What Was Phase Four?
- Glendon Frank
- Aug 1, 2022
- 14 min read
Another year, another San Diego Comic-Con. With it, comes an overwhelmingly large slate of movie announcements.
The last time I really talked about corporate Disney reveals was in this[1] article from about a year and a half ago. Feels like a long time. But at the moment, Disney was mostly focusing on its Disney+ slate, and basically ignoring the films to come. It’s an interesting time to reflect on, all these months later. Season 2 of The Mandalorian was just wrapping up and none of the Marvel shows had been released yet, so we didn’t know what was to come. In fact, nothing from Marvel’s Phase 4 had released yet. I want you to hold onto that thought, because I’m coming back to it. But all that to say, at the time, everyone was fresh-faced and waiting with eager breath for what was to come. There had been a big year-long absence from Marvel, and television seemed like an interesting way to ease audiences back in. In the time since, Marvel has released seven shows and six movies, and now I kind of long for that year where there was nothing. Seven shows and six movies in the past year and a half. That’s intimidating. Black Widow, the first MCU movie since theatres closing, came out only a year and a month ago as of me writing this. After all these releases, you’d think we’d have a solid grasp on what Phase 4 was doing and where we were going, and yet… I really don’t.
The Disney+ stuff was… fine. They started off fairly strong, and at least by the time Falcon and the Winter Soldier wrapped up last May I seemed pretty hopeful for the direction of the platform (at least according to this[2] article I wrote that only 8 people read, apparently). I thought Wandavision used its format pretty creatively and finally gave Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany a platform to act a little bit, and I liked the ambitious themes that Falcon and the Winter Solder was tackling. Neither of those shows ended strongly, but that didn’t yet concern me at the time. Five shows later, plus Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi (why did they not just call Kenobi?), and I’m singing a slightly different tune. None of these shows have been straight-up bad, but very few of them have been genuinely good. Ms. Marvel was pretty delightful and Loki was, shockingly, the strongest these shows have ever been, but other than that I can’t recommend any of this batch of Disney+ shows in good conscious. Even the ones that have shown promise have had that promise squandered by the tight episode structure that leads to hollow character development and rushed finales. Very few of these shows have even approached the thematic potential of the shows I praised in that article; more often than not, we’ve traded out discussions of institutional racism and the power of unprocessed grief with… nostalgia bait and the importance of loving your family. Which isn’t to say I don’t love a nice family-centered adventure, just that nothing is touching on the weight that we started with. I’m glad Hawkeye gets to see his family for Christmas, I’m just not sure why we needed to spend six episodes on it or if we learned anything about him as a person. And that’s maybe the biggest problem – so few of these Disney+ shows feel like television. They’re two-hours movies stretched to six hours but without the plot or the resources to sustain that runtime. Obi-Wan Kenobi could have just been a movie and would have been vastly better for it. The six-episode format is bad, and I’m glad they’re going to start moving away from it with She-Hulk and Daredevil: Born Again.
Of course, turning Disney+ shows into movies would mean cutting into the already-inflated movie slate. Despite my thoughts in December of 2020, the movie has come back, and how! Dune tore through expectations, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once swept up everyone’s attention, and Top Gun: Maverick reminded everyone just how great a good-old-fashioned action flick could be! No, I will not be giving No Way Home any credit here. It’s all Maverick, baby. But that said, there were a lot of Marvel movies released. So many that I haven’t been able to write about all of them – I spent so much time trying to piece together a Multiverse of Madness take that I blinked and Love and Thunder was here and there felt like no point. Marvel has more than made up for its absence in 2020. And at SDCC, they made even bigger promises. Kevin Feige did his whole thing where he put up a big timeline of PNGs and everybody cheered. I don’t particularly care to dig into any of the announcements, because like, none of them really matter right now? I don’t know, in a post-2020 world, I find it hard to get very excited for distant releases. My movie radar is like, a year out, at most (speaking of it’s crazy that Barbie and Oppenheimer don’t come out for a full year. And Dune 2! Move over, Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars, Greta Gerwig is going to invent cinema). There were a couple of neat things in SDCC – mostly that Charlie Cox’s Daredevil is getting a show again and that he’s going to be getting focus in other things too. My boy deserves it. But the most fascinating reveal of the event was the announcement that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will be the final movie of Phase 4. The phase that officially began, once again, a year and a half ago.
That seems… wrong.
Maybe it’s just that Marvel has been doubling down on releases to make up for lost time, but it is still jarring to me that Phase Four consists of seven shows and seven movies all coming out in the span of a little under two years. On one level, the time scale just feels way off. Phase One consisted of five movies released over five years, Phase Two had six films in three years, and Phase Three had eleven films over four years. A big uptick in releases per year, but at least there was still some sense of progression over a matter of real-world time. In the years between the first Ant-Man and Spider-Man: Far From Home, you felt like the world changed, that things had happened. I don’t feel that with Phase Four, and the extremely tight release window doesn’t help. What’s worse, is that Marvel seems intent on keeping this pace – Phase Five is scheduled to start in 2023, and end partway through 2024 to let Fantastic Four usher in Phase Six that November! Like, does this not sound exhausting to you? There are currently six movies slated for Phase Five but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if more were announced. And there are already seven seasons of Disney+ scheduled, with more surely on their way since Armor Wars wasn’t mentioned at all. That’s just… there’s too much there. Sure, in 2014 Marvel started putting out prime-time television, but you were never expected to watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Daredevil to keep up with the movies. And while at the time that felt like a downside, it’s beginning to feel more like a positive. For one, those shows were allowed to run largely at their own pace and live in their own worlds, but more importantly, they didn’t feel like they were inflating the overall watch-time of everything. I still haven’t gotten around to watching Runaways or Cloak and Dagger, but I don’t feel that luxury with any of the Disney+ shows. We’re already seeing that with movies like Multiverse of Madness that basically depend on you having watched Wandavision to get any emotional resonance out of the core plot. This is bad, y’all. And it’s just getting worse.
What really gets me about this pacing is that I don’t quite get what it is we’re rushing for. I had kind of assumed that Phase Four was going to be building up to… something, but with the announcement that it’s ending in November, I find myself asking, what was this Phase? Up until now, the “phase” demarcation has felt like it meant something, even if vaguely. Phase One was about setting up the world, introducing the pieces, and slowly putting them together until they fully connected with The Avengers. Phase Two developed all of those lines, and dug into what a post-Battle of New York looked like. What was a world with superheroes in it? And while each of the stand-alone movies was able to take a look at what these characters individually felt about the changing world (with Stark’s PTSD, Thor and Cap’s mutual indecision of their place), the TV shows were able to expand on how the world itself was reacting. Age of Ultron touched on a lot of those arcs and began shaking up the Avengers as a team, leading towards the fracturing of the next phase, as well as solidifying the Infinity Stones as essential plot items. Phase Three began with that split and followed up with the remaining stones, building up Thanos and the final battle between everyone. Everything felt like it had a purpose, that it was following natural rises and falls. I can’t say that about Phase Four. It would be tempting to say it, like Phase Two, is about exploring the newly-changed world, but… that really isn’t accurate. The movie that most dove into “the Blip” was Far From Home, which is technically a Phase Three movie. Thor and Doctor Strange’s arcs felt largely unaffected by Infinity War and Endgame – Love and Thunder cannot wait to get Thor back into the look he had at the beginning of Ragnarok. Multiverse of Madness pays lip service to the Avengers movies but seems mostly uninterested in actually tackling the trauma the Blip would cause; even Wanda’s arc is now more about her fake kids than the actual husband she lost during the events. Shang-Chi, Eternals, and No Way Home largely don’t mention Thanos, and Black Widow took place before the Blip even happened. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not recovery.
At most, that work went into the Disney+ shows. Wandavision and Hawkeye tackled the grief of a few specific characters in this new world, and the antagonists of Falcon and the Winter Soldier are inspired by Thanos’ goals. But it still feels insubstantial. Shows during Phase Two like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Jessica Jones had prolonged arcs about characters being uncomfortable with the sudden appearance of superheroes all around them. But it seems like the world of the MCU has moved on from the traumatic five-year disappearance of half of their population rather quickly. Characters have issues, but the world at large feels unchanged. That seems like a problem. A full five-year time skip always felt like a risky move, and in hindsight, it looks like a major misstep. In a time with 24 or 13-episode seasons, you can get away with spending time feeling the effects of an event like that in the broader world, but when you only have six episodes, you simply don’t have the time to dawdle. And so I don’t get the sense of what the Blip was, or how it affected people. There’s a vague sense of “trauma” but none of these shows seem actually interested in dealing with that – and in the present state of our world, to me, that’s a problem. You have a perfect chance to genuinely sit with some of the global stress that people have been feeling and try to bring some healing to that. By my count, only Wandavision has even tried – and even then she never recovers, her trauma just villainizes her for the next outting. And part of the issue is that these things are all made by committee years in advance. Very few of them have an actual beating heart to them, and many of the ones that do have that heart locked very far inside, only escaping in fits and starts. I long for the days of Phase One and Two.
The other obvious answer to my question is, “we’re setting up the multiverse!” but that feels equally wrong. We’ve set up the multiverse about four different times now and every one has had fundamentally different rules and mechanics. Multiverse of Madness introduces the idea that when you are dreaming, you are seeing yourself in the multiverse, which is a very fun idea in its own, contained story. But it naturally brings with it a string of questions: does Tom Holland’s Spider-Man dream of being Andrew Garfield, or Tobey Maguire? Did Tony Stark’s nightmares in Iron Man 3 or Age of Ultron come true in other universes? Does John Krasinski’s Mr. Fantastic dream of being played by a more fitting actor? And there are other contradictions that begin cracking at the seams of this franchise. Is the multiverse observed whole-cloth by the Watcher, or sustained and pruned by Kang? Can the multiverse be accessed by magic, a la No Way Home, or is it only through America Chavez’s abilities, as in Multiverse of Madness? Because if the former is true, the plot of the latter feels fairly irrelevant. These all risk delving into the sort of conversations about “plot holes” that risk making movie discussion nigh-irrelevant, but it’s all worth noting to me because it suggests a lack of vision. The MCU isn’t setting up a coherent multiverse, it’s just plugging the multiverse into a bunch of different projects and calling it a day. If the multiverse were being set up as an interesting place to explore, maybe I would be more excited by the direction the MCU is taking, but so far it’s just been a means through which to work in cameos and fan castings. Even in the movie named “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” the most interesting concept they can scrounge up is “well in this universe the red lights mean go.” This is our chief direction for the next five years? It’s not exactly inspiring.
The one thing the MCU had that kept people coming back was the feeling of character consistency, and that to me is the biggest loss of Phase Four. There was a sense that Tony Stark or Steve Rogers had ongoing arcs from movie to movie, that we were discovering shades to these characters and that they were going somewhere. But the last couple of movies have struggled to even maintain that sense of consistency. Doctor Strange was introduced as a pacifist, solving his conflicts without bloodshed; now he is comfortable with killing teenagers if he finds the situation deems it necessary. Thor’s arc has always been about feelings of worthiness, about his relationship to the throne, but his journey in Love and Thunder, while interesting, seems completely divorced from those central characterizations. Peter Parker has actively regressed to the point where all the relationships he had developed over the last several films have been wiped clean. There’s very little sense of development, of progression. I was hopeful that this phase would start pushing boundaries and lean into directorial vision when they started hiring the likes of Chloe Zhao and Sam Raimi, but instead, I get the sense that Marvel is just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, while still trying to maintain a sense of control. Movies can’t be allowed to flop or even to truly be great – they just maintain the same sense of being “fine,” like the MCU is spinning its wheels and not getting anywhere. And so, again, we approach the end of Phase Four, seven movies later, and it doesn’t appear that anything has changed. The world still seems to be recovering from the Blip. None of these entries even really seem to acknowledge the events that have happened on a movie-to-movie basis; the Celestials from Eternals haven’t been mentioned, and Doctor Strange’s interactions with the multiverse in No Way Home have shockingly little bearing on his interactions with the multiverse in his own movie, etc. Nothing is going anywhere and nothing is changing. And it’s disheartening.
However, we’re not quite done yet. Because there is still one final shot at any sort of closure happening for this wave of the MCU. For a while, I truly wasn’t that excited for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I loved the first one a lot, but the production for Wakanda Forever has been something of a disaster. It started with the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman. The studio was forced into making some impossible choices, but the movie was not yet unsalvageable at that point, even with extreme rewrites. Then there were Covid delays, and certain core cast members began to disrupt the production of the film. And all the pieces started coming together for Wakanda Forever to become some sort of disaster. However! At this Disney event, they showed the first trailer for the Black Panther sequel and… oh boy. It looks like something special. This was probably the first Marvel trailer in some time that felt genuinely exciting. It looks gorgeous, and there seems to be some honest weight to this one. Instead of focusing on the future of the Black Panther, the focus seems to be on the future of Wakanda as a whole, which is a cool direction to take things in. Black Panther had an incredible supporting cast and I’m glad they’re getting the chance to shine. And while I don’t know if Wakanda Forever will have the same climactic energy as an Avengers film, there’s still a chance they may resolve a lot of threads here.
For one, this will be our first look at Wakanda post-Infinity War and Endgame. The fight against Thanos had a huge impact on the country, with one major battle staged in the fields outside the main city. All the rest of Phase Four has focused on individuals, but here we’ll see a full county in recovery, watching how they respond to the tragedy. Wakanda was just beginning to expand out into the world when the Snap happened, and it stands to reason that what happens to Wakanda might ripple out. We know that this movie will deal with T’Challa’s death, but we still don’t know how T’Challa died. Presumably, they will say cancer, to be respectful to Chadwick Boseman, but they may line it up with some other major event in the universe. I know there was theorizing before Love and Thunder came out that Jane Foster’s cancer could be tied to the Blip, though it is way easier to do that sort of sci-fi nonsense when it’s a fictional character and not an analogue for a real, beloved person. In truth, I doubt they’ll go in that direction, and Wakanda Forever will probably be better off for it, but it’s a possibility! I think much more relevant to the wider MCU will be the introduction of Namor. Namor is a major player in the comics, the king of Atlantis, and a representative on the comic book Illuminati. He’s headstrong and committed to his cause – think something like Patrick Wilson’s Orm in the Aquaman movie. With the introduction of Namor, we might finally start getting into a string of ocean-related occurrences in the past few movies. Endgame specifically called attention to how the seas were affected by the Blip, Eternals left a Celestial frozen in the water, and it’s not unlikely that Shang-Chi’s Xu Wenwu may have crossed paths with Namor at some point. Speaking of Shang-Chi, the Ten Rings seem to be connected to the tech in Ms. Marvel, and who knows? There could be links to Wakanda or Atlantis. What’s more, the war between Atlantis and Wakanda may be the sort of climactic explosion that Phase Four needs. I think Namor’s entrance is going to tip the scales in some exciting ways.
There’s also a chance that watching Wakanda react to the world around it may bring some sense of thematic cohesion to Phase Four. Take Age of Ultron – Phase Two broadly has a much greater sense of interconnectedness than Phase Four has had, but if there was any doubt, Age of Ultron for all of its flaws manages to make the disparate threads come together under a single core idea. At the end of Iron Man 3, the first entry in Phase Two, Tony Stark narrates that “we create our own demons.” It’s an echo from the beginning of the movie, and a good summary of what is going on with Stark’s journey in that movie. It feels like a strong, stand-alone statement until we get to Age of Ultron, where the titular villain and the creation of Stark states, “everyone creates the thing they dread.” It appears to be a very intentional echo, bookending Phase Two with this “Sins of the Father” notion, and these cycles of pain. Sure enough, the idea reverberates throughout Phase Two; Thor 2 features a villain spurned by the actions of Thor’s ancestors, Captain America: Winter Solder is all about forgotten forces from the past once again rearing their ugly heads. Even Guardians of the Galaxy touches on this through the implied relationships between Thanos, Gamora, and Nebula. Phase Two is all about people dealing with their unresolved demons, with things they helped create, and Age of Ultron does a surprisingly good job at hammering that home. With luck, Wakanda Forever might just shine a light on similar arcs in Phase Four that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe Wakanda Forever will bring some much-needed resolution or thematic resonance to Phase Four. At the very least, I hope it winds up being a strong entry unto itself, that Ryan Coogler is able to make a worthy successor to the first Black Panther and a respectful ode to Chadwick Boseman’s legacy. And I hope Marvel learns a few lessons and, maybe, begins to take its time. I hope it pays attention to its characters again and dives back into what the earlier movies so great. I don’t dislike any of the movies from this phase, but we can be doing so much better. I’d like to see more films with the heart and soul of Shang-Chi, with the vision of Eternals but with the allowance to follow through on the execution. I’m hoping that will be Wakanda Forever.
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