A Reboot Will Not Save The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Doctor Doom holds court.

Back in February I noticed a rising trend among critics who used to be fans of the MCU before the current direction it took post-Perlmutter. They were calling for a reboot of the universe in light of actors dying or just getting too old to continue the roles. I said back then, and I maintain this perspective, that this will not save Marvel movies. There are a lot of other factors to be considered, and unless those are addressed it’s just going to be another gimmick. Rebooting the DC movieverse hasn’t done them any favors. If anything, Gunn’s DC Universe is rather confusing. The first two productions, Creature Commandos and James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn, haven’t exactly made a huge impact, the Superman and friends movie only hanging on because Superman.

Plus Marvel Comics has managed to go without rebooting their universe this whole time. While DC has huge and minor reboots going as far back as Crisis On Infinite Earths, Marvel has taken the sliding timeline approach, moving up when Tony Stark got his armor pacemaker and when Captain America was awakened through the power of retcons. Neither is really a perfect systems if you absolutely have to keep the same characters close to the same positions or resetting them for the next generation of readers (which is not what they target anymore, but that’s another conversation) but it seems to work for the former House Of Ideas before being absorbed into the nearly-former House Of Mouse.

Well, it seems Kevin Feige has confirmed that after the big multiversal event of the next two Avengers movies, a reboot is exactly what’s about to happen for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The baseball-capped head of Marvel Studios provided this update as to the MCU’s future casting plans during a recent sit down with the press, as hosted by at Marvel’s headquarters in Burbank, CA.

Per a recap of the event provided by Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro and Justin Kroll, after an opening assurance that the studio currently has “a seven-year plan” for its films and television shows – “I think it goes to 2032,” he added. “It’s on magnets, it can move around.” – Feige was eventually pressed as to whether or not said plan included recasting any of the canonically dead or ‘oldhead’ Avengers like Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, T’Challa, and Thor.

In turn, the producer offered an answer that essentially boiled down to ‘Yes for everyone except the God of Thunder’:

This is not going to go well. Not on its own, anyway.

The article continues by suggesting Iron Man, Captain America Steve Rogers, and others will be recast for this new continuity, though Feige would like to do the same thing he’s doing with Robert Downey, Jr. and recast actors in new roles. My guess is he thinks people came for Downey and not Downey as Tony Stark. I’m not even sure why you need a reboot to do this. Outside of T’Challa, because they wanted to replace him with his sister needed to honor Chadwick Boseman whether he likes it or not (and he didn’t), we’ve had recasts before. Most recently we had William Hurt replaced as General Ross after he passed away, though what I’ve seen of Harrison Ford’s portrayal doesn’t even come off as the same character). Terrance Howard was a better James Rhodes but they still threw him out in favor of Don Cheadle because he was cheaper. (No shade to Cheadle, but Howard nailed that role, and I say that as a Rhodey fan.) Then they made him a Skrull, but that’s another conversation.

It’s even possible this multiverse story arc has even been leading up to this. Spider-Man: No Way Home gave us two Peter Parkers from other timelines, played by previous movie actors. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness gave us a Mister Fantastic played by popular fancasted actor John Krasinski only to have the underwhelming choice of Pedro Pascal in Fantastic Four: First Steps. The only character that’s been the same guy throughout was Kang The Conqueror, until Jonathan Majors got into huge trouble and they opted to wipe out the character. According to the Deadline article they’re quoting from, they had a different reason for not recasting him.

Getting access to the Fox Marvel characters has enabled Feige to plus-up the next two Avengers movies with the most notorious antagonist in the comic books: Dr. Doom. While the original plan for the Avengers movie announced at Comic-Con 2019 was to feature Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror as the main baddie, the character’s future was thrown into question after the actor’s arrest for assaulting his then-girlfriend in early 2023.

Feige says, “Even before what had happened to the actor, we had started to realize that Kang wasn’t Thanos.”

“There was only one character that could be that because he was that in the comics for decades and decades, and because of the Fox acquisition, we finally had it, and that’s Dr. Doom,” he says.

There’s no reason Kang couldn’t have been a big threat, but his deal in the comics was being the master of time, not dimensions. At the same time, Doom has only messed with the multiverse once, in that version of Secret Wars that inspired the movie. (Marvel’s reused that title more often than Hasbro has “Robots In Disguise”.) The only reason I can see them doing all this was planning from the start to scrap everything and start over.

Like I said, that won’t save them. There’s still all the other issues needed to be addressed besides playing musical performers:

1. Realizing that matching thc comics as much as realistically possible brought in the types of fans who would buy the merchandise and spread the word about the movie, Marvel Studios under Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad created a committee whose job was maintaining multiversal continuity. Disney not only tossed them out but brought in producers and directors who specifically wanted nothing to do with the comics and sometimes not even the characters (Echo comes to mind), just the names and vaguest of concepts. If your new MCU follows the old ones’ trend of ignoring the comics, which many Hollywood adaptations already did prior to Marvel Studios, a reboot will only toss out the movie comic fans actually liked. Again, the people buying the stuff and talking about your movie…or not as the case may be except to talk about how the movie sucks.
2. Letting activists take over rather than good writers, directors, showrunners, and producers…the actual reason it sucks as a production and not just an adaptation, thus chasing off the casual fans as well. It was the casual fans in the end that made the MCU as a theatrical showing popular while getting the adaptation part as right as feasible brought in the geeks looking to line their bedrooms and home offices with likenesses of their characters. People still talk about the “M-She-U”, where women replace male characters through takeover or gender swap, and are usually not even interesting on their own, never mind replacing beloved versions of the characters with subpar “diverse” in-name-only types.
3. The gimmickry. In addition to playing to social messages only shared by people who hate superheroes, bringing back Downey is a gimmick. The only time they follow the comic is when it’s something the fans hated like replacing Steve Rogers, Riri Williams (the most comic accurate character in the MCU is one of the most despised…go figure?). Otherwise they look at (popular thing) and try to replicate it. It’s why, for example, Shang-Chi went from a traditional Kung-Fu hero to the son of the Mandarin in a magical “we saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon type martial arts movies way too much” type story. Gimmicks are doing nothing to benefit the comics and they’re doing nothing to benefit the movies, either.
4. The production nightmares. Where do I start on this one? The ridiculous budgets are not to their benefit. Starting filming without a finished script, rewriting the script after a good portion of the scenes were already filmed and sent to the VFX team, expecting said VFX team to put out top-tier visuals in less time than they were given to make the ET The Extra-Terrestrial game on the Atari 2600, and working them so hard they formed a union just for Disney’s nonsense, and somehow still expecting a winning movie that was shoved out the door to make a release date that wasn’t completely thought out? Yeah, that will kill your film no matter how good the script was. We keep hearing about how they want to shift to “quality over quantity” but we haven’t seen a sign of either yet.

So whatever Earth-199999 is replaced with (that’s the MCU universe number, not 616 because they can’t even get that right) is not going to be the big savior of the Marvel Cinematic Universe they’re hoping for. All it will do is make a new canon that, unlike the first one, starts on a bad foot and keeps failing, while wiping stories people liked out of continuity. It’s been said the real MCU stopped at Avengers: Endgame, and even that movie has received some reassessment in light of the failed movies causing a full reexamination of the Marvel movie franchise. You don’t need a reboot to fix the universe and doing a reboot will not address all the other problems. It just gives any MCU fans who stayed loyal to the franchise for whatever reason a final jumping off point, and they will.

Reboots are only signs that you admit you failed…and Marvel Studios is most definitely failing so hard that they’re even willing to do what the comics won’t: toss everything out and start over and hope people forget their past mistakes…while remaking every one of them while hiding behind gimmicks and “bigot” defenses. As a Robert Downey, Jr. character once said, “not a great plan”.