The Marvel Cinematic Universe

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

There has always been love for comic books within America’s vast culture. Superheroes and supervillains filled the panels and attracted countless children in their silly adventures and endings, which are now considered cliche. Among the biggest of these comic book franchises is Marvel, which has formed into a large movie franchise that has kickstarted America’s new found love for superheroes on the big, and little, screen.

Since the release of Iron Man in 2010, Marvel has slowly been working its way to the epic showdown during the newest movie Avengers: Infinity War, which will bring all the the fan favorite characters together and may result in a death or two.

Marvel currently consists of three phases, the third of which will include Infinity War. Phase three begins right after the events from Avengers: Age of Ultron with Captain America Civil War and leads up to Avengers 4, the current title for the proposed sequel to Avengers: Infinity War. The phase introduced new characters (Peter Parker, Dr. Steven Strange, T’Challa, etc) all of whom will be reintroduced in the phase’s finale, which will finally see the common enemy of all the movies since midway through phase two, Thanos, get exactly what he wants; all six infinity stones.

The stones are immensely powerful objects that are tied to different aspects of the universe such as “mind,” “space,” “time,” etc. They were first introduced in Captain America: The First Avenger in the form of the Tesseract, the “space” stone. The Tesseract was again introduced in the first Avengers film in the hands of the movie’s villain, Loki. Several of these stones were introduced throughout the rest of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of which lead to the birth of one of the newest Avengers: Vision. Vision was first introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron and was created by the movie’s villain, Ultron, and a scientist. Imbued with the mind stone, Vision was able to become sentient and turned on his creator to join the Avengers team.

Despite the big schedule set out by the creators of Marvel, there seems to be a little bit of a superhero fatigue. With what seems like hundreds of movies from Marvel and the equal amounts from their rival comic studies, DC and Sony, viewers of these movies can sometimes lose interest with the somewhat repeat plots the stories bring. However, in an interview with Vogue, Kevin Feige, Marvel’s studio head, delivered an answer.

“For years, predating the history of Marvel Studios itself, people asked me about superhero fatigue and if it was a fad or a phase,” Feige said. “I say, if they’re all different, if they’re all special, nobody will get tired of these things before we at Marvel Studios will, since we live and breathe these things 24 hours a day. You make films like Thor: Ragnarok, like Homecoming, like Guardians of the Galaxy, certainly like Panther, and the upcoming Infinity War to keep it interesting and change it up.

“And we will continue to do that.”

All in all, the several years of Marvel movies will finally come to an end of a chapter with the release of Avengers: Infinity War and later Avengers 4, leading up to it’s new ray of movies in Phase 4.