With still 3 years and another full phase of MCU movies to go before the next Avengers installment,
How do you think the MCU will be shaping up by the time the "Infinity War" climax of Phase 3 reaches our screens?
Personally I think they're going to set up the grand return of the "Big Three" in
A:IWpt2 by distancing them even more from the Avengers line-up throughout the course of the next few movies...
- Tony Stark/Iron Man - either incumbent director of S.H.I.E.L.D, or just out of the suit and back to running Stark Industries
- Thor Odinson - residing in Asgard, possibly on the throne following the events of Thor: Ragnarok
- Steve Rogers/Captain America - presumed dead, with the mantle taken up by either Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (my personal preference) or Sam Wilson/Falcon, with both being part of a "Secret Avengers" team post-Civil War along with the likes of Natasha Romanaov/Black Widow, Sharon Carter/Agent 13, Clint Barton/Hawkeye, (who I hope we get to see as Goliath at some point now that "Pym Particles" are in the game) and James Rhodes/War Machine.
Which could maybe leave us with a "New Avengers" team that uses the line-up at the end of
A:AOU as a transitional point and builds around the recently introduced characters from that line-up with others from Phase 3 giving us a roster that includes...
- Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch
- Vision
- Scot Lang/Ant-man
- Hope Van Dyne/Wasp
- T'Challa/Black Panther
...and one other to make up a 6-man roster which I don't think will be
Doctor Strange, as I've a feeling they could make him more of a mentor to
The Defenders team featuring
Luke Cage, Danny Rand/Iron Fist and
Jessica Jones, which seems like it's going to be more like 2005's
"New Avengers" title than that from which it takes it's name.
Daredevil, by this time will probably be solo again if the speculation that the Netflix shows are heading towards a "
Shadowland" scenario in the
Defenders miniseries turns out to be correct, and it would be nice to see him and
Spider-Man encounter each other in the MCU, which would be a wasted opportunity were the two both to feature in
A:IWpt1 and not have that one-on-one interaction.
ABC's
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the soon to be seen
Secret Warriors team will hopefully have some kind of cameo or mention, with the latter team being well established after a couple more seasons of
AoS
Guardians Of The Galaxy, I don't have a clue about, though bringing Yondu into the line-up would work for me :)
Neither
Captain Marvel nor
The Inhumans will have had their own movie yet by then so they'll probably be hinted at but not necessarily feature, unless maybe there's a lead-in to the
Captain Marvel movie somehow.
...and last but by no means least, there's
HULK, who's return I have no doubt will be anything short of AWESOME, though it would have been nice to fit a "
Planet Hulk" movie into
Phase 3!, :)
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Disney could so easily have screwed up the MCU but they have handled their ownership of Marvel more respectfully than any of us could have imagined and the way characters cross over from one movie to another gives Marvel's "Cinematic Universe" the same sense of scale that it's comic book universe has always presented us with, and that is an achievement in itself.
:)
