a bigger threat. When in reality, what connected people to Tom Holland in “Brand New Day” was that the conflict was smaller, it was human.
I remember scrolling through Instagram after the trailer dropped, seeing that people were excited to see that this Peter Parker is depressed, lonely, and broke; just like them. People could relate to Peter’s life and that’s what had them emotionally invested in his character.
Doomsday
The Doomsday clock is tick, tick, ticking down every day. I think we are all excited to see how everything unfolds.
Obviously, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is too massive for the failure of just one movie to kill it. But if Doomsday flops after Marvel spent two years promising that this giant crossover movie would make everything worth the wait, then its failure would definitely mean something.
It isn’t that Marvel lacks compelling stories or influential characters. Right now, they are just so focused on building the next big thing that they’ve forgotten why people love it so much: lovable characters.
The MCU does not need to become bigger to survive, it just needs to become more meaningful again. And I for one, don’t want Marvel to end… I just want to love it again.