The Marvel Cinematic Universe is now suffering from the same thing that once made it a success: its continuity of interconnected movies and television shows. Everything has gotten too confusing for the average fan to keep track of, which is why the MCU is getting a much-needed reset after Avengers: Secret Wars. But the popularity of the Marvel Zombies miniseries reveals that Marvel would be better off focusing on more shows and entire movies that ditch existing continuity and are set in their own separate universes.
In the comics, the Marvel Zombies were introduced in Ultimate Fantastic Four before getting their own wildly successful miniseries. In animated form, these creepy cannibals were introduced in the What If…? television show and were recently given their own highly popular miniseries. Freed from the shackles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Marvel Zombies miniseries was free to explore a much darker world in which the Earth’s mightiest heroes had almost entirely been transformed into flesh-eating monsters.
Why Marvel Zombies Works
I wasn’t surprised by how much I enjoyed the miniseries; after all, I was a huge fan of the original Marvel Zombies comics and was even dorky enough to collect their Heroclix figures. Still, it felt refreshing to be genuinely excited for a Marvel project that was doing something different instead of just going through the motions. That’s when it hit me: Marvel Zombies succeeded in large part because nobody working on it had to worry about nearly two decades of MCU continuity.
The heroes of Marvel Zombies
That leads to my simple pitch to Marvel: we need more animated movies and TV shows set in their own continuity. For example, fans loved seeing Blade in Marvel Zombies partially because the character’s solo MCU movie is stuck in perpetual development hell. We may never see Blade in the Marvel Cinematic Universe outside of Wesley Snipes’ iconic cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine. If Marvel can’t figure out how to properly integrate a new version into the MCU, why not just ditch continuity and give us a solo Blade animated movie set in its own universe?
How Marvel Zombies Points The Way To Future Success For Disney
Creating animated works in their own continuity would work wonders for any other comics that would be impossible to adapt into a live-action MCU film. This includes Earth X, Marvel’s dystopian answer to DC’s iconic Kingdom Come. Personally, I’d kill for a TV show or series of movies adapting Age of Apocalypse, the epic alternate universe saga that would otherwise be too expensive to film and too niche for mainstream audiences.
Once Marvel ditches slavish devotion to continuity, it’s possible for writers, directors, and showrunners to simply focus (like Marvel Zombies did) on telling a good story. The sky’s the limit, even with characters that already have a place in the MCU. Just because we’ve already gotten several great Captain America movies (and one really sh***y one) doesn’t mean we can’t get an animated show adapting Ed Brubaker’s iconic Captain America comic run; just because we already had an MCU Civil War movie doesn’t mean we can’t get an animated series fully adapting all of the craziness of the original comic.
If nothing else, the time for Marvel to pivot is now. Once, it was generally accepted by fans that Marvel made the best live-action superhero films and DC made the best animated superhero films and shows. Now, the MCU is faltering while the DCU is reliably churning out live-action hits like Superman and Peacemaker, so if Marvel wants to retain its fans, it’s time to stop focusing so much on continuity and start focusing on creating killer animation.
Otherwise, Marvel may fully become like the stars of its latest show: a shambling shell of its former glory that won’t quite die but will never again truly be alive.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
