Marvel’s Disney+ Shows Made Endgame’s Writing Even Wilder

The culmination of 22 movies of storytelling was also a teaser for like 10 projects, and we barely noticed.

When Avengers: Age of Ultron came out, one (of many) major criticisms of the movie was that it was so clearly trying to tease future Marvel movies. Depending on how charitable you were to this concept, some referred to this as “setting up” the next entries in the series, while others called these scenes “ads.”

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the latter characterization. It’s a bit like saying the fifth episode of a TV show is an “advertisement” for the season finale. On the other hand, when Thor takes his shirt off and hops into an inexplicable pool to get brief flashes of a YouTube video explaining what the Infinity Stones are, I kinda see their point.

Which is what makes Avengers: Endgame so absolutely wild. Because it’s loaded with the narrative equivalent of ten half-naked Thors in exposition pools. And we barely even noticed.

Okay, so we noticed some of them. The moment when the 2012 version of Loki picks up a tesseract and voips away? That was. Uh. Weird. And it never comes up again in the movie, so it must mean he’s gonna come back later. And there’s the obvious bit at the end when Thor makes Valkyrie ruler of Asgard, then hops on Quill’s ship and calls the team he’s just joined “the Asgardians of the Galaxy.” Sure sounds like a setup for a movie…