This Wasn’t Always the Plan

The sensational quality of Marvel SDCC surprises obscured certain less-rosy realities. Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

It would be Doom that gave them the most joy. On Saturday, as culmination to Marvel’s packed San Diego Comic-Con panel announcing the studio’s upcoming slate of projects, veteran MCU hands Anthony and Joe Russo appeared onstage alongside a phalanx of sinister metal-mask-wearing, robed figures to ecstatic cheers and awed murmurs. The co-directors of some of Marvel’s biggest hits (Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War) had come to announce not only their return to the Marvel fold with a shocking — if somewhat expected within fanboy circles — reveal: The fifth Avengers installment would be titled Avengers: Doomsday and be plotted around the megavillain Dr. Doom. From there, Joe Russo introduced the “one person who could play Victor Von Doom,” the “greatest actor in the world” — !! — Robert Downey Jr.

The cosplay-attired masses inside SDCC’s cavernous Hall H went reliably apeshit, and the convention worked its magic as perhaps popular culture’s most impactful hive of buzz, generating headlines worldwide that the erstwhile Iron Man, 59, would be back on the opposite side of the superhuman moral divide to antagonize his former cinematic-universe friends in 2026’s Doomsday and its 2027 sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars. But the sensational quality of the reveal — on the heels of a year where Marvel skipped the Con — obscured certain less-joyous realities.

Namely, that this Avengers iteration, this actor, and even these directors were not Marvel’s first choice. And that, emerging from a span of months when the 33rd MCU entry, The Marvels, clocked a franchise low box-office gross, last year’s lame threequel Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania disappointed fans with thin plotting and shoddy VFX, and Disney CEO Bob Iger announced his prize studio division would drastically reduce the number of shows and movies it distributes, Marvel is entering a period of retrenchment clearly meant to remedy perceptions of superhero fatigue, market oversaturation, and franchise exhaustion.

The Kang-Doom Continuum

Studio president Kevin Feige’s long-laid plans, announced at the 2022 San Diego Comic-Con, were for the fifth heroes-assemble movie to be Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, starring Jonathan Majors as the evildoer Kang the Conqueror (previously seen in season one of Disney+’s Loki and Quantumania). But after Majors’s domestic-violence arrest and December 2023 sentencing for reckless assault and harassment, the studio fired him and scrapped all story lines involving his universe-incinerating character. Comic-Con ’22 also marked the announcement that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton would be directing The Kang Dynasty. But Cretton dropped out in November, reportedly to concentrate on the Shang-Chi sequel and a Disney+ series he co-created called Wonder Man. As recently as last month, Marvel was offering the job of directing this Avengers 5 to Shawn Levy, the writer-director-producer behind this weekend’s smash hit Deadpool & Wolverine (he passed due to prior scheduling commitments including “very active development” on a new Star Wars movie and directing episodes of Stranger Things, which Levy also produces).

Despite having directed several of the most successful MCU entries of all time (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War plus the last two Avengers, which combined to gross more than $4.8 billion), the Russos have failed to continue delivering monocultural moments as filmmakers outside the Marvel fold. They co-directed Netflix’s Ryan Gosling–Chris Evans action flick, The Gray Man and the opioid drama Cherry for Apple TV+, neither of which generated positive reviews or much enthusiasm among streaming-service viewers. (They’ve fared better as producers: Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the 2023 Oscars, winning Best Picture among other top trophies).

The Fantastic Four in the MCU — Nominally, at Least

The third Deadpool — which took in a staggering $438 million worldwide over the weekend — was duly represented in San Diego this weekend with a nighttime electric spectacle projected in the sky above Petco Field (purported to be the most drone-intensive drone show in the history of drone shows), and a stand-alone panel on Thursday featuring Levy, co-stars Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, and the movie’s multiverse-spanning cameo performers including Chris Evans, Dafne Keen, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, and Jennifer Garner. But the sequel also served as something of a lead-in batter for Marvel’s SDCC-announced Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Going into production on D&W in 2022, Levy informed Feige the sequel would violate established MCU protocol insofar as it would “not be a setup for another movie. It’s not going to stress itself about how it fits into nine other movies.” And likewise last month, Feige himself announced the new F4 — which will star Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn, due out in July 2025 — would be a retro-future-styled, ’60s-set period piece, possibly taking place in an alternate universe. Saturday’s Comic-Con presentation confirmed that First Steps will unfold off the so-called Sacred Timeline (as the primary reality depicted in MCU fare is known) and likely won’t connect with Marvel Phase Five and Six characters. Concept footage teased the genocidal, Zeus-like devourer of worlds Galactus as the Four’s impending nemesis — never mind that Dr. Doom began antagonizing “Marvel’s first family” in a 1962 Marvel comic, four years earlier than Galactus.

New Cap, Same Homework

But why, then, would the MCU — with its interweaving plotlines and franchise-jumping characters who turn up with consistency in one another’s movies to bolster a meta-narrative superhero soap opera that has exploded the way modern-event movies are sequelized — choose to set Fantastic Four off in a kind of alternate timeline purgatory? In an interzone within Marvel’s brand boundaries yet just outside its prime-time cinematic universe? In a word: homework.

In two widely cited examples of what is now understood as MCU overreach, fans were expected to have digested the events of the Disney+ series WandaVision in order to make sense of the theatrically distributed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And if you hadn’t watched the six episodes of Ms. Marvel on D+, you could basically forget trying to make sense of what was going on in The Marvels. “The MCU will be on your TV screen at home on Disney+ and interconnect with the movies and go back and forth,” Feige infamously explained at Brazil’s CCXP back in 2019.

Several years into this strategy, fans have begun been reacting badly to the perceived “watch your homework” streaming-to-cineplex MCU crossover. Hence, the kind of retrenchment that sees Deadpool & Wolverine and Fantastic Four: First Steps released under an ever-broadening MCU banner but not existing as storytelling pillars within its meta-narrative framework.

What then to make of the Saturday Comic-Con ta-dah reveals concerning Captain America: Brave New World? A June teaser trailer for the 35th Marvel Cinematic Universe entry hints at both its hybridity as something of a political thriller-cum-superhero flick but also its canonical context as the first post–Chris Evans Cap feature. (Erstwhile Falcon Anthony Mackie takes over the title role after being handed the vibranium shield at the end of Endgame and wrestling with hero duty on the D+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier.) In San Diego, Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito was unveiled as Captain America’s charismatic adversary Sidewinder, leader of the Serpent Society. The character was kept under wraps until hitting Hall H, and reportedly was not a part of Brave New World during its principal photography in 2023 but somehow made it into the story line during lengthy rewrites and reshoots earlier this year. And new Comic-Con footage included a conversation between Harrison Ford’s President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross character and Mackie’s Sam Wilson about rebanding the Avengers — before half the White House gets blown up and Ross is shown morphing into the rampaging Red Hulk.

None of which is exactly the kind of content aimed at viewers averse to watching their homework. The movie will need to fit into the continuity established by other MCU films and TV shows, and will serve as setup for more of Marvel’s grand plans. Its target audience is fans already invested in Captain America version 2.0 and his potential place in a Phase Six Avengers.

So what does all that portend for Marvel’s content strategy going forward? That in all likelihood the studio is hedging its bets. That it will still put out classic Cinematic Universe fare as well as studio stand-alones, with a new and unpredictable cadence to lower the threshold of expectation placed on viewers. And if Deadpool & Wolverine’s breakthrough this weekend wildly overshooting even the most optimistic pre-release “tracking” estimates to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time is any indication, the plan is already working.