We haven’t even seen Avengers: Doomsday yet, and won’t for a couple of months, but already fans are looking to Avengers: Secret Wars. That’s probably because the Secret Wars story is one of those epic crossovers that kids — including the Russo brothers — have imagined as a movie since the original storyline in the ’80s which boosted an action figure line, and the revived, similar storyline in 2015 by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic Marvel recently republished that run in a Premier Edition collection, and with it came a foreword by Kevin Feige. The usually tight-lipped, spoiler-sensitive Marvel Studios boss made some reveals in it that seem to hint where the upcoming movie will be going, and those comments are finally going viral online.
Fan reaction is mixed to skeptical, as Marvel’s track record lately has been more up-and-down than usual, and even casual moviegoers know that the studio’s original plan was for Kang to be the big bad, before actor Jonathan Majors got in trouble, a rewrite became in order, and Robert Downey Jr. was summoned back for a piece of Doctor Doom stunt casting that could be brilliant or merely gimmicky. Can we trust what Feige is saying? More importantly, can we interpret it correctly?
“We will bring together the characters we know and love in pinch-me moments that we as fans have always dreamed of but have never seen realized,” Feige writes. “And we will call on Doctor Doom, the greatest villain in the history of the Marvel universe, to become a centerpiece of that story.”
Ever since Disney bought Fox, fans have wanted to see X-Men in the same universe as the Avengers, but the MCU has dragged out expectations. We’ve seen alternate-reality versions of Professor X and Beast, and a Quicksilver tease that turned out to just be an actor named Ralph Bohner. Spider-Man: No Way Home brought in the non-MCU Spider-Men, and Deadpool and Wolverine had Blade. Now that Doomsday has shown the Fox movie X-Men, or at least a version of them, fans are thinking Feige means that all the aforementioned characters will finally clash. That’s mostly what we expected. But then there’s this:
“Like Loki gathering up branches of the timeline at the end of all things, we’ll pick up the threads of Hickman and Ribic’s run and all those who came before and weave a new story inspired by the vast tapestry of our comics and films.”
This appears to be a statement that Avengers: Secret Wars will serve as a soft reboot for the MCU, allowing for, among other things, the major roles to be recast with younger actors. We already know they’re doing that with the X-Men (though Wolverine’s fate is uncertain); is it time for new actors as Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Hulk? Fans haven’t yet taken as strongly to their in-canon “kids” like Ironheart, Love, and Skaar.
Just as events like Secret Wars are designed to streamline confusing continuity and create a new jumping-off point, though, Feige sounds like he wants the movie of the same name to function similarly. Some moviegoers already complain about “homework,’ something Marvel doesn’t exactly help when they tell you what you have to rewatch before the next one.
Will Secret Wars be, as one commenter put it, “More cameo slop with old ass actors instead of giving new characters time to shine…”? Or, as another exclaimed, “a whole new multiverse of awesome”?
