I hate the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not all of it – there are redeeming films. Ant-Man actually managed to get a laugh out of me, The Guardians of the Galaxy movies are broadly good, and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was camp mayhem. It’s cool as a concept, but in practice, it’s led to an industrial complex of incredibly mediocre media dominating the box office and spending inordinate amounts of money on movies that don’t deserve them.
My biggest issue is the constant churn of content, and I say content because much of it is lacking in any artistic value whatsoever. If you choose to watch just the ones you’re interested in, the plot starts to get muddled. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man movies are completely incoherent if you watch them as a trilogy. Multiverse of Madness, as much as I like it, is nonsensical without witnessing Wanda Maximoff’s mental decline in WandaVision. The Marvels deals directly with the events of Secret Invasion, WandaVision, and Ms. Marvel. And even the newest Captain America is just a thinly veiled Incredible Hulk sequel.
There Was Almost A Marvel Gaming Universe
I could go on, but I’ll spare myself and you the tedium. At the very least, if you really did want to watch everything the MCU had to offer, you could watch it in the background while doing other, more interesting things. Maybe you could clean your house. You could play Sudoku on your phone. Personally, I binged most of the MCU when I had COVID a few years ago, because I’d run out of video games to play. It’s not riveting or hard to follow, because it’s the lowest common denominator slop out there, and you could probably clear it all in under 150 hours.
You know what would take ages and lots of attention to finish? Games. That’s why I was so appalled at the fact that a Marvel Gaming Universe was once pitched, before the MCU was even a thing. Imagine if every Marvel game ever made was connected instead of being disparate, standalone experiences. Oh, does that sound cool to you? You’re wrong. It’s a horrible idea.
The pitch fell through, and it’s not hard to see why. As Marvel Rivals writer Alex Irvine explained, the main reason the idea was rejected was that it would have to be different from the comics and movies, and whether there’s consistency across all the mediums was a big question mark.
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A Marvel Gaming Universe Would Never Work
But there are so many other reasons this would have been a terrible idea. For one, it would limit developer creativity. The MCU is notorious for hiring early- to mid-career filmmakers who have made standout indie hits, getting them to make Marvel movies, and then stamping out every unique directorial mark they could possibly have added. How did Chloe Zhao, who made the transcendentally good, Oscar-winning Nomadland, also make one of the worst MCU films in Eternals? It boggles the mind. I can’t imagine that studios would fare any differently when working under the Marvel machine, forced to adhere to brand standards and never stray too far from the beaten path.
Then there’s the fact that game development timelines can spin wildly out of hand. One game getting delayed – something that happens very often – can lead to a whole slate of games getting pushed back. This happens with the movies, too, but fixing something in a game can take much longer than film reshoots and re-editing would. In the same vein, games can very easily flop and fail to recoup their budgets, completely bankrupting studios or at the very least ruining their reputations. One game in the franchise doing poorly could be completely disastrous. Look at what happened to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
And of course, there’s the fact that games require much more investment from players. A movie takes a couple of hours to watch and costs the price of a ticket, while triple-A games cost upwards of $60 and require significantly more time and energy to complete. Getting people to invest in a MGU is a significantly bigger task than asking them to watch some shows on a streaming service they might already subscribe to.
Some game universes already exist. Remedy, for example, has linked Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control together, but this universe is completely in the hands of one developer and is alluded to more through references than direct crossovers. Arguably, any game series is kind of a universe if its games are developed by multiple studios, like The Legend of Zelda, but these are original IPs that aren’t under the control of a bigger entity like Marvel.
It’s hard to say if Insomniac’s Wolverine game will intersect with its Spider-Man games, but I can’t imagine it’ll be in any huge way if it does.
A Marvel Gaming Universe simply isn’t feasible, especially not in today’s gaming industry, and frankly, that’s a relief. I’ve already poured too many fevered hours into trying to understand the MCU. I don’t want to do that with video games.
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