Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I don’t know Kevin Feige’s grand plan. But holy hell did they mess up the timeskip.
So Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has begun causing great discourse amongst the fanbase. Some people are really excited it see what’s next and some others hate what has transpired so far. It was around Strange 2’s release date that I heard a common complaint both offline and online; Phase 4 fucking sucks.
I wish I had the energy to correct them every time that no, it was 2021 that sucks. Phase 4 is standard. Some people also complain that it’s too slow, boring, or unconnected despite the fact that it’s only three production years into the Phase. Seriously, I ask you who may feel the same way; what was the connecting factor between Iron 1, 2, Hulk, Thor, and First Avenger? Or Winter Soldier, IM3, and Dark World? Or Civil War, Ragnorak, Homecoming, and Dr Strange? You’re probably going to come up with a few things but these are loose connections. They could be easily taken out of the film without ruining the film. The same can be said for our first wave of films of which the connections would include the Blip, a birthing multiverse, and Fury on the Moon. It’s important to know where Fury is, it seems. But then you might answer to the fact that they all used to connect to the climax; Avengers Infinity War. My brother in Christ, that took ten years. No, you’re not going to know how Shang Chi and Eternals connects to Secret Wars or whatever when you’re 2 years in. It seems like you fans who share this sentiment have been consumed by impatience. I almost wanna assume most people became MCU fans (such as myself) during Phase 3 when it was basically at the end, where movies necessarily had to be connected. You children want Secret Wars in 2025 as if we don’t have a whole universe of X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Thunderbolts to journey through first. Chill the fuck out.
Anyways, we have been through 2021 of the MCU which includes the totality of Phase 4. Apparently, Far From Home is apart of Phase 3 so we start off with Black Widow and now Multiverse of Madness has just come out along with upcoming Love and Thunder, Wakanda Forever, and Quantomania. 2021, I’ll say, was absolutely a fucked up production year. 4 films in 7 months? Never do that again, I beg of you, no matter the circumstances, that was not the play. To be very honest, they could have just posted Black Widow on D+ over quarantine, just make it pay for view outside of the subscription. Excluding BW, I have an understated issue with that year of films. This critique actually also works for the shows and also 2022’s Moon Knight and Multiverse of Madness. Why the hell is the time skip going unused? Like it didn’t happen at all?
First, I want to kind of define what I mean mean by unused timeskip. There’s plenty of narrative media in recent times that uses timeskips in an array of different ways. Now timeskips are important mainly because time passage within universe is integral to storytelling. A page of a book could take up a minute or an hour depending on what happens. A slice of life series like Great Expectations might rarely skip time because everyday is important while a series like Dragon Ball may use skips all the time because downtime in between events is utterly unimportant.
Actually, I’ll use Dragon Ball as an example because the MCU is built in a similar event-by-event timeline. In Dragon Ball, timeskips are no special thing. After Goku meets Bulma, they go on some adventure collecting the Dragon Balls until Goku decides to train with Master Roshi. The training lasts several months that we skip through until the World Tournament, Red Ribbon Army Arc, a three year skip (in which Goku travels the world aimlessly), another World Tournament, and the King Piccolo Arc. Then we get another three year timeskip that Toriyama (the author if you didn’t know) mostly uses to age Goku who is finally 18. After defeating Piccolo Jr, Goku lives through a five year skip in which he raises his child Gohan away from the audience and his own friends. After Piccolo kills both Radditz and Goku, Roshi’s students train for a year only to get killed by Nappa and Vegeta. After a journey to Namek, the Earthlings live a year without Goku and the audience. Future Trunks would execute Mecha Freiza and his father Cold before asking everyone to train for the next three years in preparation for the Androids. Regardless of this training, the Android are absorbed by a Future version of Cell who hosts his own tournament where he gets defeated by an 11 year old Gohan. Then we have our longest seven year time skip in which Goten and present Trunks grow up. Vegeta finally dies along with everyone else when Majin Buu blows up Planet Earth before racing across the Universe (casually destroying planets on the way) to reach the afterlife to potentially kill everyone again (lmao), but he ends dying to a bomb fueled by the good people of the Universe.
So as you can see, our experience of the universe relies on the main characters fighting somebody because it is an action based series. If Toriyama even tried to chill out by sending Gohan to high school it doesn’t seem to sell to well. If we wanted to know the daily life of Krillen and 18, the series wouldn’t be Dragon Ball. Unlike the Marvel comics (where we do see the ins and outs of Parker’s habits), the Marvel films are built by the same event-by-event timeline.
Steve Rogers jumps into the Second World War bringing an end to the HYDRA organization until he gets frozen for about 70 years. During the 90s, Fury is visited by Captain Marvel beginning his journey of protecting the Earth from the extraterrestrial. A few years before Captain America is thawed, Tony Stark escapes the capture of an oriental terrorist group, the Ten Rings, by building his own personal mech suit. In the next two years, he solves crime and literally “privatizes world peace”. Only foreign threats could fracture that peace. For the next section, every event happens calendar year by calendar year. Loki, Prince of Asgard, is banished from Asgard due to his failed coup. He falls under the service of the warlord Thanos who lends him the Mind-Stone-powered Scepter so that he could acquire the Tesseract on Earth. One day after arriving on the planet, he opens a gate to the Chitauri Legion so that they could conquer the planet for Loki himself. Stark nukes the army and Hulk disarms Loki leaving him to remain imprisoned on Asgard. The Battle of New York brought a new era of heroism. Tony would retire after defeating his last personal dilemma, the rise and fall of Wilson Fisk as the Kingpin of New York, and Thor’s victory over the Dark Elves. Then we enter the HYDRA arc which ends with a destruction of Ultron and then the passing of the Sokovia Accords. Despite the policy of “Thunderbolt” Ross now contracting superheroes, new vigilantes would sprout out including; Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Ant Man, Dr Strange, Black Panther, and the Punisher. Meanwhile, Thor ventured the universe in a search for the other Infinity Stones until he comes face to face with the other stone collector; Thanos. Thanos kills Loki for the Space Stone, humiliates Hulk, sacrifices his beloved daughter Gomorrah for the Soul Stone, defeats the Guardians (who tagged with Spider-Man, Stark, and Strange) for the Time Stone, before finally arriving on Earth to rip the Mind Stone out of the Vision’s head. With a snap, he kills half of the universe. Sometime later, Thor would decapitate Thanos with his new Stormbreaker axe. Then we reach the five year timeskip. After which, Captain Rogers regroups the Avengers to go on a time heist, recollecting the stones to bring to their present time. Hulk revives them but the Thanos from 2014 tailed them and brought his forces to their doorstep. After the biggest battle since D-Day, Stark kills himself erasing Thanos and his forces. In the time of mourning his and Natasha’s death; Spider-Man defeats a VR artist by the name of Mysterio, Wanda traps a small town in a 50’s sitcom, Captain Falcon defeats rising anarchist Flagsmasher, Shaun defeats his father Wenwu the Mandarin, Earth’s celestial becomes stillborn, Kate Bishop pulls the rug from Fisk’s small operation, and everyone forgets that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. That was a good stopping point but also Strange defeats Wanda the Scarlet Witch and Thor fights Gorr the Godkiller as well.
Wait what do you mean you put it in the middle of a film? What- what about what happened during the timeskip? Surely we’ll discuss it in the next film or at least the ramifications of the skip.
Because it wasn’t just regular downtime for the heroes. After every arc, Goku went back to his farm home to train and there nothing going on across the planet for the audience or Toriyama to care about. In between each Marvel film, the world is at peace. I mean, excluding Thor, most of their adventures are just personal problems that approach them because Stark (as of Iron Man 2’s first scene) already achieved world peace. Btw, I keep repeating that because that is absolutely insane, just crazy talk. Go rewatch that first scene in the movie though, he apparently did it. I imagine he didn’t solve petty crime because random people do that all the time but he seemed to have singlehandedly and proudly brought the world’s villains to their knees. Anyways, we are not in that state of peace 30 minutes into Endgame. We are, in fact, still under duress from the Infinity War.
I’m just surprised that with half the population, the political systems around the world just didn’t shatter. Statistically, with the correct 50% dying, the entire federal government of the US would be gone. All those fucking boomers….unfortunately (of course) gone. But even if you wanted to go Minecraft Peaceful mode, those left behind would have to genuinely rethink the world. There’s at least two options; a new country tries to become hegemonic or the world unites under a single world government that can handle the supernatural easier. Now if we go Minecraft Normal mode, we can have some fun with villains like Doom, Namor, Nathanial Essex, the Leader, the Maggia, the Silver Samurai, and the all-powerful Morbius coming out of the woodwork in their plays for power. I like the idea of Matt Murdock getting dusted which leaves Vanessa, the wife of Wilson Fisk, safe from a lawsuit so he recreates his empire. I mean the only Avengers left are Rogers, Stark, Romanov, Rhodes, Barton, Banner, and Thor. But then again, I assume Rogers and Romanov are the only active ones while Barton commits Castle-esque murder on yakuza. I mean, doesn’t it seem too easy that out of everyone, it was only the Flagsmasher that rose as a force to be reckoned with?
At this point though, I have to complain about the type of villains that even cause an uproar in this universe. Mysterio, again, is just a personal problem. Same thing for Wenwu and Icarus. At least Wanda is an interdimensional problem. The biggest thing the MCU has been missing is people like Doom who (most importantly) don’t die easily, is a problem to anyone, and can troll whenever necessary. How is Zemo the only one introduced after 20+ movies filling those recruitments??? It’s crazy that Wenwu has ‘conquered’ some land for centuries. Which continent did he conquer with his magic rings which weren’t a problem to anyone before it was personally brought to Wenwu??? Actually, speaking more on Doom, I don’t even want him to be a Fantastic villain. I suggest he gets introduced in Black Panther 2 in order to abuse some vibranium before popping up in Ant Man 3 as the main villain and then getting an origin story in Fantastic Four before being the final boss of Secret Wars. I would love for him to be a menace.
Agent: hey, I got you a role in a Marvel movie!
Actor: oh cool! Like, as a hero?
Agent: Nope. A villain.
Actor, deflated: um…but I’ll have multiple appearances right?
Agent: As Baron Strucker? No way.
Okay Okay, we are off topic. But back to the timeskip. I saw a tweet once, no several different times with large gaps in between, about Disney Plus needing a show that showcases how regular humans react to Avengers activities. We get some of that in the Defenders shows back on Netflix and I’m sure Agents of Shield discussed it as well. It would be nice to have a miniseries recapping the last five years. Even if they just used throw away villains or whatever, or maybe the only problem was global logistics of whatever but 1 episode for each year could have been fine. 30 minutes length. If they foresaw the quarantine, that would have been the time to release it. But six movies later and YOU guys have forgotten the timeskip. Fiege, the fans rushing for Secret Wars, those who were dusted and thus didn’t get to live it. All of you suffer memory loss and need to get your priorities straight.
My final suggestion is hoping for one of this D+ shows to just do bare minimum world building so we know what countries we are dealing with. Half the world came back. In the last 5 years, there was probably a population boom as well. Countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, and Mexico (it exists under suffering) should be changed beyond recognition. Bruh, imagine the US election with half the population. So I don’t know, upcoming is Ms Marvel and She-Hulk. Maybe they can help build the world that the Captain Falcon show should have. That series did less world building than Wandavision and Hawkeye combined. The worst offender is Moon Knight with maybe three references to present day MCU. It’s like how the Hulk vs Abomination fight in Harlem went completely unmentioned in Luke Cage.
This was written in June and kind of finished in August
tdwriter 