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Toward the end of Avengers: Infinity War, Doctor Strange sits down and uses his powers to look into 14,000,605 possible futures in their conflict against Thanos. In only one did he see a path to victory.
After watching Deadpool and Wolverine over the weekend, and catching up on all the Marvel Studios news out of San Diego Comic Con, I too have looked into 14,000,605 potential timelines to see if Marvel can stick the landing of these most recent, mixed in quality, phases. Just like Doctor Strange, I have come to the conclusion that only one path leads to victory, and as with the Sorcerer Supreme handing the Time Stone over to Thanos, Marvel may have to relinquish its biggest trump card to pull it off with Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
Slight spoilers upcoming for a running joke in Deadpool and Wolverine and some basic plot elements of the Secret Wars comics.
Marvel has to use Secret Wars 2015 as the backbone of its Avengers movies
This step is the one I am most confident that Marvel Studios is going to take based on the direction it has been moving its multiversal plot, but it’s also not something that has been explicitly confirmed. To confuse things further, at Marvel’s SDCC panel, Joe and Anthony Russo alluded to Secret Wars being inspired by the original comic book crossover story from the mid-’80s. “It’s the first comic book run I read as a kid that made me fall in love with comics, and it’s the reason that Anthony and I are standing up here,” Joe Russo said to a packed Hall H.
The original Secret Wars is… not good. It’s a very basic story that featured a character known as the Beyonder teleporting all of Marvel’s heroes and villains onto a planet called Battleworld to duke it out, and was literally only invented to boost Marvel toy sales, being mostly the creation of Mattel. That being said, it is iconic as the first major crossover event in comic book history, something that now dominates superhero stories both on and off the screen.
However, in 2015, Secret Wars returned as the brainchild of prolific comic book writer Jonathan Hickman. After setting up the event across his runs on Fantastic Four and the Avengers comics, Hickman had the Marvel multiverse collapse in on itself, only to be “saved” at the last minute by Dr. Doom, who made a patchwork planet of all the different universes and ruled it as its God Emperor. Hickman’s Secret Wars is widely regarded as the best crossover Marvel Comics has ever done.
If you’ve been keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Endgame, you can see how its Multiverse Saga could potentially result in an adaptation of Hickman’s Secret Wars. However, despite that clear connective tissue, the Russos, even before they were revealed to be the directors of the movie, have only ever referred to the original Secret Wars in past interviews about them potentially returning to the MCU.
The fact that Dr. Doom will play a major part in the story of the next two Avengers movies doesn’t necessarily narrow things down, as Doom plays a pivotal role in both iterations of Secret Wars, although he is far more relevant in Hickman’s story.
If I were a betting man, I’d say that Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars will be an amalgamation of both comic storylines. After all, while its quality may be in question, the original Secret Wars did give us one of the most important creative decisions in all of comic books: Spider-Man getting the black symbiote suit. I would be shocked if that moment didn’t make it to the big screen. Regardless, Avengers: Secret Wars has a far better chance at being a critical success the more it borrows from Hickman’s take on the crossover event.
Marvel has to nail The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which must feature RDJ’s Doom
The MCU’s iteration of the Fantastic Four is an important film for Marvel for multiple reasons, but with the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it might end up being the studio’s most important film ever.
One of Deadpool and Wolverine’s best jokes is when the merc with a mouth calls for an end to Marvel’s multiversal storytelling, stating that it had been “miss, after miss, after miss.” While I enjoyed the movie, its own multiversal shenanigans make it the messiest of the Deadpool trilogy, a sentiment shared in our review. And “mess” is a perfect word to describe MCU Phases 4 and 5.
Where Deadpool and Wolverine works best, outside of its litany of one-liners, is with its surprisingly emotional core that had me a little choked up as we approached the movie’s credits. An emotional core, in some ways quite literally, is at the heart of Hickman’s Secret Wars, and it’s formed between the Fantastic Four and Victor Von Doom.
By the time the 2015 iteration of Secret Wars came around, years and years of storytelling that pitted Reed Richards and family against Dr. Doom had laid the emotional groundwork that made the crossover event the spectacular graphic novel that it is. Sure, it was cool to see the Thing turned into a Game of Thrones-esque Wall that held back the Marvel Zombies horde, and the spin-off comic featuring Thors from across the multiverse as Battleworld’s cops was a highlight of all the tie-in storylines. But my passion for Secret Wars 2015 stems almost entirely from the conflict between Reed and Doom.
I won’t get into it here, but if you haven’t read the comic–which you should–just know that it’s some of the best writing the medium has ever featured. That’s why, if the story is indeed being adapted to the MCU, the quality of Marvel’s Fantastic Four movie is paramount. RDJ hasn’t been confirmed to be in that project yet, but it would be incredibly disappointing if he weren’t, because we have a lot of emotional groundwork to lay and we’re running out of time to do so with Doomsday releasing in May 2026.
Marvel should save its MCU X-Men for Phases 7 and beyond, following a near-total reboot
When the film rights to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men returned to Marvel Studios via Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, everyone assumed that a new take on the X-Men would play a pivotal role in Marvel’s plans post-Endgame. And yet here we are, five-plus years later, nearing the end of the next trilogy of phases, and the only hint we’ve had of mutants in the MCU has been from multiversal variants and the brief revelation that Ms. Marvel is one.
While some may argue that a lack of X-Men has only hurt Marvel’s prospects in recent years, at this point, the mutant team is a big gun that the studio should save for after Secret Wars, when it has to convince audiences once again to commit to more interconnected stores with its characters. It’s not unlike how Strange had to give up the Time Stone in order to put the remaining Avengers on the correct path to defeat Thanos following five years of misery with half the world being blipped.
Marvel has put itself in a pretty good position with this, however. Secret Wars can feature those multiversal variants, making Reynolds’ Deadpool and Jackman’s Wolverine two of the headlining heroes. Then, that movie can serve as the perfect point to have a near-total reboot of the MCU, finally putting RDJ, Jackman, and other veteran Marvel supers to bed, maybe bringing some of the franchise’s younger, fresher heroes like Tom Holland’s Spider-Man (sporting a black suit perhaps) and Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel into a completely new universe, kicking off with a fresh batch of mutants acting as the pillar of the MCU. That, to me, feels like a way to keep audiences interested in Phases 7, 8, and 9.
As Robert Downey Jr. likes to say, “Never bet against Kevin Feige,” and while I don’t share the actor’s unwavering confidence in Marvel Studios’ overlord, I do see how he and his team have set up the building blocks for a compelling end to a very sloppy set of phases. While Downey’s casting as Doom does reek of desperation, there is a way to not only make it work, but make it an engrossing choice. It all depends on if Feige, the Russos, et al can see that path forward too.
