At a certain point, the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a lot more compelling than any of the stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe . For me, that point arrived during the end credits of the very first “Iron Man” movie in 2008. For the MCU itself, that point arrived with “Avengers: Endgame” some 11 years later, when the defining mega-franchise of the 21st century reached its most summative moment, smashed through the looking glass so hard that it shattered, and — to an even greater extent than it had thus far — began to re-center the miracle of its own success as its prevailing mythos.
That process inevitably led to the creation of a multiverse, which turned the MCU into a meta-textual jigsaw puzzle that could only be reassembled by looking for stray pieces off-screen. It didn’t take long before the sort of knowledge that used to enhance these movies became required to understand them, as blockbusters like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “ Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ” were premised upon a working familiarity with the kind of corporate mishegoss (e.g.
character rights, streaming ambitions, box office data) that only nerds and shareholders should ever have to know. That pivot felt like a natural response to a moment in which the conversation around the culture had become fully inseparable from the culture itself, but the movies suffered without a grounding force of their own, and the ouroboros of it all triggered a degree of.