Marvel’s Phase 4 Has Had Some Pretty Major Changes Thus Far
By George Robbins
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, has most certainly become something of a household name over the past twelve years. Marvel Studios now produces films that manage to captivate most of the audiences they are trying to and they bring in plenty of revenue for their parent company, Disney. This has easily made them one of the most successful franchises to date outside of Disney’s other property, Star Wars. It is pretty easy to see why things have been working out for them because Marvel Studios has pretty much been able to perfect the whole superhero genre film thing as a whole. So now, we expect nothing less than a good film whenever a new film of their’s comes out.
These days, a lot of problems now find themselves being pushed up front and center given how much is currently going on in the world. Over the past couple of years, Marvel has been doing their best to pull everything together in spite of their shortcomings. This is why the state of the MCU as a whole is something that is debated upon by the general public because everything that has been seen thus far has given a moment of pause. This mainly stems from the fact that the film industry as a whole is a mess right now and that Marvel has had their release plans set already. This makes things kind of difficult as they are now somewhat bound to a formula.
Even though Marvel has had a release plan for all of their movies over the years, there has been some level of flexibility involved in order to get storylines working. This is how they were eventually able to incorporate characters like Spider-Man and Thanos into their over-arching introduction saga. I say introduction saga because they called the entire first three phases a saga which means they plan on keeping this going for a very long time. This means that, in the future, there are sure to be more issues which mess with their movie plans going forward and they need a level of flexibility to deal with it. Although they have some flexibility with their stories, there is still the issue of them not having flexibility with their releases.
They had plenty of plans in place for how they were going to kick off Phase 4, but those plans got changed already a couple of times. The first time their plans were interrupted was back in 2018 when James Gunn was temporarily let go from directing ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.’ Originally, the plan was for the third film to be the one that would actually have the chance to kick off Phase 4 of the MCU. This plan was changed and now the film was moved much further down the roster. Not that it was really much of an issue at the time, but it showed that they needed some flexibility to move things around. The problem really started coming into play, though, when they released their launch plans at San Diego Comic-Con last year.
At SDCC last year, they announced the line-up and release dates for their films, but obviously they will not be able to keep this line-up the way they planned. The new first film on the line-up was meant to be ‘Black Widow,’ but the pandemic forced back the release date to some time in 2021. This has effectively pushed back the releases of every other film and shows that when they released their plans, they lost some flexibility. Another issue to crop up was the deal between Sony and Marvel for Spider-Man as Disney was trying to go back on their deal with Sony as they felt they were not getting enough money out of the character. Eventually this issue was resolved and we ended up getting new possible future films out of the deal.
When the new deal was made between Sony and Disney, it became known that Disney would get 25 percent of the profits in return for paying roughly a quarter of the production costs as well. On top of this fact, Sony would get more creative liberty to use the MCU’s Spider-Man in their own Spider-Verse films. This overall presents the possibility that we could end up seeing Sony’s Spider-Verse films becoming a larger part of the MCU in some way. So it appears that not every change made to the MCU will be a bad one as people have been wanting something like this to happen for awhile now. This just goes to show though, that the MCU is something that must be flexible moving forward or else the over-arching stories will end up suffering as a result.
Although their have been plenty of changes thus far, it is certainly apparent that Marvel Studios pretty much knows what they are doing in the long run. The pandemic has made it a bit more difficult for them now in terms of movie releases and when they can work on producing their films, but they have a pretty good idea of what they are doing. They have had to deal with many changes to Phase 4 already and it would not be surprising if they came up with a new line-up for the public soon enough. Marvel Studios has a long road ahead of them because it is highly likely that they will be changing even more due to the pandemic, but we know they can handle being flexible. We just shouldn’t be surprised if things continue to change in the near future for the MCU.