Some interesting MCU Phase 4 stuff to unpack.

And before anybody says anything: look, folks, they’ve been setting it up for a bunch of movies now that people besides Thor can wield Mjolnir. As I understand the comics, if they follow them then Jane Foster will eventually become a Valkyrie or something anyway. At any rate, they haven’t even started filming Thor: Love and Thunder; none of this is gonna be written in stone.

Moving on: Black Widow next year, very cool, set in Budapest (my dream of a Rashomon-style movie remains undashed, for now). Chang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings is… all right, I have no idea what that is and why it’d be awesome, but that’s the MCU’s business model right there. I feel much the same about The Eternals (I was a DC kid, remember). Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, on the other hand, is something I can process. Straight-up horror? Fine by me.

Bunch of TV shows, an admission by Feige that they’re planning to use their looted X-Men and Fantastic 4 properties, and… oooh, new Blade planned. But not Wesley Snipes. Which I kind of have to expect. I mean, Snipes would be pushing sixty at that point, and Mahershala Ali is… not. But if they offer Snipes the Whistler role that would be nice.

All in all, nothing really horrible, but this and future Phases of the MCU are clearly going to be more multimedia than before. More TV show on a dedicated streaming channel, fewer movies. It will be interesting to see if this actually works — as would if streaming channels do in general. but if anybody can manage it, it’d be the Mouse.

6 thoughts on “Some interesting MCU Phase 4 stuff to unpack.”

  1. Shang-Chi, not Chang-Chi. I’ve no idea why the linked article gets it wrong on one of the mentions even though the poster has the correct spelling. In any case, any time you see “ten rings” in Marvel, it means that the Mandarin is around somewhere. And this is the REAL Mandarin, not the knock-off joke that they had in Iron Man 3. The kicker is that the organization that kidnapped Tony Stark in the very first Iron Man movie used “Ten Rings” as its moniker. So this is a plot hook that’s been dangling for a bit. Shang-Chi himself is a martial artist who has links to Misty Knight and Colleen Wing in the comic books.

    I never read any of the issues with “Jane Fosthor”. But my understanding is that she was not well received by the majority of the fans. To make matters worse, Natalie Portman’s character was one of the less popular characters in the movies. So I’m not sure that introducing her is such a good idea. Plus, Mjolner’s shattered. So unless they’re going to reforge it…

    While the Eternals largely do their own thing, that isn’t always the case. In particular, the Eternal Sersi moonlights as a party-planning socialite in New York, and was a member of the Avengers for a while. One of her fellow Eternals – Gilgamesh – has also been an Avenger, though I don’t believe he had as prominent of a role on the team.

  2. I heard a rumor that the MCU Fantastic Four would be set in the 1960s, which makes a lot of sense. It wouldn’t surprise me if anything X-Men was delayed until Phase 5, whenever that is, just to let the current X-Men run fade in peoples’ minds a bit.

    1. I keep hoping we get a *good* Fantastic Four movie, and doing a retro-future 1960s environment would .. make that an easier sell.
      .
      Mew

  3. Will Ten Rings finally bring out the real Mandarin who’s a mainstay villain for Iron Man.

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