The Marvels Director Admits That MCU Continuity Is Getting Hard To Manage
For all the headlines about the Marvel Cinematic Universe of late, surprisingly few have been focused on the franchise's latest film release, "The Marvels" (and those that have focused on the film have been, well, a little troubling). The movie itself acts as a sequel to far more than Brie Larson's initial solo outing as Carol Danvers in 2019's "Captain Marvel," bringing in the grown-up Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) from "WandaVision" and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) from "Ms. Marvel" for a body-switching adventure that also picks up a key story thread involving Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and his newly-revealed Skrull wife Varra (Charlayne Woodard) from "Secret Invasion."
If your head's spinning just after reading that paragraph, you can start to imagine how "The Marvels" director Nia DaCosta felt while she was working on the film. Concerns have been growing of late that the MCU is starting to collapse under the weight of its shared continuity, so much so that even the House of Ideas is actively taking steps to make the franchise more accessible to casual viewers. Of course, that's not really feasible with a film like "The Marvels," which builds directly on the lore established in the aforementioned MCU installments, as well as many of those that came before them. Luckily, the film has an advantage in the sense that its story is designed to be just as confusing to its characters as those watching in the audience.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, DaCosta talked about wanting to put audiences in the heroes' shoes when the body-swapping shenanigans begin in "The Marvels." She also admitted that the sensation of being roundly overwhelmed was one that she knew all too well herself after the challenge of having to manage the MCU's continuity for the film.
'I wanted it to be very subjective'
Viewers got their first taste of the hijinks to come in "The Marvels" with "Ms. Marvel," which ended with Kamala inexplicably changing places with Carol and the latter looking completely perplexed to find herself in a teenager's room with images of her face strewn all over the walls. The trailers for the film similarly show Monica on a mission in outer space when she too gets pulled elsewhere and Kamala — who's understandably baffled to find herself in an astronaut suit floating well outside the Earth's atmosphere — takes her place.
"I definitely wanted, because they're so disoriented with the switching, for people to be inside of their experience," DaCosta explained to GamesRadar+. "I wanted it to be very subjective; and each of them is doing very different things when the switching starts so, yeah, I wanted it to feel as jarring for the audience as it is for them."
The tricky part, however, was figuring out how much of Carol, Monica, and Kamala's backstory to include in the script (which DaCosta wrote with Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik) without confusing audiences any more than they already are. "They have a whole history before this," DaCosta noted. "We have 'Ms. Marvel,' the TV show, 'Captain Marvel,' 'WandaVision,' and it was kind of a constant negotiation to figure out, 'Okay, how much information do people need? It was a real trial and error." And again, that's before accounting for everything that happened to Nick Fury in "Secret Invasion" (although maybe it's for the better if we all just Thanos-snapped that show from our memories and accept that Fury suddenly has a Skrull wife now because, hey, that's how the man rolls).
'It's sort of a sequel to five different things'
Once upon a time, keeping up with the overarching narrative of the MCU was manageable enough, so long as you watched most of the films and had a rough idea of what went down in the ones you skipped. But with so many additional Disney+ series having premiered in the last three years, on top of all the films that have come out over the same period, it's gotten kind of impossible to check out any single entry these days without doing all of your homework ahead of time. At a certain point in developing "The Marvels," even DaCosta realized she had to give up trying to make the film work as a standalone story. In her own words:
"We don't want people to have to watch anything else but, of course, you also have to be honest and be like, 'This is the [33rd] project in this universe. It's sort of a sequel to five different things. So at a certain point, you have to just be like, 'Okay, yeah, there are some things that we can't get in here, but it'll be fun.'"
Case in point: it's hard to tell if DaCosta is just being flippant calling "The Marvels" a sequel to "five different things" or if it actually does serve as a direct follow-up to something else besides "Captain Marvel," "WandaVision," "Ms. Marvel," and "Secret Invasion." Could Kang be involved somehow, making this a sequel to "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" too? Or maybe some other MCU title entirely? Given all the uncertainty, it's little wonder some folks think the MCU should undergo a comic book-style relaunch, lest it unexpectedly collapse under the weight of its current continuity.
"The Marvels" hits theaters on November 10, 2023.