What's Going To Happen to the MCU After "Avengers: Doomsday"?
Do you remember watching "Avengers: Endgame"? That overwhelming feeling of completeness when you saw the culmination of a decade’s worth of life-altering movies merge into one masterpiece? For me, it was incredible. Like many of you, I grew up watching these movies, and I love them so much that they’ve essentially become part of my personality. And now, with "Avengers: Doomsday" just a few months away, it’s time to continue that narrative.
But it raises the question: what’s next?
After so many world-ending, universe-destroying foes, what happens after Doom?
You may have heard of the term ‘superhero fatigue '—the idea that oversaturation of superhero movies in the last decade has created a numbness to the whole genre. And it really started affecting Marvel and superhero movies in general in the early 2020s. Every movie had to deal with some world-ending threat, and Marvel movies just lost their impact.
But with more recent releases such as "Spider-Man: Brand New Day", Marvel seems to be taking a step back from such high stakes. But if that’s true, why release Doomsday, a multiversal-level film, during a time of smaller-scale, character-focused films? To get into that, we first have to delve into what Doomsday is, how it is related to its sequel, "Avengers: Secret Wars", and how both of them will set up the rest of the MCU.
In the comics, Secret Wars was an event that brought together Marvel's cornerstone characters and had them interact. And if Marvel is choosing to adopt the 2015 version of the Secret Wars storyline, both Doomsday and "Avengers: Secret Wars" are going to reboot the MCU.
That might sound terrifying, but it is probably for the better. A soft reboot of the MCU will allow older characters to wrap up their storylines and pave the way for a new age of characters to take the lead. It does not mean that everything that has happened to this point is moot. Rebooting the MCU would allow for interactions between all the characters in all of the different universes we have seen them in.
Essentially, Doom is the ‘beginning of the end’, a wonderful homage not only to his name, but also to the actor who plays him.
