I’m not sure if you saw it, but Disney+ has just made Twitter compl🎐etely unusable. On one hand, this is brilliant. Twitter is a hellsite and the less usable it is, the less time I waste doomscrolling through posts about NFTs and which anime character you want to… let’s say marry to keep this article relatively PG. On the other, the reason Twitter is currently unusable is because Disney has announced the next 57 million Marvel projects in one fell swoop.
Please, Marvel. Stop the MCU. I want to get off.
I am a very casual MCU enjoyer. Earlier this week, I went to see Eternals and thought it was outstanding - I even wrote about how its brilliantly꧟ ꩵdiverse cast makes it the most true-to-life superhero movie ever made. I’m also a big fan of Shang-Chi and Thor: Ragnarok, and I was devastated the day I found out The Punisher wasn’t getting a third season - Matt Murdock is great, but nobody does it like Frank Castle. [Editor’s note: Cian is such a casual fan that I, another editor ꧅at the site, now have to inform him that neither The Punisher nor Matt Murdock are technically part of the MCU.]
Wha🃏t I mean to say is that I like the MCU. I’m not as invested in it as a lot o꧂f people - particularly people who ‘post’ - but it’s fine. I enjoy watching it on a big screen with a bigger box of popcorn. It makes me laugh a lot and care a decentish amount. But seriously - what the fuck just happened? I know I said I’d keep this relatively PG, but also: what?
I was going to count the amount of new TV shows Disney announced on Twitter but then realised that doing pretty much anything else a human being is capabl🙈e of doing would be a more worthwhile use of the finite time we have in this mortal realm. As a matter of fact, Twitter actually pooed itself when I tried to scroll through the thread - if it were made of water, it would outrank the Nile as the longest river on Earth. I don’t know what kind of things they get up to at Marvel Studios, but I’m starting to think that if even one person is working on all of these projects, it has to be the biggest employer in the world.
The MCU’s interconnectedness is obviously one of its biggest selling points. We’re currently three films into Phase Four and can expect to see shit well ꧃and truly hit the fan when Spider-Man: No Way Home launches in cinemas next month. Phase Four officially made TV shows part of the MCU too - there have been four of them so far this year - and as if the MCU wasn’t already sufficiently convoluted, we’re all about to witness the introduction of the multiverse, which basically means 43 iterations of Thanos can click their fingers to the mixtapes of 187 different versions of Star-Lord. As someone who mainly likes Marvel movies that are funny (Thor: Ragnarok), human (Shang-Chi), or mature (Eternals), this idea is already annoying to me before it’s even materialised.
Still, I will watch and almost definitely enjoy Spider-Man and all the various MCU films that follow it. The problem, then, is how numerous said various MCU films enꩲd up becoming. If Disney’s Twitter account is anything to go by, there are now several million seasons’ worth of Marvel content scheduled to come out at some point in the next eight seconds. If you don’t watch them, the twist in Phase 26’s “Captain America: The Dead Never Sleep” won’t quite land. Personally, I just don’t see how “Don’t blink a single time, 🎃ever!” is a compelling reason to follow a story.
It’s worth noting that this is coming from a massive J.R.R. Tolkien fan, by which I mean I know everything about how a detached branch from the westernmost tree i🌸n Mirkwood actually ended up being used to make the doors Aragorn pushes open in Helm’s Deep. That’s not true, but did you believe it for a second? The Lord of the Rings and the rest of Tolkien’s collected works are almost as convoluted as Kingdom Hearts. Somehow, Disney has come up with a concept even more convoluted than that - a game where Mickey Mouse is able to have a scrap with Sephiroth - by announcing a slate of approximately 18 trillion upcoming TV shows that are all apparently telling the same story.
If you’re excited for all of these Marvel projects, more power to you. For me, however, that Twitter thread is the single greatest example of prime Johnny Silve💃rhand meme material I’ve ever seen.
Marvel fans - I ꦕain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorryꦦ that happened.
