The Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten too big for its own good. The multiverse, a fun concept to begin with, has bloated the MCU by essentially making every Marvel character ever depicted on the big and small screens canon. While that may have allowed movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine to resurrect popular character portrayals from older Marvel movies, it’s also made death all but meaningless in the MCU. We saw one Reed Richards die in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, only to have another, an alternate dimension Reed, show up in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
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Deadpool & Wolverine stretched this concept to the extreme with an infinite parade of both Logan and Wade Wilson variants, mostly for comedic effect, yes, but technically canon nonetheless. If the MCU is to have any dramatic stakes going forward, the next big crossover movie, Avengers: Doomsday, needs to put some heroes (and villains) in the ground for good. No snap/blip reversal, no time-travel variants or alternate universe dopplegangers, just a handful of assorted Avengers shuffled loose the mortal coil in a definitive way with no take-backsies.
It’s not that we’re morbid sadists that revel in the deaths of our fictional heroes — it’s quite the opposite. We love our spandex-clad adventurers so much so that we hate to see Marvel take away their dignity for some cheap applause. Take Wolverine, for instance: while we can’t argue that Deadpool & Wolverine was insanely successful at the box office, winning over critics and fans alike, we can’t help but feel like it cheapened the end of Logan. And sure, Ryan Reynolds knew that fans would feel like that and designed a spectacular action scene around Deadpool literally desecrating Wolverine’s corpse, but that doesn’t change the fact that the movie made Hugh Jackman’s “final” performance as the pint-sized Canadian wild man just a little less special.
Now, Doomsday comes along and digs up even more celluloid corpses like James Marsden’s Cyclops, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, and scores of other pre-MCU characters. Don’t get us wrong, we love nostalgic cameos as much as the next geek, but not as much as new interpretations of old characters that the MCU can call their own. Tom Holland is, to some fans, the best live-action Spider-Man to ever hit the big screen, but we never would have discovered that if Marvel had just brought back Andrew Garfield as their main webslinger.
If the MCU wants to find the next Tom Holland through a new Cyclops or Wolverine, then it needs to get rid of the old guard permanently. To paraphrase another Disney+ franchise, the MCU needs to kill the past if it hopes to have a future. But it’s not just the multiversal variants that have to go.
The MCU Needs to Trim the Fat When It Comes to Forgotten Characters
The MCU has accumulated many characters and plotlines over the years that have essentially gone nowhere. We haven’t heard a peep from America Chavez in three years. Ditto Namor and Hercules. Shang-Chi has been M.I.A. for four years, and Justin Hammer hasn’t made an appearance in 15 years. These characters are just floating around in limbo, waiting for some Marvel exec to remember they exist and stuff them awkwardly into a new project like they did with much of The Incredible Hulk cast in Captain America: Brave New World.
Then you have characters like Thor who have seemingly run their course. If Thor: Love and Thunder proved anything, it was that the Asgardian just doesn’t have what it takes to hold an audience’s interest anymore. For the MCU to survive going forward, it needs to trim the fat, so to speak, to become a leaner, tighter IP that values quality over quantity. Getting rid of all the above-mentioned characters would be a giant step in the right direction.
If Avengers: Doomsday is going to sell even a fraction of Avengers: Endgame‘s tickets, it needs to make fans care what happens to the MCU’s heroes again, and the only way to do that is to show them that this time, Marvel is playing for keeps. Doomsday needs to not only thin the Marvel herd, but it needs to do so in a way that can’t be reversed. Any characters that get killed off in the next Avengers film need to stay dead.
Avengers: Doomsday Needs to Be Marvel’s Crisis on Infinite Earths
The best thing that Marvel could do right now is destroy the multiverse Crisis on Infinite Earths-style. The more bloated the MCU gets, the more it resembles the pre-Crisis DC comic book universe. As most comic fans know, in 1985, DC got fed up with trying to keep track of which version of Batman came from Earth-2 and which one hailed from Earth-6 and decided to streamline their entire canon with a company-wide reset called Crisis on Infinite Earths.
At the end of the 12-issue maxi series, the DC universe consisted of one Superman, one Batman, and one Earth. The multiverse as we know it was no more, and it greatly improved DC’s continuity for decades. Avengers: Doomsday needs to do the same thing and kill Marvel’s multiverse to save the MCU. Not to mention, if word happens to get out that Doomsday is wiping out the majority of the MCU permanently, it will do wonders for the film’s box office.
By taking a page from the DC playbook, Marvel can make fans care about its characters again. It can reboot the MCU, keeping the few things that are currently still working, and jettisoning the rest. Or the execs at Disney can keep doing business as usual and watch one of its biggest IPs die a slow, agonizing death; the choice is theirs.
Like the legendary phoenix, Marvel can rise from the ashes, bigger and stronger than ever before, but it has to be willing to burn everything down first.
Do you agree that Avengers: Doomsday needs to feature some major casualties, or is there another way the MCU can regain its former glory? Let us know in the comments!
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