Should The Marvel Cinematic Universe Be Rebooted Or Destroyed?

Ever since Disney took over Marvel, which they wanted for the movie studio and not the comics since they’ve bungled that up and had other publishers doing some of their properties that weren’t pre-existing contracts, the franchise has gone downhill. The writing and adaptation have fallen apart, the social pandering is more and more obvious, and the lack of interest in the source material that their movies wouldn’t exist without by the people making those movies is all on display and has hurt the very brand they sought to use. Amazing what happens when you look at the popularity of the brand name and ignore why it’s popular in favor of your own biases, isn’t it?

This has led some in the fandom to just call for a reboot. Even Film Theory under both MatPat and current host Lee have suggested it. Supposedly, Marvel Studios are one reboot away from saving Marvel movies…except it won’t. Reboots do nothing to address the actual problems with Marvel Studios, Disney, Marvel Comics, the MCU, or anything else that has led Disney’s Marvel away from what made Marvel Studios so good when they were making movies on their own and distributing through Paramount or Universal. There’s also a call to just stop making MCU material in theaters and Disney+, a similar call being made for the Star Wars franchise that has also suffered under Bob Iger’s continued destruction and desecration of Walt Disney’s legacy.

Let’s go over this idea fairly, though. Superhero fans want to save the movies, but will killing the MCU in favor of a new Marvel movieverse fix things? To properly showcase the frustrations of the superhero movie fans I bring you the following video by commentator and indie filmmaker JesterBell. Watch as she vents her issues currently with the direction the MCU has taken and tries to convince us that a either reboot or total shutdown is the solution, with the upcoming Fantastic Four movie as the best place to do a Flashpoint style remaking of the universe. We agree on the problems, but I’m not convinced this is going to help. It might even make the problem worse.

There are two things we can agree on. The MCU should take a break. Stop ramming movie and streaming productions out the door and take time to figure out where to take this property. The other is that Kevin Feige’s vision is getting stale. Every phase is getting more and more into the “epic overload”, where every event having higher stakes than the last. First it was Earth, then it was the galaxy, then it was half of the universe, and now it’s the multiverse. Avengers comics went for years just being the latest villain too powerful for any one Avenger to handle alone or a scheme that required extra help to foil. They even had villains that targeted the group, like Ultron, rather than any one hero. That’s what the movies should have been doing, rather than trying to outdo themselves each time.

It might be better to let the older characters go and let the new characters take their place and find a way to fit into the current continuity without a multiverse. Boseman should be replaced, and a story about why he had to fake his death, or perhaps he was comatose but there’s still a chance to save him (of course he shows up in the final act to save the day) is doable. Replacing the actors James Bond style is an option. Personally, I think they should have gone animation and avoided any issues with aging actors, but you can’t expect a Disney company to do anything with cartoons. In the 2020s anyway. Otherwise, reboot or not you’re just going to suffer the same issue again in a few years, even if you take a break and start over, those actors will still age, and it’s more noticeable between movies than it is between shows. TV/streaming shows have more stories in the same time it takes to make the next movie, so maybe focus on making shows.

Like or dislike the CW’s Arrowverse (it didn’t grab me, and I tried with The Flash and I liked season one of Supergirl for the most part), they proved you can do a shared universe on TV. Heck, they didn’t even come up with it. Networks, franchises, and production companies did and still do have crossovers. A couple of years ago CBS did a big event with all their NCIS shows at the time, and the various Law & Order characters showed up in each other’s shows. Speaking of CBS they did a two-part story with the two Jim Carrey-tied cartoons they had at the time, The Mask and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The final season of Space Ghost had a two episode (six parts as they were short adventures) crossover story that saw them team with The Herculoids, Moby Dick the Super Whale and his friends, Shazzan and his young chargers, and Mightor among other Hanna-Barbera superheroes of the time. Oddly the comics would be the ones to pair him with his mid-show back-up, Dino-Boy In The Lost Valley while the others came from their own show until the repackaged Hanna-Barbera’s World Of Super Adventure.

(Hey, MeTV Toons, bring that show back, or at least add the action shows to your House Of Hanna-Barbera block. That would include the Fantastic Four cartoon Hanna-Barbera made. Just avoid the version where Ben Grimm is a teenager with magic rings. Trust me. Add Space Stars segments without the laugh track Williams Street shoved into the Space Ghost segments and I’ll be thrilled.)

You would also think that Jester, being a DC comics fan as well, would realize that a reboot wouldn’t help. DC has done three major reboots and a lot of semi-reboots ever since Crisis On Infinite Earths, not counting shoving the Golden Age depictions onto Earth-2. Replacing Kevin Feige isn’t enough, either, unless you bring in someone who cares about the source material not only in the new studio exec but in the producers, writers, and directors. Echo was changed because the showrunner hated her comic abilities. She-Hulk: Attorney At Law was the showrunner upset that Captain Marvel wasn’t better received simply because of XX chromosomes. At least one producer said that if you know anything about the comics he didn’t want you working on their movies and nobody was allowed to know anything about the very material they claimed to be using. All they wanted is that brand name because they see it’s popular without understanding why it’s popular.

When Disney kicked out Ike Perlmutter and chased off Avi Arad, they also got rid of the group responsible for maintaining enough similarities with the source material that fans, the ones buying most of the merchandise and bringing free advertisement if the movie is good and doesn’t need a certain level of fanboy status to enjoy, would go to and promote the film. Changing Joe Quesada with C.B. Cebulski didn’t benefit Marvel Comics anymore than replacing Dan DiDio with Jim Lee helped DC Comics.

What Marvel needs to do is take time off from the MCU until they figure out a direction, bring back people interested in adapting the comics properly whether they’re fans or not, and find a way to work around aging actors while keeping the stakes logical but important. Otherwise a reboot is at best going to delay the inevitable. Superhero fatigue is a myth, but the audience lost interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when Marvel Studios forgot what made them work. Until and unless that is fixed, a reboot will only delay the inevitable destruction of the brand and send superhero movies back into hiding. Superhero movies never went away, but Iron Man proved they could still be popular…if the people responsible cared about what they were making.