The MCU's future is in weird Jack Kirby stuff and pre-made teams like the Guardians
With half of all living things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe now dead thanks to the events of Avengers: Infinity War, and with the surviving Avengers having absolutely no hope of ever undoing that (since it’s not like anybody possess a mystical stone with time powers), Marvel Studios is going to have to dig pretty deep in the well for its post-Avengers: Endgame movies. We were surprised to learn in April of last year that studio head Kevin Feige was considering a movie based around The Eternals, an obscure line of space-based characters that Jack Kirby came up with in the ‘70s, and we were similarly surprised when Feige actually hired a couple of writers to make a script for an Eternals movie with some “Game Of Thrones-style cosmic powerplays.”
Now, contrary to the understandable assumption that Marvel Studios is just making up the post-Thanos roadmap as it goes along, Feige has indicated in a new interview with Collider that he actually does have some kind of plan here. For one thing, he says that making room for returning characters is “certainly something we’re gonna do and want to do,” but the MCU’s focus in its next phase will be “introducing characters that the majority of the world has never heard of.” He offers up the Guardians Of The Galaxy and The Avengers as examples of Marvel Studios having pulled this off before, even though cool Marvel fans had definitely known about Rocket Raccoon for years and plenty of people knew that the Avengers were hanging around somewhere while they read X-Men comics.
Speaking of Guardians, Feige said Marvel Studios would like to do more movies that start off as ensemble stories like that one did, rather than introducing a bunch of solo movies that eventually converge into big events like Avengers. He doesn’t necessarily want to match up with the tone of Guardians, but he apparently likes the idea of throwing together big groups of characters that people don’t know—like, say, The Eternals—to quickly and efficiently expand the reachers of the MCU. Plus, as Feige told Collider, Jack Kirby created a whole bunch of crazy space shit that people don’t really know about, so there’s tons of stuff for Marvel to revive with a big ensemble movie.