The End of the Quest

The MCU has been around for 18 years. Everyone has had an off-ramp at some point.

I would imagine for a lot of people it was Avengers: Endgame, hence the 7-year malaise that has largely led to Marvel Studios trying to do that all over again with Avengers: Doomsday this December. There are probably points along the way between those two movies too, as the MCU tried and failed to establish a new era on screens big and small. There are probably points even before that, for a more critical kind of audience who could see the writing on the wall coming as years of Thanos-teasing began to hit the runway.

The point is, when a franchise has been around for, just about, half of my entire life, it's going to have moments where your relationship changes with it in big ways. I can't really remember the last time I would've considered myself a big MCU fan in particular (this is separate from my interest in the comics or games and whatnot, but those have likewise focused and refined themselves over the years). There was a time I would watch every single movie and dissect every Easter egg and detail. My previous career at io9 helped transform that fandom into work, and when it became that, I think my interest in absolutely everything began to wane. I allowed myself to have favorites, to have areas of expertise—but there were other people who could focus on the things I grew to care less about. The need to be all in on everything Marvel, from a professional and personal standpoint, lessened as time marched on. Someone else could always pay attention if I didn't.

I would consider myself to have been generally checked out after Endgame—I watched most of the movies, but that was, up until earlier this year, a work priority rather than a personal one. I dropped off many of the shows Marvel made to plug the gaps. I keep a distant awareness out of intellectual curiosity more so than because I truly love most or all of the MCU material anymore (I would gladly argue that Madame Web remains my favorite Marvel movie of the 2020s). And yet, ironically, it's one of those shows that really kept some of my original spark for the MCU going—WandaVision—and this month, its journey comes to an end after a trilogy of series in VisionQuest. And its impending arrival has me thinking my time with the MCU in a broad sense will conclude with it.