FISCHER: Turning the page on the MCU

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Hey, remember the MCU?

It wasn’t long ago that nothing short of a global pandemic could stop Marvel Studios from pumping out as many as three movies a year, with “super hero fatigue” getting brought up every time one of the more mediocre entries received a proportionate response.

And then all of a sudden, the deluge stopped. It’s been more than six months since the latest release.

How crazy is that? Once upon a time I was regularly heading out to the theaters every few months for the latest MCU entry. Now there’s not even a Disney+ show running right now to keep the hype train rolling.

There has yet to be an MCU movie released in 2024 and the only one on the schedule is “Deadpool and Wolverine,” and that barely counts. After all, while the Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman will probably be introducing mutants into the MCU with multiverse shenanigans, these are still characters brought over from the Fox X-Men corner of fiction.

And that’s it for the year.

The next fully fledged MCU movie will be “Captain America: Brave New World,” a movie that was supposed to be out a month ago but has instead been pushed into next February to accommodate a series a reshoots.

Then there’s “Blade.” What’s going on with “Blade?”

Mahershala Ali was cast as the vampire hunter way back in 2019. Since then the movie been stuck in a development rut. Not only dealing with COVID and the Writers Guild strike, but at least two script rewriters and, most recently, the loss of its second director.

“Blade” is arguably scheduled to release in November of 2025 but who can say if that will actually happen at this point?

Now the MCU has always had to be a little flexible at times when it comes to scheduling movies, but this is getting kind of crazy. This is the kind of production chaos you’d expect out of Lucasfilm, not Marvel Studios.

There’s supposed to be an Avengers movie in 2026 but, at this point, it’s unclear who would even be in it.

Well, we know who won’t be in it. Jonathan Majors, whose real-world legal troubles has seemingly derailed his career defining role as Kang the Conqueror and possible the entire multiverse story arc with it.

Then again, maybe this is the kind of break Marvel Studios needs to soft-reboot the overarching MCU. After all, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the MCU has been a little bit directionless since the big climax of “Avengers: Endgame.”

Perhaps laying low for a while isn’t the worst thing in the world. Ride things out until next summer when “The Fantastic Four” starts up and everything old will be new again.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and hopes the MCU can get back on track long enough to get a Nova movie going.