Could we be experiencing the beginning of the end of the MCU?
It certainly feels like it, sometimes. The once dazzlingly popular franchise is circling the drain in many ways, and failures like Secret Invasion only serve to underscore this point. The behemoth cinematic universe was a shining beacon in Hollywood — inspiring countless copycats and record-breaking ticket sales — but the giant has fallen, and fallen hard. Faith in the MCU is petering out fast, and it’s clear where the blame lies.
See, the MCU’s been making mistakes from the start, but most of those are forgivable. It takes risks, experimentation, and skill to craft a franchise like the MCU, and the great minds behind perhaps one of cinema’s most impressive rises nailed it with the slow build, and ultimate payoff, that was the Infinity War saga.
But that’s where things started to get shaky. Following the epics that were Infinity War and Endgame, the MCU started to lose its luster. Its releases are still several steps above anything (live action) DC can scrounge up, almost without fail, but none of them hold a candle to some of the franchise’s greatest early releases. We’re seeing the fall of the titanic franchise before our very eyes — and a big culprit behind its collapse is Disney Plus.
I’m certainly not complaining about the easy access Disney Plus provides to all those great MCU releases — or to its less-impressive series. Nor is my issue with the MCU’s Disney Plus approach, related to the content it chooses to adapt. I like the areas and lesser-known heroes they’re exploring with their releases, but the purpose behind each and every MCU series is lacking, for one key reason.
That reason was on full display in Secret Invasion. If you, like me, watched the show with high hopes and low expectations, you probably still found yourself disappointed. It wasn’t just the utter letdown of a finale, or Nick Fury’s infuriating (hah) impotence. It was the fact that Secret Invasion was never intended to stand on its own. It was — as are all MCU Disney Plus shows — intended as nothing but supplemental to the franchise’s real moneymakers: Its big screen releases.
The franchise treats Disney Plus like a side gig, one that pulls in some views and helps expand the world, but that ultimately serves as a stepping stool for its primary projects — movies. Despite the rise of the televised format, and the broad success and popularity of shows like Game of Thrones, Ted Lasso, and the ambition of shows like The Expanse, the MCU has yet to see the worth in television. And so, while some of its shows are thoroughly entertaining to watch, none of them carry the impact of a proper MCU release.
The most infuriating thing? You still need to watch these shows if you want to understand the MCU at large. They do deliver necessary story connections and character development, but oh wait, it might just get tossed out to make way for a movie the studio likes more. Wanda’s arc across (most of) WandaVision? Beautiful to watch. It was a creative, interesting, and genuinely impressive exploration of grief, and it set Wanda up for her next arc with purpose. Then Multiverse of Madness stomped all over it, and Wanda’s growth, and made her a second-rate villain.
Without Ms. Marvel, viewers won’t know who the hell that kid in The Marvels is, and without Loki people weren’t introduced to Kang until Quantumania. It’s increasingly a terribly tangled mess, but it would be worth it — as comic books, with all their crossovers and confusing events, are worth it — if only the resulting projects were good. Or at least meant something in the broader MCU.
But, while Maria Hill’s death and Rhodes’s longstanding status as a Skrull will inevitably make waves past Secret Invasion, the show did little more than set up other, future, MCU projects. It served as yet another supplemental series that failed to accomplish much of anything. It’s a side note, as are WandaVision, and Loki, and even Moon Knight. They don’t carry the MCU weight of a show like Andor does in the galaxy far, far away, because they aren’t intended to have the impact of an Infinity War level event — even those that claim they do.
Secret Invasion should have been the exception. It should have been Andor to Star Wars’ Mandalorian. But instead it was The Book of Boba Fett, and it damaged faith in the MCU to the point of no return, in some cases.
The franchise needs to either put faith in its shows — and let them form into something real, and rich, and worthwhile — or it needs to give up on the Disney Plus formula. Because without something truly great to turn the tides in its favor, every fresh failure further establishes that the MCU’s greatest days are behind it.