Okay Doomer

With the benefit of hindsight, this is what I wish Marvel’s plan had been for the Multiverse Saga era of the MCU:

In my head-canon, the emphasis on Kang was a red herring. He’d have been a major villain, sure — Jonathan Majors, frustratingly, was really great in Loki and even had some good villain moments in Quantumania — just as Loki served as a solid multi-movie villain in phase one of the MCU.

But, ironically, what the Kang variant called He Who Remains said in Loki Season 1 would have been true — he and the TVA were all that was holding the universe from spinning out into chaos. The real threat would be something teased in the post-credits scene from Doctor Strange 2: Wanda’s A Supervillain, I Guess? — incursions. Not a bunch of supervillains who can traverse the multiverse, but some mysterious force causing the multiverse to collapse on itself.

In the comics, the incursions were both a serious universal threat and a solution to an editorial problem. Marvel Comics had introduced a second line with its own rebooted, MCU-inspired continuity — the Ultimate Universe — that had introduced at least one popular new character (Miles Morales, the Ultimate Spider-Man) but otherwise failed to gain long-term traction with readers. Thus, Marvel introduced a major storyline in which different universes were colliding into each other with both being annihilated in the process, with the prime and Ultimate Marvel Universes the last to go. At the end of all that, rather than everything being destroyed, the heroes found themselves in a strange new world made of salvaged bits of all the destroyed universes, in a storyline called… Secret Wars.

(And who was responsible for creating this patchwork world after the end of all the other universes, btw? Doctor Doom.)

In my mind, the best version of the MCU’s Multiverse era was one where Marvel Studios leaned into the multiverse not just as a recurring, awkward bit in several movies, but as a narrative device to start introducing new characters (like the Fantastic Four and X-Men) who had never existed in the regular MCU and would be hard to retcon in now. Imagine if we’d already gotten a new X-Men or Fantastic Four movie from Marvel Studios… but it took place in a reality with no Avengers?

What if, at the same time some MCU sequels began to offer glimpses into worlds beyond what we’ve seen, there were other, newer movies that seemed disconnected, but then it turns out they’re elsewhere in the same multiverse, facing the same incursion threat?

At this point in the production schedule, Jonathan Majors’ arrest and conviction aside, we’d have seen several MCU stories fleshing out this take on the multiverse, and maybe a few “Ultimate MCU” stories beginning to introduce new characters who’d become important during Secret Wars if not before.

Somewhere along the way, let’s say that we’d been given a few examples where evil variants of our regular heroes existed, and even more terrifying than characters like Kang who we only know as variants. The Ultimate comics tried this; their version of the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards was a supervillain called The Maker. Post-Endgame Marvel, bless their hearts, made an attempt here. Doctor Strange Into Darkness introduced the idea that a Strange variant broke bad and had to be banished into another universe — our Strange even faced off against that Strange, but like everything else in that movie, that idea didn’t land. (Which is mystifying because Michael Waldron wrote both Loki and Doctor Strange Reloaded, but I digress.)

My point is, it would have been a huge reveal — and something to keep secret as long as possible — for the true Big Bad of the fifth and sixth Avengers movies to be an evil variant of Tony Stark. Honestly, that’s much more narratively satisfying than introducing a character like Kang, or even Doctor Doom, who audiences (not to mention the MCU’s cast of characters) barely know. The Stark we knew created Ultron, indirectly destroyed Sokovia, and before all of that had been an arms dealer — we already know he had the potential to break bad. We also know he could figure out multiversal time travel within a few days of learning it was possible. What if Tony Stark never had a heart?

It would be totally in character for the Stark we knew to try to build a better world at the cost of two universes, and especially fitting if it turns out the reason he’s doing it is because, in his universe, he never had the Avengers to help keep him honest.

Of course, this kind of “evil duplicate” story works best if the original version is still in the cast, or failing that, if other characters are still around to react to seeing an evil version of their friend. That’s the main flaw with this idea, and (I think) with bringing Downey back at all — he was part of an ensemble nearly all of whom have left the franchise. Does it have the same impact if Sam Wilson or Shuri were to meet Evil Tony, as it would if Captain America or Hulk did?

In any case, none of that is the plan, or if it is, it’s something they’ll cram into three or four movies over two years. If I had to guess, Avengers: Doomsday will end up a lot like the story I suggested here, bringing the awkwardly-introduced and awkwardly-dropped plot threads of multiple universes, variants, incursions, and whatnot into something like the incursions storyline from mid-2010s Avengers and Fantastic Four, so that Secret Wars can reboot the universe just in time for the next 10 years of franchise content.

In Doomsday and Secret Wars (and probably Fantastic Four: First Steps in some form), Robert Downey, Jr. has been announced as playing Doctor Doom. Maybe Doom is Stark, or maybe Doom is just played by Downey as a wink to the audience (I doubt it, he’s probably Evil Stark) — it doesn’t matter much, because either way it’ll be nothing like the MCU of old, but rather a continuation of what the MCU is now.

There’s Nothing Sadder Than Corporate Thirst

Companies can need success in different ways. Pre-Disney Marvel needed the MCU to succeed because they’d had some lean years, and definitely had never fully realized the value of their characters in movies and TV, and chose to bet big that they would do a better job than Hollywood had. That’s one kind of need.

The other is less like need and more like thirst. Like, right now the tech industry really, really wants to believe AI will result in a durable market shift that companies spending billions on AI models and GPUs today will get to own. From their own perspective they’re making sensible investments in the future, but you can often tell the difference between strategy and thirst by the size of the bets. A sensible bet may be big, but a foolish, thirsty bet feels big. A good bet feels like it’ll succeed even if some things don’t go to plan; a thirsty bet needs everything to go right.

No other franchise or studio succeeded at creating a cinematic universe with anything like the same pull as the MCU, but so many media giants tried. Warner Bros. tried with the DCEU, and Legendary is still at it with the “MonsterVerse,” both of them essentially a single movie series pretending to be broader and more interesting than they are. Snyder’s first Superman movie and Gareth Edwards’s 2014 Godzilla are entirely passable early 2010s summer blockbusters, and it’s unsurprising that their studios would want sequels. The thirst was in trying to not just sell one sequel but whole release slates, not because audiences demanded them but because if they worked they sure would make running a successful movie studio a lot easier.

Just as the tech industry really, really wants to believe AI will result in a durable market shift that companies spending billions on AI models and GPUs today will get to own, and just as streaming and e-commerce companies really, really thought the pandemic would bring on a permanent shift toward couch-potato-dom, in the 2010s Hollywood studios thought they could repackage various kinds of IP into “universes” and emulate Marvel’s success. They were wrong.

There’s some place and value for giving audiences what they want — not every bet needs to be a long shot — and, hypothetically, casting Downey in Doomsday hiring the Russo Brothers to direct should be exactly that. You wanted more Endgame? Here you go!

But Endgame was Endgame because of the MCU movies that came before it. One can eventually recapture that kind of magic — say, through a multi-year narrative like the one I wish Marvel had pursued — but you can’t just jump straight to the end and expect it to work the same way. The way Marvel and Kevin Feige are doing this feels, yes, thirsty.

All these words notwithstanding, I haven’t minded the last few MCU shows and movies I saw — I even dragged friends to go see Quantumania and Wakanda Forever in theaters. But I’ve also had to skip some, and been fine with it. I still haven’t seen The Marvels or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — I’m not avoiding them, but I’m not making time for them either. After powering through the first few MCU TV shows, we skipped the finale of Ms. Marvel, got bored with Moon Knight, and then just stopped trying.

There’s giving audiences what they want, and sometimes it’s also OK to give audiences something new just in case they may want it. But all this feels like Marvel giving audiences what they want us to want, because it’s so much simpler to work off of a strategy PowerPoint than to think of good stories and then tell them well.