MCU Project: Crossovers
Erik Bates | December 26, 2021
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Matthew Preston | December 26, 2021
Agree with Erik. MCU only. I'm sure that as we go through this, certain viewings may spark my interest in going back to watch other non-MCU titles. That would be on my own time though.
Evie Totty | December 27, 2021
MCU only
Scott Hardie | December 31, 2021
"MCU only" it is. I haven't heard from any other non-TC folks beyond the first person who inspired this conversation. Their position was that if we're going to watch everything, let's do it properly and really watch everything, and I don't disagree with that principle, but logistically it makes sense to draw the line here. As Matthew said, anyone who wants to watch additional titles can go for it. Thank you all for the feedback!
Evie Totty | January 3, 2022
Aw man - just realized Legion isn't MCU. I still need to watch the last season!
Evie Totty | January 3, 2022
Actually - I noticed we are watching stuff not related to the MCU (most notably the Netflix shows) and I just skimmed what we are "not watching" and I guess I don't understand why we aren't watching Legion or The Gifted because while I was trying to find out when Paramount ended and Disney began officially, I read that they were produced by Fox in association with Marvel Television.
Is this because they were Fox properties at the time? (And I guess that is also why none of the X-Men titles are included, and likely the source of your original conversation with the unnamed member).
Scott Hardie | January 3, 2022
It's been hotly debated for years whether the Netflix shows take place in the MCU. There are endless opinions and articles online to cite in support of any position in the debate. I have an opinion too (they very much are MCU), but I'm not interested in debating their canonicity in 2022, because that argument is endless and unresolvable without a definitive and unambiguous statement from the company. When the Netflix shows were originally announced years ago, they were said to be part of the MCU, and for me that's still good enough to count them now.
On the other hand, Legion and The Gifted were produced as part of the separate X-Men film universe, albeit different timelines after Days of Future Past, according to 20th Century Fox statements at the time. (I can't help but notice that each series has an appearance by a major X-Men character who was played by a different and quite famous actor in the movies.) Marvel used to get a production credit for any movie using their characters, which is why their company logo at the beginning of Fox films was different than the one on Marvel's own projects. I see no reason to include these shows as part of the MCU unless I missed something.
Evie Totty | January 3, 2022
Right - perhaps the Netflix shows were a bad example. I see Runaways and Cloak and Dagger in the list of checkboxes, but I haven't looked through the complete list closely.
Basically, I suppose my definition of what the MCU is is different (that each show / film is connected in some way).
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter though, as I'm not trying to start an argument or whatever :D
Scott Hardie | January 3, 2022
Oh! That's easy. Runaways and Cloak & Dagger are both MCU shows. Like the Netflix shows, they were intended to interlink with the rest of the universe, but the connections wound up flowing in one direction only. (There's talk of an object in WandaVision rendering them non-canon, but I think that's premature. Marvel has repaired canonical conflicts before, such as in Hela's visit to the throne room in Thor: Ragnarok.)
I hear you about not wanting to argue! This talk of what counts and what doesn't can become maddening. I have friends who have ventured deep into the Star Wars extended canon though various books and video games and so on, and they argue until they're exhausted about what counts and what doesn't, based on something George Lucas supposedly said in an interview once that can't be found online now, or based on a Disney company edict that they have since violated themselves, and on and on and on forever. I was wary of simply writing my last comment at all, lest I approach that void myself. :-)
Evie Totty | January 3, 2022
Hah! Yeah - more important things to worry about, my friend.
Scott Hardie | October 25, 2023
I'm not interested in debating [...] canonicity in 2022, because that argument is endless and unresolvable without a definitive and unambiguous statement from the company.I wrote that sentence almost two years ago, because the evidence cited by fans that certain MCU titles had been de-canonized were *not* definitive: Stuff like a prop having a different appearance in a later show, or references to characters and events only flowing in one direction, or Disney+ menus not promoting old shows, or what is widely assumed to be a bad relationship between Kevin Feige and the old Marvel Television division that made the early MCU shows. Those were guesses by fans, and what I wanted was an answer by the company.
Well, Marvel has just made as close to an official statement as I can foresee it making. It collaborated with Penguin Random House to publish a new book that provides an official and complete timeline of the MCU. No TV series prior to WandaVision is mentioned in the book, nor are any of the short films. And this isn't a matter of only counting Marvel Studios properties in a book branded with their logo, since the book incorporates the three Spider-Man films made by Sony and the Hulk film released by Universal, Edward Norton and all, which they have a spotty history of including.
That's what I've been waiting for. I'm disappointed in the outcome, since I love the early shows, warts and all, and I don't think that the Disney+ shows are any better on the whole, and also since I have a general dislike for revisionism. (Start pulling threads and you don't stop. Consider Star Wars's endless canon overhauls.) But I do accept that it's the official position.
So, what of our MCU Project, which is still chugging along to this day, albeit a bit behind schedule? Firstly, I don't want to drop shows we're already in the middle of watching, of which there are currently five, because I think they're all worth finishing. Secondly, what originally inspired this project was that friends had recommended AOS to me for years, and I wanted to watch it in sequence with other MCU titles so that I could understand its many subtle connections. And I have really enjoyed that part of the project, like this shot from AOS that combines events from three different shows in one image. That's fun! Thirdly, I've picked up on a lot more thematic richness and philosophical food-for-thought by watching these shows so closely together, which has turned out to be my favorite part. I've given more consideration to morality and storytelling in the last two years than I have since college. Thus, my preference would be to keep going with the same schedule, watching every title that was ever MCU at some point. Unless there are objections, we'll do that.
I'm grateful to have this project. There have been some fun discussions, most of all with Erik as he and I try to keep up with the schedule to this day, and I look forward to more good conversation until the project eventually catches up to the present day. Who knows if more titles will be de-canonized by then? (It'd be Secret Invasion, right?)
Scott Hardie | October 25, 2023
Oh, also, one more reason why I'm not a fan of throwing out the old shows: It allows the company to cheat the people who make the shows out of pay and benefits.
Erik Bates | October 25, 2023
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Erik Bates | October 26, 2023
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Erik Bates | October 26, 2023
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Scott Hardie | October 29, 2023
Ha! That's a fun idea. Not many actors have played themselves in the MCU (with one big humorous exception that I won't spoil), but I bet there's a similar conflict in there somewhere.
To expand on what you said about the Sokovia Accords, it bugs me when fans say that the canonical connections were one-way only, as in, the old TV shows referenced the movies but not the other way around, which is false. Take Age of Ultron as one of several examples: The attack on the Hydra castle at the beginning was directly set up by the preceding episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. wherein the agents found the location of the stolen scepter. And upon the appearance of the Helicarrier near the end, Nick Fury says, "I pulled her out of mothballs with a couple of old friends," referring to the actions of Phil Coulson and Maria Hill on that series. Plus there's the fact that the S.H.I.E.L.D. that is depicted participating in the Sokovian rescue is Coulson's revived agency from TV, not the movie version that was dismantled at the end of The Winter Soldier. :-\ I've read numerous interviews over the years with Marvel Studios VIPs who said that they couldn't assume that the movie audience had kept up with the shows, so they were wary of doing things like showing Phil Coulson again and trying to summarize the long story of how he was resurrected, thus leaving him out or referencing him indirectly was merely a time-saver rather than a deliberate revision to TV canon, but now this book makes the historical revisions official.
...Official, but not final. My concern is that either we're going to have a series of official overhauls to the canon, à la the Star Wars universe (especially if the creative well runs dry and they decide to reboot with the original Avengers), or that latter creative decision-makers are going to slip in so many references to old non-canon material as to effectively re-canonize it in a messy unofficial way, like Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have been doing lately with the Star Wars shows, or that Star Trek has done for years now with increasingly overt callbacks to the 1970s animated series. Leaving everything canon in the MCU would be the easiest way to avoid such messes, and at little cost!
But debates like this have been raging for years among MCU fans, and this new book ought to shut them down for good, so I'll leave it at that.
Scott Hardie | May 4, 2024
For anyone who still cares about official MCU canon, here's observing that Disney+ just started counting the six Netflix original series as official MCU (minor Echo spoilers at that link).
I never put much stock in whether the Disney+ menu counted as "official" canon because for all I knew, it could have been populated by some random cubicle-dweller in some isolated division of the massive Disney conglomerate without oversight from Marvel Studios. But that article quotes an executive saying that the streamer menu really is intended by Marvel Studios to be its official statement as to what is and isn't canon -- which still doesn't seem comprehensive since Disney+ lacks some content that should count, but fine, whatever, at least it's some kind of statement of canonicity from a company that was frustratingly averse to making one for so long.
If that's true, then they've gone and done what I feared above: Recanonized something previously decanonized, contradicting their big "official" book from last year and further destabilizing the ongoing saga. I can't bring myself care about this more than they do, and I refuse to take a side any more. I'm now on Team Just Leave It Alone Already.
Our MCU Project, which is lagging a little behind schedule but still very much going, will continue counting what it has from the start: Every title that was announced as canon at one time, ignoring all retroactive changes. In other words, it's all-inclusive, so that you can skip over any titles that you don't (or they don't) consider official.
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Scott Hardie | December 26, 2021
With The MCU Project beginning in one week, I'd like to get your opinion about something before we get started, please, because I've already heard from one person who disagreed strongly with one part of my plan.
I intended the viewing schedule to be comprehensive: We'd watch every show, every short film, everything. I would even include in-universe TV commercials if it wasn't nearly impossible to keep track of them.
And we'd watch everything in order of release, because that's the way they're intended to be understood. Captain Marvel took place in the 1990s, but it's intended to be seen and understood after the events of Avengers: Infinity War.
That said, there's a real possibility of retroactive canonization: New MCU productions like, say, Deadpool 3 might acknowledge the events of non-MCU productions like Deadpool 2. I really don't want to argue about what is canon, because we'll never reach a consensus on that, so let's look at it this way instead: A line must be drawn somewhere with regards to what we'll watch and what we won't.
If an MCU production incorporates characters or story elements of an earlier non-MCU production, should that older title be watched in the MCU Project?
Personally, I'm inclined to say no, for primarily logistical reasons: How would we go about including outside series in something like this? If we watch The Good, the Bart, and the Loki, does that mean that we must watch all 716 Simpsons episodes to date? Even if we set aside that extreme example, and we only watch Marvel titles like Spider-Man or X-Men or Deadpool with the expectation that they might become retroactively canonized, where do we draw the line? Do we include 2002's Hulk? The 1990s Blade movies? The 1986 Howard the Duck movie? The 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series? Just adding the titles since 2000 would add over half a year to the project. And with new ones potentially being retconned in at any time -- who knows, maybe some future MCU title will reference some current cartoon series on Disney+ that we hadn't even considered -- we couldn't hope to keep watching them strictly in release order. That's why I chose not to get into this messy decision and I struck all non-MCU productions from the viewing plan.
But I know some folks out there must disagree. I want to hear from them. If we're going to change the plan, we have six days to do it. Should we incorporate non-MCU titles into this if they crossover, and how/when? Thanks!
Please avoid spoilers for any MCU production that you happen to know includes a crossover already.