- Avengers: Endgame is the best Marvel movie to date, but its success is directly related to the way Marvel built its MCU, weaving a complex story with the help of 21 films that were launched over a decade.
- It’ll take years for Marvel to replicate the success of Endgame, and hope to outdo it with an even bigger Avengers sequel.
- The directors of Endgame know what storyline could make an even bigger movie than Endgame, and it’s the story that’s already rumored to be in the works for the MCU.
There’s no question that Avengers: Endgame is the best movie Marvel made so far. The MCU title shattered numerous records at the box office, earning nearly $3 billion from ticket sales alone. But Endgame wouldn’t have been possible without the 21 films that preceded it, which helped Marvel set in place the various pieces of the puzzle that made Endgame a must-watch movie. It’s not just the superheroes and villains that the audience got to meet over a decade, but also the story that Marvel weaved over the years, interconnecting all those seemingly separate stories.
That’s why we can’t expect an Endgame-like anytime soon. Marvel has to rebuild its universe now that it has retired three fan-favorite superheroes and create another major storyline to replace the Infinity Saga that concluded with Far From Home last year. MCU Phase 4 doesn’t even have an Avengers 5 sequel in it because Marvel will introduce new heroes and big villains in this stage, as well as the building blocks for the next massive story. The Russo brothers may be done with the MCU for the time being, but they know exactly what kind of storyline would turn a future Avengers installment into an even bigger success than Endgame.
Talking to BroBibgle, Joe and Anthony Russo explained, yet again, that the Avengers story that would bring them back to the MCU would have to be Secret Wars. That’s hardly surprising considering that many expect Marvel to bring Secret Wars to the MCU after the Infinity Saga. In fact, Secret Wars may give Marvel the perfect opportunity to bring back Iron Man as well as other Marvel characters who died or retired without actually reviving anyone or without ruining Endgame. We’ve already explained how Marvel has already conditioned us to accept versions of the heroes that aren’t exactly the characters we grew to love. The new Loki and Gamora are perfect examples of that. The originals died in Infinity War, and now we’re getting to explore different versions of these two key players.
Getting back to the Russos, it’s not the first time that the Russos said the Secret Wars story arc would be the kind of Marvel adventure that would bring them back to the MCU. They further explain what makes the storyline so appealing.
“You know, I read that when I was 10 or 11, and it was the scale of getting all of the heroes together,” Joe Russo said. “It was one of the first major books to do that — that was really event-storytelling to me at its finest. And what happens when you put all of those personalities together. I also like the idea of villains having to team up with heroes. [Anthony] and I like complicated relationships between heroes and villains, we like villains who believe they’re heroes in their own stories, so it’s all sort of built into this notion of Secret Wars. To execute something on the scale of the Infinity War was directly related to the dream of Secret Wars, which is even larger in scale.”
“It would be the biggest movie you could possibly imagine, so that’s what really excites us about the story — the ambition of it is even bigger than the ambition of the Infinity Saga,” Anthony Russo added.
That’s not a confirmation that Secret Wars is going to be the next MCU story. Nor is it a given that the Russos would be hired to make the upcoming Endgame-like movie several years from now. But once the MCU gets underway, once the Fantastic Four and X-Men come out of hiding, once we get to see the Avengers 5 soft reboot of the franchise, once we get to meet the new villains, we might understand where this is all going.
