10 HUGE Problems Facing The Future Of The MCU

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most commercially successful movie franchise ever, obliterating the combined box office of even Star Wars, the Wizarding World, and James Bond.

It is nothing short of a pop-culture phenomenon that has grown from the comparative modesty of 2008's Iron Man to a wildly interconnected universe of films and TV.

The ambition is laudable on the part of mega-producer Kevin Feige, even if it's tough to dispute the claim that the MCU's fervor has fallen off significantly in recent years.

The series is far from doomed right now - despite what some might tell you - but it's clear that there are some major creative and business issues which need desperately ironing out if the MCU will ever get back to its level-best.

If Feige and co. press on without addressing these problems, it's reasonable to predict the MCU's pop-culture dominance continuing to ebb as the years pass, even if it's tough to picture a future where the MCU declines enough to be in genuine danger.

All the same, the franchise has a bevy of issues it needs to fix as soon as possible for the sake of its growth and longevity...

There's no denying that Avengers: Endgame marked a tectonic peak for the MCU - it paid off a decade-long arc which began with the first Iron Man, and for many mainstream audiences it basically felt like the de facto end of the franchise in its original iteration.

It shouldn't have been surprising that there was a significant mainstream drop-off after Endgame, which marked a soft reset for the series, and though Spider-Man: No Way Home got the casual butts back in seats, generally speaking the Multiverse Saga has been a wildly mixed affair to date.

Though we recently learned that these new movies are buildings towards two new Avengers films, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars, even the promise of a multiversal battle royale in Secret Wars will struggle to fully replicate Endgame's excitement and success.

The Infinity War-Endgame two-parter felt like such a unique cinematic epoch for not only the MCU but superhero movies as a whole, and just as many sequels struggle to match their predecessors, it too appears that this franchise may forever remain in Endgame's shadow.

And that's not to say that The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars won't be hugely successful, because they likely will be.

But with Hollywood always expecting the next big thing to be a bigger, more lucrative event than what came before, Kevin Feige and co. might be disappointed when they probably fail to capture quite the same popular zeitgeist.

At which point it's also relevant to discuss one of the biggest elephants in the room - the Multiverse Saga's Big Bad...