Why a Year Without Marvel Movies Was a Good Thing
By: Max Borg
Tags: Film, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios, Disney

There were no Marvel Studios titles throughout 2020, and that was quite all right.

Credit: The Walt Disney Company

Of all its many weird characteristics, the year 2020 will be remembered by some as being the one without any Marvel movies. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, in that there was one Marvel adaptation that did make it to the silver screen: The New Mutants, the final installment in what used to be 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise, which came and went in theaters in late August.

It’s also not entirely accurate to say there were no Marvel Cinematic Universe titles, be it on the big or small screen: though its canonicity has been a sore subject among fans, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. graced us with its final season during the summer months. Additionally, Helstrom debuted on Hulu, failing to make much of an impression and effectively sealing the fate of Marvel Television.

2020 was, however, the first year since 2009 to not feature a single Marvel Studios production, due to the current health crisis: Black Widow and Eternals, originally slated for May and November debuts in cinemas, were pushed back an entire year (with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings taking a vacated July 2021 slot). And while it was widely assumed that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision would usher in the tail end of the year on Disney+, the two miniseries are now scheduled for the first half of 2021.

Credit: The Walt Disney Company

This was not by design, and yet it should have been: after the mammoth year that was 2019, the franchise needed a break. And so did we. It’s not entirely dissimilar to what happened with Star Wars: it wasn’t really planned that way (the “one film a year” strategy went on hiatus after the box office failure of Solo), but the current four-year gap between movies is exactly what that universe needed, having completed the Skywalker Saga.

Granted, The Mandalorian is still happening on Disney+, and so are other projects (the recent final season of The Clone Wars, an upcoming spin-off called The Bad Batch and miniseries focusing on Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan Kenobi, among others), but those are largely self-contained and feature — or will feature — few, if any, major legacy characters.

That is not the case with the upcoming Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: starting on January 15, and barring changes to the schedule, we will have new Marvel Studios content roughly every month, and the first title to not focus on established franchise players — the aforementioned Shang-Chi — won’t arrive until July. So a bit of a break in between Phases was, with hindsight, just what we needed.

I mean, think about it: Avengers: Endgame, released in May 2019 (which now feels like a lifetime ago), wasn’t just the end of Phase Three; it closed the book on an entire era of the franchise.

As suggested by the title, it was the final Avengers movie, at least as far as the original team is concerned: Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff died, Steve Rogers chose to retire, and Thor hitched a ride with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Clint Barton is set to pass the torch to Kate Bishop, and Bruce Banner’s on-screen future has always been murky due to external circumstances (Universal gets to call dibs on the distribution of any solo films).

It was the culmination of ten years’ worth of storytelling, with a coda in the shape of Spider-Man: Far From Home two months later, showing the first signs of how the world would move on without the original Avengers. And this doesn’t just apply to the in-universe world, but to ours as well. Save for Black Widow (a prequel which is also said to feature a Stark cameo via repurposed old footage), we are unlikely to see any of the Earth-based original Avengers on the big screen again.

Credit: The Walt Disney Company

As such, an entire calendar year to let that sink in was far from a bad idea, even though it took a pandemic to actually implement it.

And while a certain section of film fandom went on about how much they missed the MCU, the hiatus also gave other forms of cinema some much needed breathing room: whether it was the infuriating third act of Antebellum, the controversy surrounding PVOD and streaming releases, the uproar over certain Netflix releases (ridiculous in any case, but for different reasons) or the much-discussed status of Tenet as the savior of movie theaters, large chunks of the discourse were Marvel-free.

Sure, it will be nice to see these characters again, but it was also good that we actually got the time to properly miss them. A luxury that is unlikely to be granted going forward, based on the sheer amount of announcements until 2023.