The MCU has what kids today would call “a complicated relationship with continuity.” With 7,000-plus minutes of content spanning 32 movies and what feels like a punishingly infinite number of streaming shows, there have been oodles of opportunities for the franchise to trip over its own feet.
Here’s a look at a few of the times that the studio snapped its own inconsistencies out of existence.
The Nova Corps’ bad intel
The Nova Corps wore a lot of hats back in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Story-wise, they got to be the adults in the room, keeping civilization all civilized. From a more utilitarian perspective, they moved the story along thanks to their baked-in passion for exposition. The mug shot sequence where we meet most of our heroes is a solid 101 class in the economics of storytelling.
The bad news is that, just shy of a decade later, it’s also full of what screenwriters call “whoopsie-doodles.” Gamora is listed as the “Last Survivor of the Zehoberi People,” a claim that falls apart pretty hard in Infinity War when we find out that her people weren’t all exterminated – only half of them were, don’t be so dramatic.
Now, the one that really stings is a detail in Rocket’s bio. Listed as one of his “known accomplices” is Lylla, who GOTG3 fans will remember as his otter companion in the High Evolutionary’s kennel. If you saw the third entry in the franchise, you’ll know why it’s weird that she’d be listed on any registry, considering how she, you know, never left the lab and only appearance served to make a bunch of grown adults cry over a semiaquatic cartoon mammal with an erector set for arms.
Loki’s not such a bad guy
In the leadup to the debut of the first season of Loki, Marvel slipped a sneaky detail into the backstory of their newest leading man: He wasn’t like, bad bad. He’d just fallen under the influence of a bad stick, the way lots of kids do when they’re a thousand years old and impressionable.
Yes, quietly, trying not to alert the obsessive fans of the biggest film franchise in the world, the MCU’s bio page for the Asgardian god of mischief changed ever so slightly. It informed viewers that Loki’s cavalcade of atrocities in 2012’s Avengers were all the fault of the Mind Stone, the occasionally corruptive Infinity dealie hidden in your boy’s staff.
The real Loki had the makings of a hero, even if he did give his dad a heart attack, usurped the throne, banish his brother to Earth through deception, and made him believe that his mom hated him in 2011’s Thor. Then, after he’d been separated from the staff for a while, he did fake his death, imprison and impersonate his father, and steal the throne again. Also, he got his mom killed by Doctor Who. But again, not “evil.” Definitely just a very cool guy with Infinity Stone poisoning.
How Wanda actually got her powers, no for real this time
Out in the real world, the MCU couldn’t call Wanda and Pietro “mutants” on account of Fox still owning the rights to those sorts of folks. The solution: Make them … something. Not mutants. Humans with incredible powers granted by space… stuff. Infinity Stones, that’s the ticket. The Infinity Stones did a lot of heavy lifting in Phase Two.
Then, in one of those small, almost imperceptible miracles of nature, Disney bought Fox for billions of dollars, and suddenly there were other options on the table. As a result, WandaVision viewers got to take a real roller coaster ride down flashback lane, revealing that Wanda had actually possessed her powers all along and the Infinity Stone just unlocked them. It wasn’t sci-fi magic at all, don’t you see? It was a different kind of sci-fi magic.
In the show’s defense, Wanda’s always had a wibbly wobbly origin story, and nobody’s ever going to do it better than Maria Hill in Age of Ultron saying “She’s weird.”
No, I am the Mandarin
Iron Man 3 sure managed to beat that wave of “subverting audience expectations is the same thing as writing a good story” energy that washed over Hollywood by a few years. For the most part, it worked – it was a solo-character movie that focused on its solo character. What will they think of next?
But there was one aspect that fans didn’t exactly trip over themselves loving: The Mandarin. First, the movie told us that he was an international terrorist with a zany speech pattern, in the same vein as Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. Then came the twist, and it turned out that the real Mandarin was Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian, a revelation that lasted all of three seconds before he got beat up and exploded.
“Not my Mandarin,” the internet screamed, insisting that what they really wanted was the early-20th century Sax Rohmer racism of the comics. Buying time, Marvel released All Hail the King, a one-shot that cleared the whole thing up: Killian was never the Mandarin after all. The Mandarin was, you know, elsewhere, and a real piece of work from the looks of things. It would take another seven years to get around to showing exactly what kind of piece of work in 2021’s Shang-Chi, but they got there eventually.
Peter Parker sure spent a lot of his childhood around people who got shot
This one’s cute until you think about it. During the third act of Iron Man 2, a wee little boy attending the Stark Expo tries to face down one of about 50 heavily-armed tank drones. He does this dressed in official Iron Man merchandise, including a full helmet and a pretend repulsor glove. A fan theory popped up that the little boy was a young Peter Parker, and the filmmakers eventually said “sure, why not?”
Fun’s fun, but between the massive amounts of gun violence that happened while lil’ Pete was at the expo and what happened to his Uncle Ben a few years later, you do start to notice a pattern. Keep your head down around that kid, that’s all I’m saying.
Nick Fury and his Meowing Commandos
First, we had Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which we saw pictures of Nick Fury with two eyes and not a single hair on his head, hanging out with his old pal, the Sundance Kid. Then he told us that the last time he trusted someone, he lost an eye.
It turned out that the someone he trusted was, um, a space cat, and that the incident in question happened years before the picture of him from Winter Soldier was taken. Confusing? Only if you pay attention to Nick Fury, which Secret Invasion sort of taught us was a road to heartbreak anyway.
The fake Infinity Gauntlet
Nobody could have known how big the MCU was going to get back in 2011, so including the Infinity Gauntlet in Odin’s vault during the events of Thor was more of a cute easter egg than a continuity-trashing mistake. It didn’t become a problem until the studio doubled down on Thanos as their big bad, at which point it fell on Taika Waititi to do some damage control in Thor: Ragnarok. The solution turned out to be as simple as having Cate Blanchett shove some stuff on the ground and call it fake. Weird that Odin had such a bad eye for forgeries. The guy really lost a step in his later years.
The Consultant
The MCU had some growing pains. It took them a while to figure out what their post-credits scenes were actually for. Nailing it out of the gate with the promise of a superteam at the end of Iron Man, they hit a sophomore slump when The Incredible Hulk did the exact same thing, but in a more boring manner.
What made it worse was that the scene didn’t make sense. Tony Stark tracks a drunken and ashamed General Ross to a smoky bar, then alludes to big stuff on the horizon. Yes, according to this sequence, fans were well on their way to finally getting that… Iron Man/Thunderbolt Ross team up? The one they’d always wanted?
Once again, a One-Shot swooped in and saved the day. Three years after the release of The Incredible Hulk, viewers got the inside skinny on what was really happening in that bar: The shady security council wanted The Abomination to join the Avengers. Agent Coulsen, knowing a bad idea when he heard one, sabotaged the project by sending Tony Stark to secure Abomination’s release, knowing that Stark would annoy Ross and that the deal would fall apart.
Rhodey gets another new face
According to Secret Invasion and its director, Rhodey has been a Skrull imposter since his accident in Captain America: Civil War. While, according to reviews of Secret Invasion, nobody cares, this detail is now MCU canon and only introduces yet another plothole to the cinematic universe.
That time when Coulson forgot what S.H.I.E.L.D. was called
It was pretty cute back in 2008 when Phil Coulson kept calling his agency the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division, eventually admitting that the name needed work. There was even that nice nod at the end when he name-dropped S.H.I.E.L.D. properly for the first time.
The bummer, of course, is that the MCU started growing like kudzu, and it wasn’t long before we were seeing S.H.I.E.L.D. operations stretching back to World War II. Go back and watch Iron Man now and it seems like Phil forgot the name of the company he works for. It used to be adorable, but now it feels like a good reason for Pepper to administer a stroke test.
