Lego Avengers and the Fall of Marvel's Cinematic Universe: "Get a pic, Do a Blog, Heroes are over with!"

A new Lego Marvel game came out in January this year, you might have read a review by some handsome fella…(Niche: Treat Your Geek Issue 13). Playing through that game with nigh on 300 characters (not counting DownLoadable Content) you get some sense of the scale of the Marvel Universe, even without the X-men, Fantastic 4 and Spider-man.

The thing is, having all these characters in one place highlights a few disconnects, a few cracks in Marvel’s grand Cinematic Universe.

The first thing you might notice is the absence of any characters from the Netflix series’. Now I wouldn’t expect the target audience for Jessica Jones to be the same one as a Lego game, but would a few alternative costumes have caused any kind of problem? Marvel may want to keep some separation between its family friendly content and the darker stuff, but how far does that go? If it extends to the movies, what is the point in having a shared universe if these characters can never meet? I’d love to see the Netflix Defenders show up in Infinity War, but I'm starting to think it’s unlikely.

The problem trying to tie the TV shows to the movies extends further… you can see it in the game… Agent Coulson gives you some hints while exploring and there’s a bunch of Agents of SHIELD references. A retired Agent Carter also gives you a good number of missions where she remembers a time when she had that very fine hat, complete with references to her TV show. Some of these are subtle inside jokes, but others could leave players wondering “Are we supposed to know who/what that is?”. This highlights just how much backstory the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) already has, yet so much of it is inaccessible to the movies. People already complain that a slight ex machina plot-hole in Age of Ultron was filled by an episode of Agents of SHIELD.

On a related note, the whole cinematic universe is becoming massive and Marvel is doing a good job spanning different movie genres. But at what point does the whole thing become so wide and varied that fans only watch their favourite characters or favourite genres? I'm sure this is already happening to some degree and it makes the whole team up movie balancing act that much more difficult. When Infinity War begins will movie-goers need to have seen 100 hours of MCU content to make sense of it? Or just the previous Avengers movies?

You’ll also see characters from each of Marvel’s current Disney XD cartoons, it seems to be the reason for including characters such as Red Hulk and A-Bomb, (one or two Guardians of The Galaxy characters also make an appearance but these are comic book versions, not from the film or cartoon) and a few others that seem like slightly odd inclusions even considering the vast comic book history of the Avengers. There are versions of Nova, Luke Cage and Iron Fist with at least one of them seemingly based on the Ultimate Spider-Man version, White Tiger also makes an appearance and even shares a voice actor with her animated counterpart which makes it even stranger that there’s still no Spider-Man, just his team. (UPDATE: A free add on has been released featuring the webbed wonder, it's awesome but then they cant just add DLC to the movies)

The Spider-man problem extends to the movies. Now there is a deal with Sony to bring Spider-man into the MCU but this emphasises the accessibility problem, adding an extra layer of movies for fans to follow and it still remains to be seen how cordoned off the Sony properties will be. There's also the chance that the Sony led films don’t hold up to the appeal and quality of the Marvel Studios movies, alienating more fans from a considerable slice of the shared universe. It’s great to see Spidey amongst other Marvel characters but it’s still to be seen if this partnership will be smooth sailing or not.
What would this mean for other properties? If Fox ever gave up the rights to Fantastic Four and X-men, this could be everything fans have dreamt of but it could make the whole shared universe concept pretty unwieldy. By the time those rights revert to Marvel the superhero movie bubble may even have popped anyway and I’d expect Marvel to start utilising some more obscure properties to branch even further from the so called super hero genre than they already have. I mean we’ve already seen traditional superhero action movies, the big event team ups but also a space opera, some World War II action, a political thriller and a heist movie. Im still hoping for a Thor movie to go high fantasy rather than the Dr Who stylings of Dark World.

The other worry is that with such a large chain of films, is the MCU only as strong as its weakest link? Would one complete stinker of a movie torpedo the entire Universe?

This massive shared universe is a great achievement but as a fan I can see some of the drawbacks and challenges, some of this worries me and I feel like I see the first cracks appearing before the MCU collapses under its own weight.

But then again, from another perspective the MCU is the strongest it has ever been with a massive breadth of characters and some pretty distinctive/unique ones on the way (Black Panther, Dr Strange, Captain Marvel). There’ll be something for everyone spanning several genres, the state of the team-up movies and the universe as a whole may become less important as people focus on the parts they enjoy, and I'm not so sure that’s a bad thing.

And for those that say they are tiring of Marvel's cookie cutter approach... here's a picture of some cookies... all the same shape, but so many delicious flavours.

Macaroons count as cookies right?