The Marvel Cinematic Universe already stands apart from other franchises by having produced 23 movies in just 11 years, with “the Infinity Saga” storyline that’s been playing out over the past decade coming to a climax with Avengers: Endgame. But how much longer can the MCU sustain itself now that it’s venturing into fresh territory in Phase 4? Well, one Marvel Studios exec thinks it can last pretty much forever.
Producer Victoria Alonso spoke about the bright future ahead for Marvel with The Hollywood Reporter. Citing that the company has “6,000 characters” thanks to Marvel Comics’ continual creativity, Alonso believes they’ll never run out of stories to tell and that the Marvel universe can keep going on and on as long as new generations get hooked on them.
“There are so many stories to tell. The thing about Marvel is we have 6,000 characters in our library. There will be children forever telling these stories.”
Looking at the power of the MCU right now, it doesn’t seem like the franchise is going to end anytime soon. The line-up of Phase 4, featuring new properties like Shang-Chi and Eternals and reboots of familiar characters like Blade, proves that Kevin Feige and his team have a lot more ideas to come. Plus, there’s the very handy fact that they just got the rights back to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. A studio insider has previously noted that this should add at least 10 extra years onto the MCU’s lifespan.
Of course, there are those dissenters who believe that superhero movie saturation will reach a point where audiences get bored of them – the usual comparison made is the one-time popularity of westerns, which is now a largely dead genre. What this argument doesn’t really consider, though, is how much more flexible superhero films can be. Just one glance at Marvel’s Phase 4 slate shows you all the different types of stories that can be told within a comic book cinematic universe.
