An Earnest Attempt to Explain What Marvel Is Even Doing Anymore

The Avengers assembling isn’t as exciting as it used to be. For the last 17 years, one of Marvel Studios’ selling points has been its interconnected narratives and major crossovers. But after 14 shows, 37 movies, and the introduction of a “multiverse” — an endless array of alternate timelines (and confusion) — the MCU has become unwieldy at best. The release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps marks the beginning of what Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige calls “Phase 6.” The term “phase” has usually meant a group of films leading up to a new Avengers movie, though these days the designation seems more arbitrary. Phases 4 and 5 had no narrative through-lines and lacked direction and crescendos; both concluded with self-contained stories (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) or streaming offerings (Ironheart). But Phase 6 is building toward a pair of films that promise to redeem the MCU and, at long last, streamline it: next year’s Avengers: Doomsday and its 2027 sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars.

Until then, recalling which characters are dead or alive, which are in space, who’s in what timeline, and where all of this is going can be a tall order. (Some heroes have been offscreen for almost four years now. Remember Shang-Chi?) But if we get started now, we just might be able to detangle all this multiversal business.

Where are the original Avengers?

Photo: Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

The original team from the 2012 Avengers is, for the most part, scattered to the wind. Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) died in Avengers: Endgame. Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) may or may not be alive. He was quite old in the closing minutes of Endgame thanks to time-travel shenanigans and was last seen handing over his shield to his former sidekick, the Falcon (Anthony Mackie). He’s been referenced a few times since — primarily in the 2021 streaming series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — but no one seems to know where he is. (There’s a rumor he’s on the moon.)

Black Widow (Scarlet Johannsson) also died in Endgame, though her prequel solo film came out after that happened because better late than never. Thor (Chis Hemsworth) is off in space, adventuring with the superpowered daughter he adopted in Thor: Love and Thunder. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) has an alien kid as well, a surprise son who briefly appeared in the 2022 streaming series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, though we’ve seen neither character since. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) received his own Christmas-themed streaming show in 2021, where he passed his hero’s mantle down to the young archer Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld). But given Renner’s severe injuries after a snow-plough accident and his subsequent salary complaints, it’s unlikely we’ll see the grizzled marksman play a major role anytime soon. Of course, alternate versions of these characters could easily appear, given the multiverse’s infinite possibilities, but the Avengers we once followed aren’t going to reassemble anytime soon.

What about the other characters from Avengers: Endgame?

Photo: Matt Kennedy

Lots more superheroes teamed up in the last Avengers movie to defeat Thanos (Josh Brolin) — who is also dead (twice over). Some of them have starred in their own sequels since then. The former Falcon is now the MCU’s winged Captain America, last seen in the disastrous Captain America: Brave New World with his own sidekick, the new Falcon, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez). Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) got her own team-up sequel, The Marvels, which mostly took place on other planets, but ended with her moving back to Earth. The Black Panther, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), died off-screen in Wakanda Forever after Boseman’s real-life passing, leaving the character’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), to inherit the iconic armor.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) was last seen adventuring with alternate versions of himself (Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire) in his third movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home. That film ended with him making a magical bargain to stop the universe from tearing itself apart, resulting in the whole world forgetting not only that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but that his civilian alter ego ever existed. The last time he appeared onscreen, Peter was living anonymously in a rundown apartment, which should make for an interesting reset when his next solo film arrives in the summer of 2026.

The Guardians of the Galaxy, meanwhile, had one final adventure in their own threequel, after which Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) returned to Earth, Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Groot (Vin Diesel) formed an off-shoot team, Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Drax (Dave Bautista) stayed on the alien colony Knowhere to raise rescued orphans, and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) embarked on a journey of self-discovery. Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) joined the alien pirate crew the Ravagers — or at least, a version of her did. This was the Gamora who hopped over from a different universe in Endgame, after the original Gamora was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.

Is Scarlet Witch really dead?

Photo: Jay Maidment/Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection

Things get even more complicated with Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and the Vision (Paul Bettany), who kicked off Marvel’s streaming era with the inventive TV throwback WandaVision. The show ends with a resurrected, amnesiac Vision (dubbed “White Vision”) flying off to discover himself — we’ll see him again in a streaming series down the line — while the couple’s magically conjured children, a pair of superpowered twins, are also off running around the multiverse. One of them, Billy (Joe Locke), shows up again in the WandaVision spinoff series Agatha All Along, while Wanda’s subsequent, villainous appearance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness concludes with her seemingly being crushed under a mountain, but who’s to say if she’s really gone for good.

Doctor Strange looks different now.

Photo: Walt Disney Studios

The fate of Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), meanwhile, may be the most intriguing among Marvel’s attempted new A-list: At the end of Multiverse of Madness, he’s cursed with a third eye and gets recruited by the mysterious Clea (Charlize Theron), who aims to stop impending “incursions” — the collisions and subsequent destruction of parallel universes.

How did Marvel’s multiverse get so messy?

Photo: Marvel

How much time do you have?

Marvel’s throw-it-all-at-the-wall approach worked wonders in the buildup to their major two-part crossover, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Existing MacGuffins like the glowing cube from Captain America: The First Avenger and the magic space goo from Thor: The Dark World were retroactively reimagined as Infinity Stones, the all-powerful gems sought out by genocidal final boss Thanos, resulting in all the existing characters coming together to thwart him. The seeds for the next big crossover were planted as early as Endgame, during a conversation between the Hulk and Doctor Strange’s Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) about each alternate universe being held together by its versions of the Stones, though that idea quickly got thrown out the window in the 2021 streaming series Loki, which began establishing its own, entirely separate mechanics for new realities.

The plan was to build up to a two-part event originally scheduled for 2025, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars. The former was titled for the series’ overarching villain in Phase 4, the time-traveling Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who was meant to carry Marvel through Phases 5 and 6. The latter took its name from several different crossover books titled Secret Wars, primarily the 2015 series that saw several universes colliding with one another. Various versions of Kang showed up in both seasons of Loki and in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but waning interest in the character (Quantumania was a box-office failure) and Majors’s conviction for assault and harassment resulted in the character being sidelined. He’s all but been replaced — as we suspected he would be — with one of the comics’ most popular villains, Doctor Doom (to be played by Robert Downey Jr.). That first film, The Kang Dynasty, was retitled Avengers: Doomsday. But the second film’s title stuck, which works well since Doom is a major part of the Secret Wars comics series. In that story, he saves the collapsing multiverse by creating his own distinct reality and ruling over it with an iron fist.

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So we’re pretending that Kang never existed?

Photo: Jay Maidment

Loki’s second season ends by suggesting that you probably don’t need to worry about Kang anymore. An early version of Kang — perhaps the earliest, the late-19th-century inventor Victor Timely — is prevented from getting his hands on the advanced technological knowledge from the future that set him on the path to becoming Kang in the first place. Also, the temporal police known as the TVA (or the Time Variance Authority) are now keeping an eye out to make sure no future Kangs come into existence. But Marvel’s post-Endgame approach to the multiverse has created other, bigger headaches, largely because few of these multiversal stories are actually connected to one another.

Take, for instance, Doctor Strange screwing up a spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home, resulting in alternate-universe “variants” of Spider-Man (i.e. past cinematic incarnations) hopping over into the MCU. In the very next film, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the walls of the multiverse are breached once more, but not because of anything Strange did in the previous movie.

Kang’s meddling with the timelines doesn’t seem to have had lasting consequences either. At the end of Loki season two, the Asgardian prince ends up replacing a version of Kang as the protector of time (he also becomes … a tree?). Where Kang fought to maintain a single timeline with no alternate possibilities, Loki ensures that the multiverse exists going forward. The way he achieves this, however, means that the multiverse has, paradoxically, always existed. As enormous and cosmic as the events of Loki might seem, none of the other Avengers are remotely aware of them, and all other multiverse-related phenomena across Marvel’s films and TV shows unfold pretty much by coincidence.

Why is Marvel bothering with a story device this complicated?

Photo: Sony Pictures

Above plot reasons, the multiverse concept exists so that the MCU can rope in alternate versions of existing characters, along with those from Marvel-based movies that predate Feige’s MCU. The success of Spider-Man: No Way Home was owed in part to Spider-Men from three different cinematic eras teaming up. The movie’s nearly $2 billion gross all but guaranteed that this would be Marvel’s formula going forward. It was applied to the recent Deadpool & Wolverine as well, which brought back numerous characters from various 20th Century Fox–owned Marvel films from the early aughts, like Chris Evans’s Human Torch (Fantastic Four) and Jennifer Garner’s Elektra (Daredevil). Marvel even brought back Hugh Jackman’s long-dead Wolverine (X-Men), since the multiverse gives them carte blanche to reuse benched actors (see also: Downey Jr. as Doom).

Sure. But where is all this multiverse stuff headed now?

Photo: Courtesy of Marvel Studios

Multiverse of Madness introduced the primary dangers of the multiverse going forward: the aforementioned “incursions.” We only see one happen during the film, but there’s always the chance Marvel will retroactively characterize past events as incursions. Spider-Man: No Way Home ends with the near-collision of other universes as Spider-Man’s enemies try to hop over into the mainline Marvel timeline, Earth-616. In the streaming series Ms. Marvel, young heroine Kamala Khan fights beings from an alternate dimension who hope to open the door between their worlds, which could destroy everything. That’s probably some form of “incursion” too. Then again, with the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday still being written as it’s being shot, who knows whether any of these previous multiverse happenings will end up playing a part at all.

Do I still need to keep up with the TV shows to understand what’s going on?

Photo: Patrick Harbron/Netflix/

It was once conventional wisdom that every new Marvel story would cross over with the others down the line (the tagline for the Avengers TV spinoff Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was “It’s All Connected”). This may no longer be the case. Despite Marvel producing their own shows for Disney+ and working Netflix series like Daredevil and The Punisher into their continuity, how much the TV shows really matter going forward is a bit of a mystery. Feige himself expressed regret about the studio’s quantity-over-quality approach in the streaming era. And, in practical terms, there just isn’t room for every single Marvel character to appear in the next two Avengers movies.

The overwhelming glut of new Disney+ series like Moon Knight, Echo, and Werewolf by Night have made it difficult for general audiences to keep abreast of important events unfolding on streaming. Some viewers might not be aware that movie characters like Maria Hill (Colbie Smulders) are now dead, or that War Machine/James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) has been revealed as an alien in disguise (both developments thanks to the subpar Nick Fury–centric series Secret Invasion).

What about Ms. Marvel? She was in a movie.

Photo: Marvel Studios

Yes, but it wasn’t what you’d call a huge success. The sequel to Captain Marvel’s billion-dollar debut, The Marvels, continued the stories of two streaming shows. It co-starred Iman Vellani’s character from Ms. Marvel and Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau from WandaVision, and went on to bomb at the box office. The film ends with Ms. Marvel recruiting a Young Avengers team and leaves Rambeau trapped in an alternate universe alongside versions of Fox’s X-Men. Whether these specific stories will continue in Doomsday is anyone’s guess.

Thunderbolts* was similarly composed of movie B-players and streaming villains, and lost millions of dollars despite more positive reviews. Marvel’s strategy going forward will likely require as little homework as possible.

Okay, what else do I need to remember going into Avengers: Doomsday?

Photo: Marvel

First, don’t expect abandoned newcomers like Brett Goldstein’s Hercules, Harry Styles’s Eros, or Mahershala Ali’s Blade (who’s been stuck in production hell since 2019) to show, since there’s been little to no movement on any of their stories. The godlike Eternals are also unlikely to appear; their planned sequel appears to be dead in the water.

There are, allegedly, still Avengers flying around Earth-616, though we’ve barely seen them these past six years. Shang-Chi’s mid-credits scene shows Simu Liu’s titular hero discussing the alien nature of his weapons, the Ten Rings, with fellow Avengers Wong (Benedict Wong), Captain Marvel, and a suddenly de-powered Hulk. More recently, Thunderbolts* concluded with its titular team rebranding themselves the New Avengers — or “the New Avengerz,” for in-world copyright reasons — while Sam Wilson supposedly leads another group of Avengers elsewhere. In other super-team news, we briefly glimpsed the Fantastic Four’s ship arriving from their universe, probably after their confrontation with Doctor Doom at the end of First Steps.

Doomsday’s gargantuan cast list — announced by way of a staggering number of chairs — reveals that X-Men actors from two decades ago will reprise their roles, likely as part of a separate, endangered universe. Does that mean you’ll need to revisit Fox’s 20-year mutant saga to keep pace? Probably not, if Deadpool & Wolverine is any indication. That movie featured a similar-but-not-quite-the-same version of Jackman’s Logan, one you didn’t need to have seen the previous films to understand.

Should I get my hopes up for Avengers: Doomsday?

Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

In a series where every film once built to a concrete destination, with characters being flung apart and reuniting for each crossover, it’s a bit of a letdown to see how little the overarching narrative now coheres. With Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo returning to helm the next two Avengers films (after Shang Chi’s Destin Daniel Cretton was set to direct The Kang Dynasty), and with Downey Jr. slotted into the role of the major villain, it feels like the MCU is trying desperately to go back to basics, while still charging full steam ahead with its plans to rope in every movie character who’s ever existed under Marvel’s IP. Doomsday and Secret Wars have been pushed back by seven months each, which one hopes will give them time to tie up all the existing, dangling threads seemingly set in motion at random. Will the Avengers recapture the Zeitgeist and reclaim their power as a once-unparalleled Hollywood juggernaut? Only time, and the multiverse, will tell.