The MCU is in a curious place right now. Those of you who’ve seen Avengers: Infinity War will know that it ends on a whopper of a cliffhanger. Specifically, it wipes out half of all life on Earth. That could have been potentially problematic for the next couple of Marvel movies, but cleverly, they’re both set prior to these events – Ant-Man and the Wasp follows Captain America: Civil War and Captain Marvel takes place back in the 1990s.
Though they won’t directly follow on from the climax of Infinity War, there will still be some connective tissue between these three movies and next May’s Avengers 4. Screenwriters Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus took part in an illuminating interview with BuzzFeed recently in which they teased that they faced a challenge with having two other MCU films coming out in between IW and A4 and so decided to see them as “opportunities.”
“Put yourself in our positions two years ago. We’re looking at a blank wall, and it says Avengers 3, Ant-Man and [the] Wasp, Captain Marvel, Avengers 4. So there are four big shoeboxes, and we’re responsible for the bookends. As we’re going through deciding what we want to do, we have these two shoeboxes in the middle that you can either look at as burdens or opportunities.”
The writers wouldn’t elaborate on what exactly McFeely meant by “opportunities,” but he did go on to confirm that he and Markus made “very small suggestions” for the filmmakers working on Ant-Man 2 and Captain Marvel in order to better line them up with the universe-shattering events of Infinity War and Avengers 4.
However, he also stressed that these were relatively minimal and did not impose on the visions of others. In fact, McFeely went on to say that he believes directors Peyton Reed and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden “got to make exactly the movies they wanted.”
Finally, McFeely said that he hopes that, in a year’s time, we’ll be able to see a clear “relationship” between the four MCU films in question.
“My hope is… a year from now, you’ll have a sense of the choices we’ve made over the course of an entire year of Marvel movies. There’s a relationship between them all.”
The next stop on the Marvel train is Ant-Man and the Wasp, arriving on July 6th. Captain Marvel then lands on March 8th and, after that, Avengers 4 brings the year-long story to a close on May 3rd.
