MCU Speculation: The Theme of Phase 4
***UPDATE*** This post has been remade into a video, which you can find here.
On the day this is released, we should be seeing the first episode of Loki, the third project for the Marvel Cinematic Universe not only for Phase 4, but just in 2021 alone. Not long ago I wrote about the themes that act as connective tissue between the movies of the first three phases of the MCU (check that out here), so, after seeing the first two series, I thought it would be fun to guess at what could be this phase’s theme.
Spoilers ahead for WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, as well as talk of rumors for future movies and series.
What Makes Up Phase 4?
WandaVision || The Falcon and the Winter Soldier || Loki || Black Widow
What If…? || Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings || Eternals
Spider-Man: No Way Home || Ms. Marvel || Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Thor: Love and Thunder || Black Panther: Wakanda Forever || The Marvels
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special || Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Hawkeye || She-Hulk || Moon Knight || Blade
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania || I Am Groot || Secret Invasion || Iron Heart
Armor Wars || Fantastic Four
Yeah… It’s a lot.
If we remove all of the Disney+ series and specials, Phase 4 is just as long as Phase 3 with eleven movies planned, but now that they are working television series into their slate, they are up to twenty-five projects within this phase!
I’ve put the movies in bold to try show how things are looking. Also, while there was an attempt to put these in release order, most of the Disney+ series do not have actual release dates yet, so most of them will probably end up moved around before they come out.
But now for a couple of disclaimers:
From what I have seen, I don’t know if it is 100% accurate that all of these series are part of Phase 4, rather than some of them spilling into Phase 5. It seemed as though they hit a point by December of 2020 (when a chunk of these got announced), that they may have been including titles further into the future in order to get everyone excited after the year they had without anything from the MCU. In the end, what phase they fall into doesn’t actually matter in any way outside of more semantic discussions like this one, but because it can affect this topic, it is worth noting.
Also, a couple of the Disney+ series are questionably in canon. What If…? is explicitly out of canon, talking about what could have been. I Am Groot is to be an animated series of Groot on little adventures, and might just be for fun. And The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, while being live action and to be shot during the filming of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, might lean into the holiday special angle and step out of canon. But if any of this will affect whether or not these titles will fit into the theme of Phase 4 remains to be seen. Regardless of how canon they are, it might still make the most sense to keep the singular through-line.
So, let’s get into what that might be.
Possibility #1 – Grief and/or Life After the Blip
WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier hit on these concepts so consistently, that it needs to be at least considered as a possibility. WandaVision is entirely about grief, and how she deals with the death of the man she loves, eventually getting deeper into her grief over her entire family. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not only about Sam and Bucky trying to deal with the loss of Steve.
Connected to this theme of grief is one that has to do with the blip itself (those 5 years where half the population was gone and then suddenly returned). In WandaVision, we get this mostly through Monica’s story. She was one of the people who got blipped, and because of this she missed her mother’s death. This means that even though her mother died years ago, she is living through it as though it just happened, having her connect to Wanda because of it. It also seemed as though she may have been put in charge of SWORD if not for her having been gone. Basically, one of the antagonists of the series may have only risen to power because he was one of the people still around.
Similarly, Karli’s story with the Flag Smashers is about trying to keep the world in the unity it had during the blip. Her entire motivation comes out of what the world was like when half the population was gone. We even have moments like Sam trying to co-sign a loan for his sister but the banker questions why he hadn’t made money for the past five years (which, let’s be real, doesn’t make sense. The banker knows about the blip), connecting even Sam’s personal trouble to these events.
I’m tying these themes together for the purpose of this speculation because of how connected they are in the two series we have seen before, but if either is truly going to be the through-line for the entire phase, it is most likely going to be one or the other. I bring this up, because based off what we know about the next two properties coming out, it is hard to imagine them tying back to the blip.
Loki follows the Loki from Avengers (2012), meaning that he has never been anywhere near the blip. And in fact, Loki dies in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) before the snap ever happened, so he’s really never been affected by it. This could leave things open for maybe bringing this Loki to the present, and so his discovery of his own death could lead to him grieving himself, or even finding his place in this post blip world. Though, it starts to become less obvious how it would all fit in.
Then there is Black Widow, a movie that takes place before Avengers: Infinity War. Again, with it happening before any of the events of the blip, it is hard to see how it could fit in to this theme. That doesn’t make it impossible of course, but, harder to predict. There is a real possibility that it is going to somehow play on audience grief, because we know she dies after this movie, but how exactly this will work, who’s to say?
This is already getting to the point where it is getting deep into speculation on how any of these themes could fit in. There aren’t really natural or obvious ways, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. But, looking deeper into WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Solider, we might see something more likely…
Possibility #2 – Expanding History
There is something else WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier have in common, and that is their treatment of the history of the MCU.
In the penultimate episode of WandaVision, we are introduced to the idea that Wanda seems to have had control over magic before coming into contact with the Mind Stone during the Hydra experiments (the explanation given for her powers in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)). As the episode progresses, we learn about the title of Scarlet Witch, explained by Agnes as being a kind of once-in-a-generation user of chaos magic.
Over in The Falcon and the Winter Solider, the second episode introduces us to Isaiah Bradley, a character who was given the Super Soldier Serum, seemingly just before Steve Rodgers got it. We learn how the thing that made Captain America into Captain Amerca had been tested on Black men. Not only this, but Isaiah tells a story of how the others who were given the serum were captured by the enemy, and that he went against orders to save them. This is identical to the scene in which Steve saves Bucky and the others from being prisoners of war in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), but where Steve was made a hero, Isaiah was thrown in jail.
Both of these series put heavy emphasis on the elements from the MCU’s past that had so far gone unexplored, expanding on the history, and using it to inform what is coming next.
Looking ahead, let’s look at Loki again with this in mind. The entire premise of his series is this version of Loki, either working with or against the Time Variance Agency, a group that monitors the timeline and aims to destroy variances within it. With this being a show that is centred entirely around time travel, it is hard to imagine a world where this doesn’t find ways to give us more insight into the past.
Next up is Black Widow, which – as mentioned above – takes place in the recent past. It looks to be exploring Natasha’s origins and the life she left behind when joining SHIELD. And here we find another situation where a premise like this lends itself easily to this theme.
What If…? is one that I have already brought up as questionable for how much it is considered fitting into the canon, when the entire premise if about reimagining the canon. But even this show fits in perfectly to this concept of history. It is about revisiting moments from the MCU’s past and taking them in new directions. While it probably won’t give insight into deeper lore for the universe, it will show us what could have been if it were different.
And then we reach the movie that really cemented this idea for me: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Even just looking at the title, this movie is showing it is going to be important to recontextualizing the MCU’s past.
Jumping all the way back to the beginning, to the first ever Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Iron Man (2008), Tony Stark is kidnapped by a group known as the Ten Rings, a refence to one of Iron Man’s biggest comic book villains, the Mandarin, who uses ten rings as the source of his power. Jumping ahead to Iron Man 3 (2013), Trevor Slattery is a character who is pretending to be the Mandarin, although that turns out to be a rouse by Aldrich Killian in his attempt to scare the world into giving him power. In Marvel One-Shot: All Hail the King (2014) (a short film included in the Iron Man 3 Blu-ray) it is revealed that the Mandarin really is a character within the MCU, outside of Trevor’s portrayal, who’s not happy about how his name had been used.
And, after that quick MCU history lesson, we get back to Shang-Chi. This upcoming movie is finally showing us the real Mandarin, presumably meaning that it will also give more context to the Ten Rings group that was seen in the first Iron Man.
Continuing on, we have Eternals. This is a movie about a group of immortals who have been on Earth for thousands of years. So much about who these characters are comes down to history and how they connect to it. If we look to Neil Gaiman’s 2006 revival of the Eternals comic, the story revolves around the Eternals needing to get their memories back because they have come to believe they are humans. It is about them learning about their own history and who they are.
At this point, we’re getting into movies and series where we know almost nothing outside of the odd rumors for casting and such, and so it becomes harder to predict how any of this could possibly fit in. But there are still a few ways we can speculate.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is going to include Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus and Jamie Foxx as Electro, reprising their roles from Spider-Man 2 (2004) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) respectively. If all the rumors are to be believed, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield are presumably reprising their roles as Spider-Man from the same movies. If all of this turns out to be true, while it doesn’t necessarily say anything about the main universe of the MCU, it is presumably connecting itself to those older movies as alternate universes within the multiverse. It is almost a meta history being expanded by connecting to other series.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness could be playing with history in the same way, not by specifically dealing with the primary universe within the MCU, but looking more into the history of the multiverse.
For some more rapid-fire speculation for ones we know almost nothing about:
Thor: Love and Thunder could be changing our understanding of Thor’s powers and where they come from when they give those powers to Jane Foster;
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has a name that implies history to some extent, where it could be building out what Wakanda means for the future by cementing what it was in the past;
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 includes a Gamora from the past, which could involve Peter Quill trying to connect to her by getting into their history from between the movies;
Blade is going to bring vampires into the MCU, a thing that will no doubt mean recontextualizing the world to having always had them;
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has cast Kang the Conqueror as its villain, a character who is a time traveler, opening up a lot of possibilities;
Secret Invasion has already been talked about as existing on a smaller scale than the comics, but it is still related to an event that rewrote a lot of the history of the Marvel comics universe by replacing many characters with Skrulls.
So, this is at the point of speculating how about 15 of the 25 upcoming Marvel projects could potentially work into this theme of expanding history. Given the kinds of things that have been happening so far, and the kinds of characters we seem to be getting in the near future, this is looking at least possible. Though, in the end, it is still just speculation, and there are plenty of other directions it may end up going in.
It is also worth saying that if this is in fact the theme around which this phase is built, there is likely going to be a lot of riding the line between expanding the history and retconning it. We are seeing it already, with Wanda’s connection to magic arguable being closer to a retcon and Isaiah’s treatment being closer to just expanding what we know. If this continues to be the way Marvel progresses, it will be interesting to see what it will mean for the context of all the other movies after this phase is done.
Conclusion
If it isn’t clear from the writing here, I feel much more strongly about the second possibility coming true, but the first was so obvious that it needed to at least be mentioned. But that being said, I could be wrong entirely. In a little over a month, we will have seen all of Loki and Black Widow, and either one can offer insight that completely changes how the pattern is forming.
But what do you think? Do either of these sound more likely or even more appealing to you? Or is there another possibility that you’re seeing based off of these first couple peaks into Phase 4?
