News Marvel movies without a year left a pop culture empty

Clout

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In early April, I watched a clip of people crying, hollering, and clapping during a scene in Avengers: Endgame. It was the first time I remember missing physically sitting in a movie theater. I thought by May, when Black Widow was scheduled to be released, life would return to normal. I’d be back in a theater on Thursday night with friends, sitting among a packed room full of strangers chatting excitedly about the beginning of a new Marvel Cinematic Universe phase.
That never happened.

Instead, 2020 has become the first year since 2009 without a major addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s no big introduction of a new superhero, no highly anticipated sequel — there’s not even an entry in Marvel Studios’ MCU TV universe. WandaVision, once slated to premiere this month, won’t hit until January 15th. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was supposed to kick things off in August of this year, and now will now premiere in March 2021. There’s no big Marvel anything.
In a year where I feel more disconnected from people than ever, where I’m searching for community from the confines of a tiny studio apartment, not having that quintessential part of normalcy — sitting in a theater and watching the couple of Marvel movies that come out every year — feels enormous.

The absence of Marvel movies is the absence of a very specific kind of excitement. Living within the confines of our new normal for the last 10 months means trying to find little things to look forward to every week. A new show on a streaming service helps or a Zoom catch-up with family who can’t visit. But it doesn’t replace the physicality of community or the excitement of leaving home to experience something people may have been waiting on for several months. In 2020, a year filled with death and travesty at the worst of times and mindless boredom at the best of times, the absence of unbridled anticipation was tough to swallow.

Marvel’s disappearance didn’t just echo through subreddit forums and on stan Twitter. It severely impacted business for a number of companies in the entertainment industry. Disney went from having its strongest third quarter ever in 2019 with the release of Avengers: Endgame, which brought in more than $2.8 billion, to one of its worst without any notable releases. Since Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment in 2009, the IP has brought in nearly $30 billion. That doesn’t include merchandise.
A new Marvel movie would come out, it would dominate pop culture discussion around the world for a few weeks or months — giving us a fresh round of memes and plenty of Twitter discourse — and then start up again by the time the next one rolled around. This happens with other movies, of course, but with Marvel, everything felt like it was on a grand scale. A subreddit deleting half of its members over the course of a couple of days all because of a joke in Infinity War was something we could participate in together, even if it was online. That moment was spurred by an event that millions of people experienced in movie theaters together.

The pandemic has become a lesson in adapting to a new normal. The beauty (or nightmare, depending on who you ask) of Marvel movies is that there’s always one or two just around the corner. That absence of excitement is beginning to fade; in part because The Mandalorian has helped to make the last few weeks fun again. I’m getting excited about WandaVision, which will premiere on Disney Plus in just over a month. I’m excited about having that week-to-week discussion and feeling of community online again when episodes drop. I’m excited for Black Widow, and hopeful that we may be at a place where we can pile into a movie theater and fall back into a world with a character that’s been on-screen since 2010.

 
It has been a weird year and I can't wait to watch a new Marvel film soon.
 
I'm more curious how they plan on doing Black Panther 2, though their plans for it already sound pretty bad.
 
As far as I'm concerned, the MCU ended with Endgame. It was a capstone to the whole series. Anything beyond that is just milking the franchise. On top of the adaptations they're talking about and characters they've announced are diving deep into some of the least-desirable and unliked arcs in Marvel's recent comics history. They're going to get some tentpole money out of the MCU for the next couple movies, but when the general populace starts getting preached to instead of being entertained, they'll start staying away in droves.
 
As far as I'm concerned, the MCU ended with Endgame. It was a capstone to the whole series. Anything beyond that is just milking the franchise. On top of the adaptations they're talking about and characters they've announced are diving deep into some of the least-desirable and unliked arcs in Marvel's recent comics history. They're going to get some tentpole money out of the MCU for the next couple movies, but when the general populace starts getting preached to instead of being entertained, they'll start staying away in droves.

it is kind of hard to keep something going after the major all out attack on the greatest evil. Specially when you're stuck to a 2-3 hour limit to show the story.
 
it is kind of hard to keep something going after the major all out attack on the greatest evil. Specially when you're stuck to a 2-3 hour limit to show the story.
It's standard US comic book power creep. Hero beats the BBEG, writer comes up with a bigger, badder BBEG because they have to keep the storyline going to keep those dollars flowing in. Their game plan for the movie releases appears to be a disjointed mess, at least from a storyline perspective. Black Widow flashback, followed by cosmic-tier stories with Eternals (who only the most die-hard of Kirby fans give half a crap about), then back to Street-Level mysticism & martial arts with Shang Chi, then multiverse junk with Spider-Man 3 - which I'm sure is going to tie directly into the Multiverse part of the Doctor Strange movie, then a new Thor flick that has promised to bring in Jane-Thor? I'm not sure where the heck their through-line is for the plot in all of these, but if they're intending to tie in the D+ stuff at the same time, to try and force the fans to their streaming service, they're going to end up losing more people than they keep.
 
I really thought Black Widow would’ve released by now.
They've kept pushing it back, I'm assuming in hopes that they can actually release it in theaters. If you look at the original "COVID-was-barely-out-of-the-gates" release they had it planned for May of last year, then they pushed it to November, and now they're pushing for May of this year. I think they're specifically trying to avoid a WW84-style disaster-release.
 
They've kept pushing it back, I'm assuming in hopes that they can actually release it in theaters. If you look at the original "COVID-was-barely-out-of-the-gates" release they had it planned for May of last year, then they pushed it to November, and now they're pushing for May of this year. I think they're specifically trying to avoid a WW84-style disaster-release.

Well not like WW84 was good to start with.
 
It certainly is frustrating. My acting career is over, too. The pandemic has basically screwed up everything.
 

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