Marvel Cinematic Universe has positioned itself as a leader in the film world. With its recent acquisition by Disney, it seems like Marvel’s sales are on a roll and its TV shows are a big hit. It’s recent new Phase Four has been doing really well for the Marvel brand.
However, Marvel seems to have a problem that needs to be addressed: Phase Four is all over the place.
Marvel’s movies are split into phases, with the recent phase including things like their new TV shows and their recent films like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness or Thor: Love and Thunder.
With each new film or TV show that comes out of this new cinematic phase, I can’t help but wonder how any of it is connected. With this new multiverse stuff, it seems like Marvel itself has no clue what’s going on with its plotline.
Each new piece of media introduces the viewers to something new, and the connections between the stories seems to be unexplained or badly explained at that.
One More Loose End
Marvel’s Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ms. Marvel, and many other of their recent works seem to not even realize that they exist in the same universe. Unless they pull the whole “multiverse” card out, I don’t know how Marvel will pull off explaining everything like this.
Be warned, there’s spoilers from here on out.
The Loose Ends of Marvel Eternals
In Eternals, it seemed clear to us that Celestials existed at the center of planets. At the end of Eternals, main heroine Sersi destroys the Celestial that was supposed to blow up Earth. So, now there’s a giant Celestial corpse just hanging out in the ocean and no mention of this was ever made in any preceding story.
It was never made clear where each story fell on the timeline, leading to some fuzzy temporality phenomenon in which no story has a timeframe, but all of them somehow do and all are somehow connected.
We know that Eternals and Multiverse of Madness exist in a post-Thanos world, but how come it’s never referenced? How can anyone just seem to ignore the fact that a massive space being is just kinda dead on Earth now? Why did Marvel’s Phase Four just gloss over this stuff?
The Loose Ends of Thor Love and Thunder
Thor: Love and Thunder only recently came out, and while I greatly enjoyed it, it really got my gears grinding on how it seemed disconnected from the series.
First of all, Gorr the God Butcher was a great character with amazing acting by Christian Bale, but there’s a lot surrounding him that doesn’t make sense. Prior to Love and Thunder, we were aware that Asgard was basically the only place that mattered in terms of mythology in the movies.
However, there’s apparently a place where all the gods gather, led by Zeus (Russell Crowe). Call me confused, because since when was this a thing? Moon Knight mentioned Egyptian gods, which okay, but Khonshu didn’t think to mention once that there was this big city for all the gods? It never crossed anyone’s minds?
Plus, the whole Eternity thing that was just plopped in front of us in the film. What’s that all about? It can grant a wish to whoever gets to it first? So, Thanos just didn’t think about using that instead of playing find the MacGuffin across the universe for the Infinity Stones?
Come to think of it, is the Time Keepers stuff connected to this too? Apparently, the Infinity Stones are less powerful than the Time Variance Authority, so does that mean Eternity is too? Is Eternity part of the TVA? Or is the TVA some multiversal crap as well?
If Bifrost was the key to getting to Eternity, why didn’t Thor just do that and erase Thanos from existence? Wouldn’t that have been…easier? He clearly seemed to know how to get to it relatively fast, no?
Multiverse or Dimensions?
So, at this point, we know there’s a multiverse. Great…so, where do these dimensions lie? Ms. Marvel is part of the cinematic universe and will be in the next Captain Marvel film, so it obviously connects in the timeline, right?
Right???
The Noor Dimension in Ms. Marvel, is that another universe? No? It’s another dimension? Did they not think to talk about dimensions before? Or is that also a multiverse thing?
We know it’s inhabited by the Djinn, but where do they lie in the Marvel universe? Are there Djinn in every universe? Does every universe have a Noor Dimension?
You see where I’m getting at? Marvel’s Phase Four seems to have so many ideas that they continue to make up for each film and TV show and don’t seem to know how they will connect said ideas, if they ever will.
Which means that the writers are just making things up as they go and are not considering that fans will want to understand where everything connects to.
Unless they have a plan, but considering what I’ve seen so far, I doubt that this plan exists.
Conclusions
Marvel’s Phase Four seems to forget that all of these stories do have to add up at the end. Besides that, each film and TV show seems to stand alone in its own universe without any consideration for the relation to another film.
It also seems to me that referencing events from other films in new films just doesn’t want to exist. You’d think that in a world post-Thanos, there would be some more chaos and more talk about the situation. They clearly aren’t sticking to comic accuracy for everything, re: Ms. Marvel’s powers, so why does it matter to not mention things?
Thor: Love and Thunder has introduced a massive element to the story with this Eternity thing, and it seems to have just brushed over the significance of it. Eternity was never spoken of before, and I’m starting to wonder if they’ll speak about it ever again.
What do you all think? Are the new Marvel stories confusing or do you disagree? Let us know in the comments below!
Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop!
Zainah Yousef
Zainah Yousef is the author of The Fallen Age Saga and specializes in gaming, social media advice, and reviews. She's been writing all her life and she probably won't stop anytime soon.
