Humility is the great boon of all the world’s artists. It’s one thing to be able to parse helpful from unhelpful criticism, but that hinges on being able to swallow criticism in the first place. Without criticism, there can be no growth.
The best case scenario is if you’re capable of critiquing your own work as an unlikely outsider looking in. In the case of Marvel Studios, the Kevin Feige machine has such an iron grip on each and every production, that compared to him, any one of the other involved creatives might fit the “outsider looking in” description. This might seem a despairing notion to Marvel actors past and present, but Simu Liu isn’t here to despair; he’s here to chuckle.
Responding to a tweet by Marvel Multiverse asking X users to rate Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings out of 10 in honor of the film’s third anniversary on Sept. 2, Liu cheekily scored it 8.5/10, noting that the lead actor in the film is “a little too full of himself.” The joke, of course, is that Liu himself is said lead actor, and you can almost feel the comedy gods dousing him in their ichor (that’s a good thing).
The replies to Liu’s gag were all too happy to join in on this particular clown fiesta.
Liu must have been ultimately satisfied with his performance in any case, because he’s still due to reprise the role of Shang-Chi in future MCU projects, including a sequel whose details continue to elude us. And that was all back before the full pivot to Doctor Doom, which itself spun out of the previous pivot to Kang the Conqueror when Feige realized how good of an actor Jonathan Majors was.
This is to say that there is absolutely no telling from one day to the next when we’ll be seeing Shang-Chi again, and whenever we do, there’s also no telling how he’s going to fit in to this current canon. The events of Shang-Chi were locked in well before Marvel Studios decided to centralize Kang, and so the decision to centralize Kang almost certainly had an effect on Shang-Chi’s narrative trajectory (as well as that of the Ten Rings, which have been implied to have Infinity Stone-level significance to the wider narrative).
And now with this decision to bring Doctor Doom in to replace Kang as the Multiverse Saga’s big bad, that likely readjusted the whole arc of the Saga once again, which subsequently readjusted Shang-Chi’s place in it. With so much backtracking and pivoting happening behind the scenes, it’s no wonder the Multiverse Saga feels as disjointed as it does.
We look forward to seeing Shang-Chi again all the same, as Legend of the Ten Rings was one of the strongest entries in this post-Endgame world by a considerable degree. But it remains that the character’s dubious future is just one of many receipts that prove that business-driven storytelling is idiotic and counterproductive.