The Marvels is the final MCU movie of the year and the last one we’ll see for a while. Disney hinted that Deadpool 3 might not be ready for its May 2024 release date because of the strikes. Plus, we might have to wait until next July or even later to catch Captain America 4 in theaters. But we’re going to at least see The Marvels in theaters before we have to worry about Deadpool, Wolverine, and Brave New World.
That said, we don’t have to wait until November to know what happens in The Marvels, and how the story fits inside the grander scheme of things in the Multiverse Saga. The film’s director Nia DaCosta has just spilled a seemingly innocent The Marvels plot spoiler. But if you’ve seen the leaks, you know how important this detail is. It practically confirms that the plot leak is real.
Before I explain, you should know that massive The Marvels spoilers will follow. Avoid them if you want to be surprised this fall.
If you love Marvel spoilers, you’re used to seeing plot leaks left and right, especially for movies. We can’t confirm them all the time. And for the most part, we have to wait until the first trailer drops to see if what Marvel shot and edited matches the text versions of the leaked plots.
We’ve already seen evidence in the first The Marvels trailer that the plot leak was real. I’m convinced I have a good idea of what happens next, and how The Marvels advances the story of not just the three superheroes that will have to work together in the movie, but the entire Multiverse Saga.
Nia DaCosta’s interview will do the trick if you are still unconvinced. That is, it’ll provide more evidence that The Marvels plot leak was accurate.
The big The Marvels plot leak
I’ll quote the ending part from that The Marvels plot leak in question before looking at the director’s recent interview:
In addition to Dar-Benn destroying planets, her creation of portals makes the universe unstable, increasing the likelihood of an incursion, which is another reason they have to stop her. An incursion happens in the climax – Carol fights Dar-Benn while Monica and Kamala try to fix the incursion. Monica ends up flying through this “tear” in the universe and fixes it on the other side, and ends up stuck in that other universe.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduced incursions. They’ll also be explored in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars. But we have to deal with incursions before then.
I have a feeling that Deadpool 3 will also dabble in incursions, at least a little bit. But The Marvels will surely explore them, according to the plot leak.
Unlike Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) will probably not know what incursions are. Neither Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) nor Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) will. But they’ll figure out that something is wrong.
The proof
Nia DaCosta talked about The Marvels with Total Film Magazine. A copy of that interview is available on Reddit. While the director was careful in her teasers not to spoil the action, she did mention incursions. Here’s what she said:
‘Here’s what I will say about [Dar-Benn’s weapon], which in the comics is called the Universal Weapon,’ adds DaCosta. ‘I would just say, for anyone watching this film, or having expectations, just know that I am deeply devoted to the comics. And so, there’s abways clues there.’
DaCosta is a self-confessed nerd who wrote fan-fiction as a child and who talks of swapping Black Bolt comics with Iman Vellani and bristling at MCU changes to the comic books incursion lore (she says the MCU’s approach to explaining incursions ‘was always very stressful to me.’)
Why would DaCosta talk about incursions if the plot leak wasn’t real? More importantly, why would she be stressed about them unless she had to deal with incursions in The Marvels?
It gets better
The Marvels executive producer Mary Livanos is also featured in the interview. She has a few telling quotes in the story that tease the connection between The Marvels, Kang Dynasty, and Secret Wars.
Livanos also explains how the incursions happen in The Marvels. The producer doesn’t mention incursions but talks about holes in space and time. That’s never a good thing in Marvel’s multiverse:
In Ms. Marvel, we learned that the bangle, paired with some other form of power, can force temporary holes in space and time to lead to somewhere else.
With the power of both bangles, more is definitely possible. And we see the culmination of that over the course of this movie. It definitely leads to plentiful opportunities for the future of the MCU, whatever the Avengers and Secret Wars teams may want to do with them.
The producer added that The Marvels plot deals with “some fluctuations in time and space, “and there’s definite dangers afoot that could affect the multiverse.” Livanos doesn’t mention incursions, but she also teases that the Captain Marvel sequel will tie directly into Avengers 5 and/or Avengers 6.
“Where it all leads is a bit of a spoiler, and exactly how it’ll all pan out in an Avengers movie is currently being figured out right now,” she said. “But we’re definitely ending our characters in places that allow for plentiful opportunity.”
The Marvels plants seeds for future movies, Livanos added, while also taking advantage of “some cool narrative track” that’s been laid out.
I’ll also point out that The Marvels could lead directly to a Multiverse of Madness sequel. And an insider did reveal the overall gist of the Doctor Strange 3 plot that’s supposedly in the making. Spoiler; it’s about fixing incursions and the root causes of these events.
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