The Marvel Cinematic Universe can’t afford to stay still, with Kevin Feige’s all-conquering franchise in a constant state of both experimentation and expansion, and the consensus indicates that Werewolf by Night director Michael Giacchino fully understood the assignment.
A black-and-white Disney Plus special arriving just in time for Halloween, the widely-acclaimed effort has been drawing serious praise for its style, tone, atmosphere, and loving embrace of classic horror. However, questions have been raised as to how it fits into the grand calculus of the multiverse, especially when everything in the MCU is connected in one way or another, no matter how subtle it may be.
In an interview with ScreenRant, producer Brian Gay artfully danced around specifics, but the Marvel Studios veteran did drop some hints, clues, and breadcrumbs as to how something as outlandish and unique as Werewolf by Night will be embraced and accepted as existing in the same mythology as things like Ms. Marvel and Thor: Love and Thunder.
“So for this, it’s a special presentation, which is a bit of a new format for us, right? It’s supposed to be a short, it’s supposed to give you — I’ve been calling it an appetizer — basically a taste of either a different story or a different area of the universe. So for this, you know better than anyone, the MCU, we’ve got aliens, we’ve got superheroes, we’ve got other dimensions, we’ve got all sorts of things. The idea with this special is that, “Well, if you look in that corner, it’s kind of shadowy and dark down there, and what happens if you peek back behind that,” and you start to see that there’s a world of monsters underneath all of this. That was the idea that we wanted to set up this concept that, “Hey, everything that you thought you knew, there was even a layer that you had no idea about.” So, we want to introduce Jack, and Elsa and all these other characters as part of a world that just makes the MCU feel even bigger.”
The “Special Presentation” nomenclature is next expected to be used in conjunction with James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special – which we already know is locked in as part of MCU continuity. Werewolf by Night looks to be an entirely different beast (ha!), so we’ll need to wait and see how sinks its claws into canon further down the line.