One of the biggest drawbacks about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that the longer it carries on, the more impenetrable it’ll become to new fans. Kevin Feige admitted you’ll need a Disney Plus subscription to be fully up to date with the latest happenings, and it’s already becoming a bone of contention among many fans.
On the other side of the coin, all you really need to be aware of heading into David F. Sandberg’s sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods is the opening installment, with the second chapter acting as a fairly standalone blockbuster that didn’t feel the need to bog itself down in nods, winks, Easter Eggs, and callbacks to other films in its own mythology.
That’s an approach Marvel could certainly learn from and adopt more often given the discrepancies in reviews and reactions between something like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Werewolf by Night, which take place in the same world but aren’t tethered at all.
Speaking to Digital Spy, Sandberg admitted that he didn’t want Fury of the Gods to head too far down the Marvel path in terms of ensuring all connective bases were covered, which is something we definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more often.
“I’m sort of a little bummed out how with the serialisation of movies, how it turned into TV shows where it’s like, I guess that’s more of a Marvel thing at the moment. Like, I love Marvel and everything, but it’s kind of like, you’re watching things like ‘who’s that guy again’, ‘which movie was that’ and ‘what happened there?'”
Of course, there are no guarantees that Sandberg or his Shazam! saga have a future in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU beyond Fury of the Gods, so maybe the new co-CEOs will be seeking to do the exact opposite and read straight from the MCU playbook.
