That'a a very cool dial, that also feels accurate to the character. I love how much you ephasise the support role, once he gets grounded.


In the movie, I loved the idea that Strange used a corpse to dreamwalk, becuase it felt like a great Chekov's gun moment. The way they dealt with Defender Strange's corpse early in the movie felt a bit off, like they just needed to get it out of the way. But the payoff when Strange needed to dreamwalk was great!

It was also a really interesting visual with the cloak of the damned.


That's a very interesting point you make about the multiverse. I have had this feeling that Marvel took too long to actually get to the multiverse proper, but I hadn't thought about why I felt that way. Other studios jumping to get there first, while Marvel move at a more reasonable pace, makes a lot of sense.
Apart from Phase 1 leading to a team-up movie, I don't think the MCU have ever telegraphed where they're going so clearly before.

And as usual, jumping the gun to get there first, without all the careful build-up, just doesn't work as well.


And I agree with No-Name that the multiverse works best, when it's used to compare what is to what could be, with a focus on how this affects the main character(s).

I was trying to think of multiverse stories from the comics, apart from big one-off crossover events, and I think the "eXiles" comics are the most obvious example.
Here, every arc takes place in a new alternate universe, and a big part of the struggle comes from the characters figuring out how each new universe works.
But even so, most of the drama comes from the main characters' feelings and relationships. About how this life of constant conflict and universe-hopping affects them. Like Mimic growing increasingly bitter about having to kill alternate versions of people he loves.

The multiverse is just like any other trope in storytelling. It can be used to great effect if it's telling us something about our characters, or making a point about the way the world works, etc. Or it can be a cheap bandwagon effect that doesn't really accomplish much of anything other than "Look at the franchises! LOOK AT THEM!"

And there's always going to be a certain level of that, it's inevitable. Part of the charm of multiverse storytelling is the mash-up. The problem comes when it's little to nothing more than that, ya know? Like the LeBron Space Jam. Granted, I haven't seen it, so I could be wrong, but between general reactions to it and the trailers, it feels like there's little more to this than WB flaunting their franchises. LeBron and the Looney Tunes hopping from WB-Owned Reality to WB-Owned Reality so audiences can go "HEY, IT'S INSERT FRANCHISE HERE! WOW!".

We're definitely at the precipice, though. I feel like we've pretty much done the good multiverse stuff as much as possible, and any further exploration of it will become tedious and lose the charm.

Nailed it, friend.

FWIW, I've heard rumors that FLASHPOINT is doing well with test audiences, but the big question mark looming over everything is Ezra Miller, who just can't stop assaulting people. Their conduct (they/them are Miller's pronouns) has led to WB debating recasting them, which would be yet another expense on this already-expensive film, and to WB dropping the flagging Magical Beasts franchise, which has been marred with scandal from Miller's behavior, to Johnny Depp's reputation and falling star, to J.K. Rowling's transphobic fear-mongering, to the fact that these movies have gotten incrementally worse from the word go.Many thanks, friend! Glad you dug it! Haha I made the mistake of looking at the May Dial Design Contest just after watching the film and saw a fantastic version of the character, so I've been worried about this one.

That's a great point about Marvel Studios' telegraphed plan. It feels like Banner's debate with the Ancient One in ENDGAME about multiverses got everyone excited only for the D23 Phase 4 reveal with WHAT IF...?, INTO THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS and QUANTUMANIA to send everyone into hype overdrive. I've seen speculation that this is all driving toward a version of The Secret Wars, which will settle the multiverse stuff, so it presumably has an endpoint... but I think many are dying to know who this Phase or 3-Phase villain is, just so there's a clear endpoint in mind.

That's a solid breakdown of the Exiles! They're a team I'm not familiar with, but the more I hear, the more I think I ought to investigate further...
Oh, for sure. There's nothing wrong with multiverse stories in a vacuum. EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE is legendarily good and makes STRANGE 2 seem quaint by comparison. And there are countless excellent multiverse stories among comics and cartoons.

As you say, I think the difference between good ones and bad ones are whether or not they're good, well-structured stories with something to say or if they're just content-plugging.

Sort of related to the point above about Phase 4 lacking a Thanos by this point (despite the fact that Thanos didn't appear until THE AVENGERS, 6 movies into the franchise), folks have been complainting that the MCU itself has become a reference-tastic content glut where it's not clear what one needs to know to fully understand a film or show (going back to our conversation about how much of it is necessary for understanding) and that the MCU is becoming homework.

It's an interesting conundrum. Do you make a franchise where the only properties that "talk" to each other are the numbered sequels, or is each next movie and show a loosely connected stepping stone to the next? Marvel Studios is clearly doing the latter, and while I think audiences have accepted that the movies and shows are forming something akin to a mega TV-season, that same mega-season isn't structured like a TV season; that is, most TV pilots will tell you who your protagonists, antagonists, and villains are. Is that something Marvel should've done to make it clear what the "main" story of this Phase is so it wasn't a guessing game of what would be most relevant? Debatably, without that, the MCU runs the risk of feeling like reference-plugging until after the big bad is revealed.

I also think that speaks to the sense of content fatigue folks are feeling, especially from the MCU which is turning out an insane amount of shows and movies which are all tied together --and that's on top of everybody else's deluge of content. I myself kinda wish that the MCU was consistently doing 3-4 movies a year and either no shows or only one or two, just because it's starting to feel like a commitment and because social media is basically unusable until you've inoculated yourself from spoilers.

Have you started the Kenobi series yet (don't worry, no spoilers here)?
Because the show starts with really nice summary of the prequels. Just a few minutes to go over everything that's important to understanding the show.

I think that is the best solution to the homework problem. The same way Netflix often make short summaries at the start of a new season of a show.

I also think the perfect medium for these is not in the cinema, but on YouTube. It would let audiences choose if they want a refresher or not, and it could even serve as a type of marketing for the film.
Just upload it on the main Marvel Entertainment channel a day or two before the premiere, and you're set.


As for the next big bad in Marvel, Kang and Doom are the most obvious candidates, and we have technically met the former (though movie-only audiences will have to wait for Quantumania).

I have! haha I haven't had much opportunity to speak about the Disney+ Star Wars shows (I've debated making a SW set, but I think there are too many excellent takes on SW here for mine to be meaningful), but thus far, OBI-WAN is my favorite of them by a country mile. Three episodes in, it's the one with the deepest characters, the strongest TV structure, and arguably the best visuals. I didn't think I'd be into it after BOBA FETT let me down, but I'm really digging it.

I fully agree that Marvel Studios needs to start doing recaps ahead of movies if these kinds of complaints are going to become ubiquitous. It's an open secret that the MCU is a mega-season, but they're acting like everyone's watching their content all the time instead of picking and choosing like we know they do from box office numbers. If anything, the recaps would likely encourage people to watch the other stuff or get a Disney+ subscription.

I just checked Marvel Entertainment's Youtube channel, and it's genuinely strange that they don't regularly release recaps. At the very least, it'd likely get tons of views and bring in lots of revenue for their channel.

I agree, at this juncture, it really does feel like Kang or Doctor Doom will be the big bad, especially after LOKI's finale. My guess is that the strength of the MCU's shared continuity is that nothing is set in stone long in advance. Things don't interlock so tightly that they can't be shuffled around or rewritten entirely, like we saw in Phase 4's schedule, and I think that was also true of the early phases. The strength of eking out Thanos is having time to fine-tune the approach, whereas if you push an element that doesn't excite audiences, like the Hand in DAREDEVIL S.2, you're not locked into pushing something lacking buzz.

That said, I easily think Marvel Studios is smart enough to make a mega-season structure that works and lead with a main villain to keep general audiences aware of the overall trajectory. It will be fascinating to see how Kang appears in QUANTUMANIA and if the movie will double-down on his villainy or pull the rug out from under us. Conceivably the Fantastic Four could turn up in there along with Doctor Doom...

That's one thing that Marvel Studios has that I think we're all forgetting, and I just remembered.

Ever since the buildup to WandaVision, Disney+ has had a series called "Marvel Studios Legends" that focuses on character-specific recaps for the significant characters in an upcoming project.

That show is actually exactly what's being requested here. If you want the quick-and-dirty recap before seeing the next big Marvel Studios project, open up Disney+ and go straight to Legends. It actually does a really good job of providing the recap you might need.

Oh, I didn’t know that. Awesome! (Though not ideal to have it hidden behind a subscription to Disney+)

That’s my contention: it’s behind a Disney+ paywall. You also have to know it’s there and plan to watch it ahead of the show or movie, which I could see many considering as homework. By contrast, if those same Marvel Legends shorts played directly in front of the show or movie, they’d be seen as helpful recaps. I actually liked that OBI-WAN’s pilot did that with the Prequel Trilogy, just to help us zero in on what would be salient.

Yeah, but well, everything seems to be behind a streaming paywall these days, honestly. It would be really nice if Marvel Studios Legends were readily available on YouTube, but that's just kinda not how entertainment seems to work anymore.

Especially since it seems like, especially with superhero franchises, that significant portions of said franchises are going straight to the streaming services, whether it's the Disney+ shows or how WB/HBO has put the movies on streaming same day as theatrical release (until it didn't work anymore) or things like Peacemaker and the upcoming spinoff series (two of them) from "The Batman".

Definitely agree with this, and I think it feeds into a larger conundrum about there being too much content out there right now. 10-15 years ago, if you recommended a show or movie to someone, they’d be liable to see it; these days, with tons of streaming services and niche interests, conversations about shows and movies feels like people taking turns discussing what they’re watching. Because everyone doesn’t have every streaming service, more content than before is likely to become fringe.

Because I’m not keeping up with DC shows on HBOMax or the CW, it’s become fringe to me, whereas the movies -so long as they don’t interact much with the shows- might be a purely mainstream thing.

I don’t think the MCU is likely to become fringe, especially because Disney+ is one of the highest-adopted streaming services, but we know that the MCU doesn’t always get seen by everyone; the Avengers movies mostly do, but the rest range by individual interest. The Disney+ shows feel like another degree of separation from the films to me. While they’re good and fun, I suspect that they’re increasingly niche. We’re probably going to see more and more audiences who haven’t kept up with the Disney+ shows and get confused by events of the movies. Haha without Disney+, an MCU movie purist would wonder why Wanda doesn’t seem to want Vision back.

It’s striking to me that LOKI was the most successful Disney+ MCU show by view count. That’s likely because of name recognition and the sense that it’d be the most important going forward.

That's a good point Squabbler - a lot of the click-baity youtube nonsense and mainstream review sites seem increasingly down on Phase 4, and I wonder if part of that is because Loki seemed like it should "change everything" (and was by view count the most watched and memed of the D+ shows), but it has mattered basically not at all to any other show or movie since. Yeah, I know Feige says that the events of Spider-man and Multiverses wouldn't have happened without Loki, but that's not on screen. That makes some complaints about "homework" make more sense to me, actually - people aren't mad they had to do homework, they're mad that the book they read wasn't on the test.

Definitely agreed with this.

I also think some of it is irreconcilable stuff. INFINITY WAR and ENDGAME were perfect ends to the franchise, and I think a fair number of general audiences saw them as a plausible jumping-off point --and I think a fair share of critics hoped the franchise would go no further for a host of OTHER irreconcilable reasons. Not only does each MCU sequel and series carry the burden of heralding in the next big thing, it also has to live up to the last big thing, AND justify it's existence when -as movie series go- there didn't need to be another movie in the series after ENDGAME.

I think these movies are still enormously popular and people even passingly familiar with comics get that the series are pleased knowing the film franchise will likely outlive them... but it's a fair concern to worry that there might eventually be too much content for audiences to keep up with. Where that line is, I haven't the foggiest clue.

And to those people, people expecting an end to this, expecting every detail to line up perfectly, to have absolutely no stories that feel superfluous or have a few contradicting aspects to them and whatnot, I say...

Welcome to comics. Maybe it's just because I'm one of the ones who've read these books for over thirty years now, but this is what I'm used to. Maybe the story didn't need to continue after Endgame. Maybe the Marvel Universe didn't need to continue after God-Emperor Doom's Secret Wars. Or the original Secret Wars. Maybe that original super-mega Marvel Universe crossover in 1984 could have served as an endpoint for the Marvel Universe. They faced the biggest threat in all existence, they triumphed. The End.

And you could keep going and going. Each massive mega-event could have ended the story in its own way. Maybe AvX could have been the climactic end. Or Civil War. Or maybe the X-Men could have had their own individual "The End" in X-Cutioner's Song.

But that's not how comics work, and that really isn't how the MCU should work. And for anybody whining about having to keep track of stories to understand the next one coming out, again, welcome to being a comicbook fan! We've been doing this for DECADES. You can handle a few years until the superhero fad fades.

But I think I might be on some level preaching to the choir.

To me, it feels more like we’re collectively preaching to the void. Which can be somewhat cathartic.

And that's my take as a fan of comic book material: I'll take as much of this as I can get, especially after decades of bad movies with favorite characters (I'll always be mad about GHOST RIDER). More, note that Marvel Studios is an actual studio. Lucasfilm doesn't even have "Star Wars Studios" or "Indiana Jones Productions." There is a studio that is dedicated to making movies and shows set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe until they stop making money. That should be a given.

I do think that the natural course of film sequels is to become increasingly niche until a given franchise dies or only gets a rebootquel decades later. Pirates of the Caribbean, Die Hard, and Terminator are good examples of this. The MCU, by virtue of the existing comic book, video game, and cartoon fanbase, is unlikely to die this way unless the movies suddenly get really, really bad. Arguably, there hasn't been an outright awful MCU movie; just a few inelegant and middling ones.

That said, as a film person, I do understand the complaints of critics and filmmakers who feel repelled and sidelined by "Marvel Movies."

1) Some critics feel like they have to do homework to fully understand the material, and party to that, it isn't material they like or want to see.

I feel ya, critics. There are some genres that never excite me, and I'd be annoyed if I had to watch a deluge of them.

2) The last 10 years of movies have shown an explosion of franchises and major IPs at the box office, seemingly replacing the riskier, original IPs and franchises that flooded theaters as far back as the 00s and early 10s. There's a perception that the MCU's success -and its host of imitators- has pushed original ideas and midbudget movies out of theaters and into the streaming space.

IMHO, this is a half-fair assessment. You don't see Adam Sandler comedies in theaters because the last decade of them were critical failures and eventual financial flops. Hollywood wasted a decade trying to make Sam Worthington, Taylor Kitsch, and Nicholas Hoult the next major stars, and that also overly failed. The failure of mid-budget films isn't fully the story of Marvel Movies pushing out worthy features; it's the story of studios mitigating risk by dumping mixed bag movies to Netflix and other streaming services. Or, more directly, it's a story of poor quality control.

3) Marvel movies & shows are made with a ton of green screen and CGI, which can look fake to the eye and cheapens the art of filmmaking.

I can't argue with that. Marvel's gotten flack for that for the last 5 years now, and it's funny/shocking/embarrassing to hear that Kevin Feige was shocked that Zhao's ETERNALS could look as good as it did on location with natural lighting. It's a blindspot for the studio, but it makes sense considering how quickly they churn these things out.

4) There's too much Marvel content.

I kind of agree? I mean, I like watching superhero stuff, but I'd prefer it be a more manageable 3-4 MCU movies and 1-2 shows per year as a ceiling and just make them as good as they possibly can be. It doesn't help that Sony is also trying to keep making Marvel-adjacent stuff, which meant there were NINE MCU things that came out in 2021. That's a lot.

Do I enjoy that I have that many options, though? I sure as hell do.

5) Every Marvel Movie is the same.

This criticism frustrates me the most because they all feel like very different films with different story goals, moods, themes, and quirks, but I think detractors only see people in costumes quipping and punching each other in front of green screens. WINTER SOLDIER is nothing like RAGNAROK. IRON MAN 3 is very different from GUARDIANS 2. Even DOCTOR STRANGE is much different from DOCTOR STRANGE 2.

What's more, when Marvel DOES try to do different things like THE ETERNALS, critics attack it because it's the obscure, weird one that they can get away with blasting --all because they'd rather voice dissent at the system than engage with an interesting film made within a system.

There's this sentiment that every Marvel property is the same, and a sense of dread that accompanies each new trailer which [they thing] promises to be the same as the last ...until surprise, surprise, it's doing its own thing in a way that's mostly unlike other things.

I get it. THE WINTER SOLDIER is not as adult a film as SPY GAME or ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. BLACK WIDOW isn't as dark as RED SPARROW (but RED SPARROW sucked, so...). But at the same time, you can't watch films like BLACK PANTHER and ignore how it ignited a global conversation about colonialism. Or ignore SHANG-CHI's pointed meditation on American-Born Chinese and the Asian diaspora.

Or ignore how THE WINTER SOLDIER is a reaction to the Patriot Act, telegraphed the Edward Snowden leak, and predicted Nazis infiltrating the FBI & CIA and how we'd see an even sharper rise in fascist policing.

6) Marvel Movie fans are s***y.

I don't have a counter to that, as I love all of y'all, but the prevailing attitude on social media from critics who discuss this is that "Marvel Fans" don't have much film curiosity outside of Marvel movies, can be film illiterate, and can be belligerent when a director or actor dismisses superhero movies.

To the latter parts of that, I'll say that it never feels good to be dismissed. The thing that some critics have to realize is that yeah, some people are comic fans first, movie fans maybe distant second, third, or even fourth. Let them have their opinions, and either don't engage and/or block.

If studios knew how to ignore people on social media, especially toxic, vocal minorities (I'm absolutely not accusing anyone here of being that) we wouldn't have had costly, embarrassing boondoggles like THE SNYDER CUT, SOLO, or THE RISE OF SKYWALKER.

Haha sorry, needed to get all that out. Bad faith critics have been annoying me lately.