In light of the release today of the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer, Alasdair Stuart indulges in some rampant speculation about the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Spoilers, inevitably, for Avengers: Endgame (and that trailer)…

I finally saw Endgame last night and there’s a vast amount of… well… everything in there. Every character gets a moment, every primary Avenger gets a wildly different and mostly very successful send off and Valkyrie kills a space whale from the back of her flying horse. It is a good time. A very good time in fact. Even if you will basically ugly cry for the back thirty minutes.

Also, I suspect it’s set up a lot of future stuff. Here’s what:

 

Loki

The nature of time travel in Endgame is such that, by and large, none of the events caused by the contemporary Avengers travelling back to the past have any consequences. Captain America doesn’t remember fighting himself. There isn’t footage of the Hulk flattening a suspiciously Stark-looking SHIELD agent. Crossbones’ unit don’t work off the assumption that Captain America is working for HYDRA. The stones are returned, the timelines created by them are truncated and disappear.

Except…

There is the small manner of Loki, a man whose relationship with mortality has always been negotiable even by the usual Asgardian standard. We see him steal the Tesseract and disappear and while time is reset, there is also the Loki TV show. Word is that will see Loki travelling through human history, indirectly changing things for the better. Sort of Quantum Leap but with much sharper cheekbones and added sociopathy. It would make perfect sense for this to be what happens to him after he makes his escape. Given the Tesseract is at Camp LeHigh by the 1970s (and that he has to come to Earth to steal it in 2012), the show even has a built in ending.

Hawkeye

On any list which WandaVision isn’t on, this would be the weirdest show. Hawkeye has a really rough five years in Endgame, coping with the loss of his family by murdering a Whole Bunch of criminals and getting a profoundly bad tattoo. While his family return at the end, he also has to deal with the fact his best friend sacrificed herself for him.

I honestly don’t know how this would work. If you take Clint’s family off the table again then its cheapened. If you don’t, then he’s… Clint Barton, Crime Fighting Family Man. Actually that might be pretty fun, especially if, as hinted, he’s training his daughter in the family business. Of course I could be magnificently wrong about this and it’s going to be an adaptation of the David Aja/Matt Fraction comic run, that would be fine too. Interestingly, word has recently surfaced that this may be Clint training Kate Bishop as his replacement, which would also be top fun.

WandaVision

This is one of the weirdest ones as the Vision is still extremely dead as Endgame finishes. But it’s also implied, heavily, that Wanda is in communication with him somehow. That has some interesting implications for how dead he and Nat really are and we’ll get to Agent Romanov in a second. Regardless, given the show’s odd title, and recent comments from Elizabeth Olsen about it being a twisted sit-com of sorts, this one has the potential to be the darkest, and weirdest, show of the bunch.

Falcon & The Winter Soldier

If the Avengers are going to continue to exist in some form in the MCU then this show is going to be the trailhead for their Phase IV stories. Not just because of Sam’s new job (or the possibility of Old Man Rogers popping in for a visit), but because Sam and Bucky are now two of the most experienced superheroes left standing. Plus there’s huge dramatic potential to be mined in how Sam settles into the role of Cap and how Bucky fits in around that. If WandaVision is the weirdest, then this feels like it could be the most intensive, at least for the MCU meta narrative.

Doctor Strange 2

This is a small but pretty significant one. Strange is directly responsible for Tony making the choice he does. We’re explicitly shown the two men sharing a glance before Tony’s final ploy and it’s notable that Strange is very quiet after this. It’s also notable that judging by the new trailer, Far From Home, Tony is going to cast a very long shadow.

There’s an opportunity here to do something very interesting, and arguably necessary with Strange as a result; humanise him. Strange, like Ant-Man, suffered very badly from ‘white guy begins’ syndrome in his original movie. He’s awesome, he has man pain, his man pain makes him more awesome, he wins, the end. I’m being deliberately unfair, because there’s a lot more going in that movie but it’s also a valid point. Strange struggling to deal with guilt has a lot of potential to expand and ground the character.

Asguardians of the Galaxy

It’s excellent news James Gunn is back. It’s even more excellent news that Thor is now on the team. The fact that Peter Quill is still an emotionally stunted man child after four movies? Not good news at all.

It’s very difficult to not look at the way Quill is dunked on in Endgame as a consequence of Chris Pratt’s newly apparent right wing tendencies. He’s certainly much less instantly likeable than he was and that’s a real shame. What’s a more pressing concern is that Quill is still Quill. He’s learned Nothing. That can’t last and unless Asguardians of the Galaxy finally forces him, and Pratt, to grow, then Thor won’t need a knife fight to take control of the group.

Black Widow

On the one hand, Endgame goes out of its way to tell us Widow is dead and can’t be brought back. She and Gamora are the only two people who don’t return because they’re the only two sacrificed to the Soul Stone. We also know Professor Hulk (who was brilliant by the way) tried to bring her back and failed.

On the other (less gauntleted) hand, this solo movie. A movie that in some form pre-dates the MCU, given the original idea was a Widow movie would kick things off before Iron Man hit the fast track. There’s been a lot of talk about this being her origin story, and the fact she discovers her father’s name on Vormir speaks to that. Plus, David Harbour being on the verge of joining the cast says either ‘dogged CIA agent’ or ‘extremely dead Romanov father’ to me. But why do an origin story for a dead character? Especially one who has a (relatively) well documented past? Unless it sets up something else. Or unless death, for this character, is negotiable. I’m not saying Nat’s been a Skrull for 22 movies. I am saying there may very well be a lot more going on here.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

The newly released Far From Home trailer also makes it clear that Endgame is going to have very long term repercussions. We already know Peter and his entire class were snapped out of existence and are stumbling, uncertain, into the badly traumatized world of 2023. We also know from this trailer that; Peter is absolutely crushed by Tony’s death as is Happy. But the further we get into the trailer the more interesting things we find out. If Mysterio is telling the truth about being from another dimension then that’s how you get the X-Men in play for sure. Likewise, the shots of Peter playing with Tony’s old holographic Design rig and wearing Tony’s Infinity War sunglasses suggest Mr Stark may be taking a more direct role in the movie than we thought. In recent days there’s been rumours of both Downey Jr and Evans making regular cameos in future movies. And Peter does have a spiffy new suit in need of a new OS…

 

This is, of course, rampant speculation but we won’t have to wait too long for specifics. I’m willing to bet at least some of these shows will be getting trailers at SDCC this year. Regardless, while Endgame brings the main plot in to land and Far From Home closes Phase III they both do a lot of work setting up what comes next. Personally? My money’s on the X-Men and a much-less-dead than thought Black Widow. I’m looking forward to finding out if I’m right.