Viral Marvel Post Shows How Far the MCU Has Come

In just over eleven years, Marvel Studios re-wrote the rules of movie franchise filmmaking and turned Hollywood upside down by applying the connectivity of comic books to films. The entire experiment was built on the back of 2008’s Iron Man, a film that was a giant risk at the time despite seeming like the easiest possible sell to the world now. From there the franchise went on to spawn 22 more feature films and over $22.5 billion in global box office receipts and counting, this total that isn’t even close to being matched either with Star Wars being the second highest grossing film franchise with $10 billion worldwide.

Nothing better exemplifies how far the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come in the last 11 years than a new post on the /r/MarvelStudios subreddit where user /u/leunnam has cleverly edited together two key moments from the beginning and end of the series. In the clip, Tony taking flight in the Mark III Iron Man armor from the 2008 movie transitions almost seamlessly into Tony flying forward with all of the other Avengers in the climactic battle of Avengers: Endgame. Check out the gif below!

In 2018 Marvel Studios updated their logo to reflect the then ten year journey they had been on in movie theaters around the globe, and this GIF does an even better job of showing that off than the logo managed. Just imagine what fans will be able to point to in 2028 that we now consider to be too out there and strange.

That in mind, Marvel President Kevin Feige said that the next big expansion for the MCU will be getting into the idea of the Multiverse, a concept that comic book readers are intimately familiar with.

“When we first started the MCU, it was all about Tony Stark. Introduce the world to Tony Stark and that Iron Man armor,” Feige said earlier this month at CCXP. “Then [we] went on to teach people what Asgardians were and learn about super soldiers then bring them together in Avengers. I’ve always loved space movies and I’ve always loved big intergalactic tales, which is why we did Guardians and the audience came with us so we could do a movie like Endgame. I always wanted to do time travel, which we finally got to do in Endgame. The multiverse is the next step in the evolution of the MCU and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is going to crack it open in ways that will have repercussions for a Disney+ series before it that’s not WandaVision and for movies after it in a big fun way.”

The future of Marvel Studios is bright with upcoming projects including Black Widow on May 1, 2020, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier in fall 2020, The Eternals on November 6, 2020, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on February 12, 2021, WandaVision in spring 2021, Loki in spring 2021, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on May 7, 2021, What If? In summer 2021, Hawkeye in fall 2021, Thor: Love and Thunder on November 5, 2021, and Black Panther 2 in May 2022. Moon Knight, She-Hulk, and Ms. Marvel series have also been announced.