Marvel's Multiverse saga, the ambitious run of over a dozen films and numerous TV shows since Avengers: Endgame seven years ago, was meant to be a bold new chapter. It promised a kaleidoscopic narrative across infinite realities, proving the franchise could regenerate like an interdimensional gecko. But if Marvel Studios is indeed adding new Avengers: Doomsday material to Endgame for its September rerelease, the less successful Multiverse phase now seems like something the studio wants to forget.
Russo's Revelation
Speaking at the Sands International Film Festival in St Andrews, director Joe Russo revealed that Endgame is being recut and rereleased in September with a segue to Doomsday. He stated, "It's critically important to rerelease the movie, and we'll be rereleasing it with footage set in the Doomsday story. It's an opportunity to create a bridge from Endgame to Doomsday in a unique way." This suggests that the most efficient route between the two Avengers films may be via a seven-year narrative flyover, bypassing the congested road of Disney+ side quests.
Questioning the Multiverse
This raises questions: Were viewers mistaken in believing they needed to watch Secret Invasion? Was it unnecessary to retain detailed knowledge of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law or Moon Knight? What about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which spent two hours explaining the multiverse? And Loki, once presented as the sacred text of this era? If fans can now watch Endgame, absorb a few fresh minutes of connective tissue, and stride directly into Doomsday, what do we do with those 25.6 hours of our lives? Not all of it was a waste—WandaVision, Moon Knight, and Loki had their moments—but if Marvel's grand multiversal middle chapter can be reduced to bonus material, it will not be remembered as the sweeping epic it set out to be.
To this Marvel fan, it's fine. The barrel was bound to run dry. The superhero saga was so interconnected that the idea of a perfectly curated spider web of stories seems like an alternate reality. Yet providing a way to jump from Endgame to Doomsday feels like cheating. There's a suspicion that if the cleanest route to Marvel's future skips half its recent past, some of us have spent seven years revising for a cancelled exam.
