For a franchise as massive and sprawling as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which only gets bigger and bigger with each passing year, things are kept awfully neat and tidy. Very rarely are there plot holes or continuity issues and everything fits together rather well. Or at least, it did, until Spider-Man: Homecoming swung into theatres back in July and threw everyone for a bit of a loop.
If you recall, the film opens with a prologue of sorts, detailing the aftermath of the events of The Avengers, with Adrian Toomes doing some clean up with his crew. Shortly after, however, we jump ahead to what a title card explains is eight years later. Now, as Joss Whedon’s aforementioned film is set in 2012, then that’d mean that Homecoming occurs in 2020, which wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, for a number of reasons.
We’re not going to dive into it all right now, as countless people already did so this summer, but basically, the further through the looking glass you go the more complicated it gets, especially when you start factoring in other MCU movies and TV shows. It’s led to a whole lot of questions as well, which is why it’s encouraging to hear that Marvel now plans to release an official timeline to clear everything up.
Speaking to Screen Rant in a recent interview, here’s what head honcho Kevin Feige had to share:
All of that debate has encouraged us. We are going to be publishing an official, and I’m not sure when, or in what format, an official timeline. It’ll probably be apart of ah, I don’t know, apart of an in print that you can fold out and look at. But suffice to say, only in limited cases do we ever actually say what the actual years are because we never want to be tied down to a particular year and I think people assume that whenever the movie is released is when is when the movie is taking place, and that is not the case.
Feige makes some good points here, and it’s interesting how he notes that the year the film is released is not when it necessarily takes place, which is what a lot of people think. Even with that in mind though, Homecoming still presents problems. But again, we’re not going to get into it here as it does become rather messy.
For now, it’s nice to see that the studio plans on addressing the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline at some point in the future. Let’s just hope that they do it before everything comes together in Avengers: Infinity War, as we imagine that that film may confuse things even more, given how many characters and storylines it’s going to include.
