Alongside the sprawling expanse of the MCU, the various Marvel TV shows provided some smaller scale and lower-stakes outings within the world the movies created. However, Kevin Feige has now declared them separate from the continuity of the films.
While at CCXP Brazil, he spoke with Brazilian pop culture site Omelete about the Marvel projects and when asked about how the visual language of the Disney+ series will compare to the MCU, he first responded by stating that “Disney+ is going to give us this opportunity to tell even deeper stories about characters you already know and love,” and followed it up with the declaration that “it all, for the first time, will interlink.” By stating that this is the beginning of the movies and TV series connecting, he’s effectively wiped all previous Marvel shows from canon, which WGTC told you he was going to do last month.
In the early days of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., there was a great effort made to maintain continuity with the MCU by referencing its events and including guest appearances from the likes of Nick Fury, Maria Hill and Lady Sif, not to mention one of the reasons the show existed in the first place was because fans were angry that Phil Coulson was killed in The Avengers and this provided an excuse to resurrect him. Things started to come apart though with the release of Captain America: The Winter Solder and its revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated and secretly run by H.Y.D.R.A. right from its inception, and after that the series largely became its own thing that fans were expected to assume ran parallel to the MCU without ever interacting with it.
Apart from Agent Carter, the other shows largely only paid lip service to existing in the same world, with the Netflix series occasionally and obliquely mentioning ‘the Event,’ referencing the Chitauri invasion and the Battle of New York, and Cloak & Dagger having a link in the malevolent Roxxon Corporation, which had throwaway references in each of the Iron Man movies.
This statement comes in the wake of Feige’s promotion to Chief Creative Officer of all of Marvel Entertainment, whereas previously he only ran the movie side of things. The TV projects were overseen by Jeph Loeb, who recently announced his departure from the company, and while the shows were nowhere near as stratospherically popular as the films, it still feels a little disingenuous to disregard them in a single sentence without bothering to even acknowledge their existence.
