Marvel Cinematic Universe – 9 years old and going strong

Films

Phase 3

• 2017 – Thor: Ragnarok
• 2018 – Black Panther
• 2018 – Avengers: Infinity War
• 2018 – Ant-Man and the Wasp
• 2019 – Captain Marvel
• 2019 – Untitled Avengers

Post-Phase 3

• 2020 – Untitled
• 2020 – Untitled
• 2020 – Untitled
• ? – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Television

ABC

• 2017 – Inhumans season 1

Freeform

• 2018 – Cloak Dagger season 1
• 2018 – New Warriors season 1

Hulu

• 2018 – Runaways season 1

Netflix

• 2017 – Punisher season 1
• 2018 – Jessica Jones season 2
• 2018 – Daredevil season 3

All Hollywood content – be it film or television – is cyclical. If you go back through the history of film you will find various themes peppered throughout it. There was a time you couldn’t go a week without a new Western at the local theater. The 1950s saw the rise of the radiation enhanced monsters. The 1980s were rife with sci-fi and teenager dramedies.

Every theme in film has its rise and fall. And this seemingly never ending stream of superhero fare will be the same.

There will be a time in the next five to 10 years where moviegoers will simply say, “You know what? I’m good” and move on to some other form of entertainment. And Marvel does seem to have an inkling this day is coming.

Up until now the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been working as a highly interconnected organism with the films belonging to ‘phases,’ but now the studio is saying that after the fourth Avengers film that the phases may go away. This is probably due to expiring contracts with the current actors in the big gun roles as well as the fact this will have been going for 11 years at that point. If Marvel was to continue building these epic storylines and the market for superhero films was to crash, it could be embarrassing and disappointing to leave large storylines unresolved.

By moving away from the phases, and possibly dialing back on the interconnected nature of the films and TV shows, it might give Marvel a bit more freedom to explore different genres of film. Ant-Man was a superhero film as well as a heist story – albeit the latter was a very low rung of the script – if they no longer had to worry about everyting building to an epic event, Marvel could try out say a true thriller, something it only touched on in Captain America: Winter Soldier. Who’s to say there couldn’t be a romantic comedy even between two Marvel characters?

On the television side of all this, it’s time for Marvel to rethink its strategy here. Looking at Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does it really need to be a 22 episode season each year? More and more shows are finding success with shorter seasons as it allows them to fully plot their storylines and keep things a lot tighter. Even 13 episodes sometimes can be a stretch (we’re looking at you Iron Fist…), so experiment with different structures. The Defenders is only going to be eight episodes, as is the Inhumans, lets see how that works out.

Marvel has literally thousands of characters and decades of stories that it can work with, and after the fourth Avengers outing seems like a good time to try new things. This superhero cycle is going to end at some point, but if Marvel plays it smart – and it certainly looks that is what they are working on – it could be setting itself up for us to come back and discuss the current state of Marvel movies on the 20th anniversary of the release of Iron Man.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/05/07/marvel-cinematic-universe-9-years-old-and-going-strong/