Marvel’s Multiverse saga, the run of more than a dozen films and umpteen TV shows that have emerged since Avengers: Endgame seven years ago, was intended to be many things: a bold new kaleidoscopic chapter, a narrative playground playing out across infinite parallel realities, a chance to prove this celebrated franchise could keep regenerating like an irradiated interdimensional gecko. But if Marvel Studios really is bolting new Avengers: Doomsday material on to Avengers: Endgame ahead of the latter’s rerelease in multiplexes this September, the somewhat less-successful Multiverse phase now seems like something the studio wants to forget.
Speaking at the Sands international film festival in St Andrews at the weekend, director (of both films) Joe Russo revealed that Endgame is being recut and rereleased in September, apparently with some sort of neat segue to the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday. In comments reported in Deadline, Russo said: “It’s critically important to rerelease the movie, and, in fact, we’ll be rereleasing the film with footage that is set in the Doomsday story that we have added to Avengers: Endgame. It’s an opportunity to create a bridge from Endgame to Doomsday in a unique way and, because the movie was so successful, we have an opportunity to rerelease it.
“You don’t always get the chance to rerelease because it costs money, so the fact that we can enhance the story of Doomsday by bridging it to Endgame and these characters that we worked with for years that we love so much, and continue their story … it’s a really unique opportunity.”
Which is fascinating on several levels, not least because it appears to suggest that the most efficient route between the two Avengers films may be via a seven-year narrative flyover. This is an expensive admission that perhaps the road in between became so congested with Disney+ side quests that the easiest thing now is simply to drive around it. Can this really be the case? Were viewers mistaken in believing they needed to know what happened in Secret Invasion? Was it unnecessary to retain detailed knowledge of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, or Moon Knight? May I forget the exact mechanics of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a film that spent two hours explaining the multiverse? And what of Loki, the series once presented as the sacred text of this entire new era? Did generations of fans memorise the phrase “He Who Remains” only for Marvel history to shrug and move on?
Most pressing of all, if one can now watch Avengers: Endgame, absorb a few fresh minutes of newly installed connective tissue and stride directly into Avengers: Doomsday , what do we do with those 25.6 hours of our lives? Not all of it was a waste – the haunted, witchy sitcom that was WandaVision; Oscar Isaac arguing with himself in Moon Knight; a crocodilian version of Tom Hiddleston’s demi-god in Loki – were pleasant enough. But if Marvel’s grand multiversal middle chapter can now be reduced to bonus material attached to the film that came before it, then the multiverse era will very much not be remembered as the sweeping, epic, magical macrosaga that it set out to be.
All of which, to this Marvel fan, is precisely fine. The barrel was always going to run dry at some point after a decade or so. This has been a superhero saga so impressively interconnected and all-encompassing that the idea that comic book movies could be mostly rubbish for around half a century and then suddenly emerge as a perfectly curated spandex spider web of smartly linked super-stories seems like somethingfrom the most unlikely of alternate realities.
And yet providing a way for audiences to jump straight from Endgame to Doomsday still feels like we’ve all been cheated. And there’s the sneaking suspicion that if the cleanest route to Marvel’s future turns out to be skipping half its recent past, some of us have spent the last seven years revising for an exam that’s just been cancelled.