The MCU Just Entered its Days of Future Past

Here’s something that hasn’t been said in some time: Marvel had a huge weekend.

Predictably, Marvel made waves—and audience raves—in theaters, where the lone MCU movie of 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine, broke R-rated records (and lofty pre-release revenue forecasts) with an opening-weekend windfall pegged at approximately $205 million domestically and $438 million worldwide. Financial firepower of that magnitude was once close to commonplace for Marvel Studios, but 10-figure box-office salvos have been scarce in Phase Four, save for Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). Marvel made a big bet that Deadpool’s first foray into the MCU would be a hit, and that wager worked out.

While making bank at the multiplex, Marvel made headlines in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center, where the studio seized the spotlight at Comic-Con to tease its next few would-be blockbusters. In typical Kevin Feige fashion, Marvel’s Saturday showcase featured a cavalcade of dates, titles, and trailers, but the biggest announcements surrounded plans for the Avengers franchise. In the wake of Jonathan Majors’s December firing from the MCU following his conviction for assault and harassment, Marvel is audibling from Kang the Conqueror to a new adversary for the climax of the Multiverse Saga. Feige is bringing back the Russo brothers—directors of two Captain America films (The Winter Soldier and Civil War) and two Avengers films (Infinity War and Endgame)—to helm the next two Avengers installments, Doomsday (2026) and Secret Wars (2027). And he’s drafting Robert Downey Jr., a.k.a. Iron Man, as the villain, refashioning the MCU’s foundational face as another masked character, Victor von Doom. (Doctor Doom to you, although the ruler of Latveria never spent six years in evil medical school.)

There’s a clear link between the MCU’s present, represented by Deadpool & Wolverine, and its future, as presented at Comic-Con: its past. Having encountered unaccustomed turbulence, in the form of flagging audience support and a nosediving critical reputation, Feige is steering the cinematic Quinjet to a safer, more familiar, and more comfortable cruising altitude. In essence, Marvel is moving forward by looking back—attempting to put its recent history behind it by embracing its more distant history. For better or worse, the MCU is now a nostalgia act.

Deadpool & Wolverine unabashedly draws on Marvel’s movie legacy: It’s about the MCU, more than anything or anyone else. Costar Hugh Jackman, who bid farewell to Wolverine in 2017’s Logan after playing the part for close to 20 years, came out of superhero retirement to wear Wolvy’s (newly comics-accurate) costume again. He was joined by a long list of returning actors making cameos—including MCU star Chris Evans, who reprises his role as Johnny Storm from the mid-2000s Fantastic Four films. (Evans, who appeared at Comic-Con, has also been rumored—both recently and not so recently—to have re-upped with Disney to bring back Cap.)

This approach has paid off, sentimentally and lucratively, with the public, which has rewarded Deadpool & Wolverine with an “A” CinemaScore and an opening take that puts it on track to blow by a billion bucks. But more so than the first two Deadpool films, the third installment has fallen flat with critics—including The Ringer’s Miles Surrey, who labeled it “less of a rallying cry for the superhero genre than a death rattle” and lamented, “it’s not bringing anything new to the table; rather, it’s a film that believes simply bundling familiar IP matters more than doing anything novel with it.”

Marvel will, at least, be doing something novel with a familiar figure by rebooting RDJ as the MCU’s new Big Bad. As with Jackman’s comeback, though, this isn’t an effort to organically continue an ongoing arc or rectify an unsatisfying exit; the deaths of Logan and Tony Stark in Logan and Endgame, respectively, were among the most definitive, fitting, and fulfilling endings in on-screen superhero history. These are primarily moneymaking plays, enabled in both cases by the multiverse, a storytelling hack (and sometimes, a source of hack storytelling) that provides a means of sidestepping narrative consequences and undoing dead ends.

Admittedly, the multiverse isn’t a movie invention. And although the concept didn’t make its MCU debut until 2016, even the pre-multiverse half of the franchise’s history that preceded Doctor Strange was never really new. Marvel’s movie empire was built on the back of a comics corpus that was several decades old before the first Iron Man movie premiered. The films traded on a preexisting fondness for long-iconic characters whose comics incarnations dated back to the early 1960s (Thor, Hawkeye, Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Black Widow, Doctor Strange) or, in Captain America’s case, 1940. In adapting those characters for the screen, the MCU also recycled some of the famous stories that featured them, in modified form. Secret Wars, for instance, is a title lifted from not just one comics series, but several. And there’s ample precedent in print for Iron Man/Doctor Doom identity swaps.

Still, the MCU was its own entity, with a distinct continuity, canon, and cast. And, almost to a fault, its sights were always set on the next actor, the next character, the next story. From Iron Man on, the franchise perfected the art of the post-credits scene, leaving moviegoers buzzing about both the film they’d just seen and the latest conversation-starting stinger that had given them a glimpse of sequels to come. Marvel Studios is still hyping impending releases, of course, but it’s doing so by promising a return to past glories. Even aside from the prominent presences of Giancarlo Esposito, Pedro Pascal, and Harrison Ford—the last of whom is no longer claiming not to know who Red Hulk is—this weekend’s moves were straight out of Star Wars, which has constantly called back to more beloved days during its Disney era.

On some level, Marvel’s pivot to its past is an admission of defeat: a concession that Phases Four and Five haven’t regularly resonated like the three Downey fronted did; that Kang was floundering as a multiversal menace even before Majors made himself unsuitable as a face of the franchise; that the actors and characters tapped to take the places of Downey, Evans, and other MCU stalwarts couldn’t quite fill their boots; and that the younger directors with less mainstream sensibilities who’ve taken cracks at MCU films didn’t deliver as dependably as the Russos.

On Saturday, Feige and Anthony Mackie made sure to mention that the next MCU movie, early 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World—which will feature Tim Blake Nelson playing Samuel Sterns/Leader for the first time since 2008’s The Incredible Hulk—will hearken back in tone to The Winter Soldier. “Marvel has to show that there’s creative life left in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” wrote Susana Polo in her Comic-Con preview for Polygon. To the extent that the company accomplished that goal, it did so by blowing on old embers that it hopes will still smolder.

Maybe this was inevitable, now that the MCU is as old as Return of the Jedi was when The Phantom Menace came out. After all, you have to have history in order for people to pine for it. And 34 films and 10 Marvel Studios series in, the MCU’s back catalog is established and extensive enough for superhero fans to feel nostalgic not just for growing up reading about Stark, Cap, and Co., but for seeing them on screen. Plus, the MCU’s impulse to get the gang back together is par for the course in this era of reboots, one of many manifestations of which is a profusion of old actors appearing (and reappearing) in old franchises. Our culture is consumed with conversations about passing the (human) torch, and with conflicts between rewinding time and “not going back.” Downey first entertained the idea of playing Doctor Doom two decades ago, so no wonder we wound up with RDJ2 (not to be confused with RJD2).

Just because lighting the Jackman, Downey, and Russo signal smacks of creative bankruptcy (with a side of desperation) doesn’t mean people won’t watch the results, or even that the results won’t be worth watching. It would be a bummer if Downey’s renewed commitment to the Marvel machine prevents him from flexing his non-franchise chops, as he did in his Oscar-winning supporting turn in Oppenheimer or his Emmy-nominated performance(s) in The Sympathizer. (I feel less regret about potential interruptions to the kind of franchise-oriented, big-budget fare the Russos have individually or collaboratively written, directed, or produced since Endgame, such as Extraction, The Gray Man, Citadel, and the upcoming The Electric State—though they also helped produce Everything Everywhere All at Once).

But apart from the possible opportunity cost to Downey’s IMDb page, it’s not a tragedy that his work will be back in front of the maximum number of eyeballs. If anything dooms Doctor Doom’s debut, it probably won’t be Downey. One can only imagine the size of the check Disney cut when Feige reached out to Downey, and Downey, presumably, said something like, “You could not live with your own failure. And where did that bring you? Back to me.”

If handled adeptly, the introduction of Tony 2.0—a fancast come to life—could pay dividends not just in the off-screen interest it generates, but also from a storytelling standpoint. Perhaps there’s pathos to uncover in characters confronting a misguided or evil multiversal variant of the ally or mentor they lost.

Maybe more important than the return of any actor or director, though, is the fact that the MCU is working once more with primo source material. James Gunn made movie stars out of the quirky and semi-obscure Guardians of the Galaxy, but that trick proved tough to repeat. After years of trying to make headliners out of newer characters, or those from further down the hero hierarchy—Shang-Chi, Ant-Man, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Monica Rambeau, Echo, the Eternals—Marvel is bringing out the big guns, thanks in part to Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. In Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four (who’ll appear in both upcoming Avengers films, as well as their own), and the X-Men, Marvel is mining fan-favorite IP. Thus, it’s also ripping more pages from its own past playbook and recruiting fan favorites to shepherd that IP through production.

On the sliding timescale of Marvel’s comics, the saga’s formative events—such as the spaceflight that forged the Fantastic Four—occurred approximately 15 years prior to the present day. In real life, the MCU is roughly that old—and Feige is reaching back about that far for its once and future star. Amid the MCU’s crisis on infinite earths (to mix my comics companies), how far will Marvel’s revanchist grasp for its former relevance extend? Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) and Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) haven’t ruled out returns of their own, but when would the creative returns diminish? Will the MCU’s days of future past leave no one behind?

Nostalgia acts can be crowd-pleasers: Billy Joel just sold out his 150th show at the Garden, even though he didn’t play a single song less than 30 years old—and even though he’s hardly released any new songs in that span. (Though he has been covered by the cast of Endgame.) I’m among the millions who’ve gone home happy after hearing him or one of his contemporaries play the hits. Judging by the response so far to Marvel’s more nostalgia-centric projects—the aforementioned No Way Home, X-Men ’97 (not an MCU series, but a well–received one), and Deadpool & Wolverine—that formula may work for the franchise, for now. In the long run, though, a preoccupation with the past could dim the future and become “frustrating and disappointing,” à la Patrick Stewart’s description of his cameo as Charles Xavier in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. To borrow another line from Thanos, “As long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be.”

In response to Downey’s entrance on Saturday, my colleague Van Lathan tweeted from Hall H, “We are back.” For Jackman, Downey, Evans, and the Russos, that’s the literal truth. For Feige, it’s the figurative goal: He’s hoping these reunions will bring back Marvel’s movie mojo too. All that for a drop of (old) blood.