Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Three

• 1. Introduction

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  Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase Three is a group of eleven superhero films that ran from May 2016 to July 2019, and together they became the highest-grossing phase in MCU history. Six of those eleven films crossed one billion dollars at the worldwide box office. One of them, Avengers: Endgame, dethroned Avatar on the 21st of July 2019 to become the highest-grossing film ever made, unadjusted for inflation. How did a single linked chain of superhero movies pull off something no Hollywood franchise had managed before? What made audiences return eleven times across three years? And what does it take to coordinate eleven different directors, dozens of returning actors, and a storyline that had been seeded since 2011?

• 2. The Announcement That Changed Hollywood

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  On the 28th of October 2014, Kevin Feige stood on stage at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood and revealed the complete Phase Three slate in one go. The event drew comparisons to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Feige had wanted to make the announcement at San Diego Comic-Con earlier that year, but said "things were not set" for the slate at that point. Marvel Studios had never held a solo event like this before.

  The original lineup named at the El Capitan that evening included Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Inhumans, along with two Avengers crossover films labeled Infinity War Part 1 and Infinity War Part 2. That lineup would shift considerably before filming was done. Inhumans was quietly removed from the theatrical schedule; Feige later said it would happen on television instead, and Marvel Television and IMAX Corporation did eventually produce an eight-episode Inhumans series for ABC. Two Spider-Man films were added to the slate after a deal was struck with Sony Pictures on the 9th of February 2015, following the 2014 Sony hack that had exposed negotiations between the two studios.

  The addition of Spider-Man: Homecoming and Ant-Man and the Wasp forced date changes for several films, pushing Ragnarok later into 2017 and moving Captain Marvel to 2019. The untitled Part 2 of Infinity War remained a mystery until December 2018, when the first teaser trailer revealed it as Avengers: Endgame. Feige later admitted that withholding the title for so long had backfired, because fans built up expectations the reveal could not match. He also explained why the studio did it: the October 2014 Infinity War announcement had already overshadowed Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Marvel did not want to repeat that mistake.

• 3. The Architecture of Collaboration

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  Anthony and Joe Russo, along with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, directed and wrote Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame, and they also collaborated closely with the creative teams behind every other Phase Three film. Their shared goal was to make sure, as they put it, "everything lined up right" for the MCU's culmination in those two crossover films.

  Director Peyton Reed, who helmed both Ant-Man films, described the working relationship among Phase Three directors as "probably the closest thing that this generation will have to a '30s- or '40s-era studio system where you are all on the lot and you are all working on different things." That spirit of coordination reached into specific scenes. For the mid-credits sequence in Civil War, in which T'Challa offers Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes asylum in Wakanda, the filmmakers brought in Black Panther director Ryan Coogler to advise on how Wakanda should look and feel, even though his own film was still two years away.

  Kevin Feige produced every film in the phase. Amy Pascal co-produced both Spider-Man films alongside him, and Stephen Broussard co-produced Ant-Man and the Wasp. The actor count was staggering. Chris Evans and Tom Holland each appeared in five Phase Three films, more than any other performer. Returning players ranged from Josh Brolin as Thanos to Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster, who appeared briefly in a Vol. 2 post-credits scene before a full role in Ragnarok. The Doctor Strange mid-credits scene was actually footage from Ragnarok directed by Taika Waititi, inserted to bridge the two films.

• 4. Planting the Infinity Stones

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  Infinity War director Joe Russo described the Tesseract from Captain America: The First Avenger as the first seed planted for the Infinity War storyline. By the time Infinity War arrived in 2018, Marvel had seeded five of the six Infinity Stones across earlier films: the Tesseract as the Space Stone in The First Avenger, Loki's Scepter as the Mind Stone in The Avengers, the Aether as the Reality Stone in The Dark World, the Orb as the Power Stone in Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Eye of Agamotto as the Time Stone in Doctor Strange. Thor: Ragnarok added a twist, revealing that the Infinity Gauntlet seen in Odin's vault in Thor was a fake.

  The sixth stone, the Soul Stone, was kept hidden until Infinity War itself. When the Red Skull appeared as its keeper, he was played by Ross Marquand rather than Hugo Weaving, who had originated the role. Thanos had been shown holding an empty Infinity Gauntlet in a scene from Age of Ultron. The post-credits scene of Avengers: Infinity War showed Nick Fury transmitting a distress signal on a device bearing the insignia of Captain Marvel, pointing directly to the next chapter. Captain Marvel, released on the 8th of March 2019, is set entirely in 1995 and introduces the Skrull species to the MCU. Its mid-credits scene, filmed by the Russo brothers, takes place directly before the first scenes of Endgame.

• 5. The Timeline Scroll Problem

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  When director Jon Watts began work on Spider-Man: Homecoming, co-producer Eric Carroll showed him a physical scroll that mapped the entire MCU timeline. Carroll had created it when he first joined Marvel Studios. Watts said that when fully unfurled, it extended beyond the length of a long conference room table and documented both where the continuity of films lined up and where it did not.

  That scroll became the source of a notable miscalculation. Homecoming included a title card stating that eight years had passed between the end of The Avengers and the events of Civil War. The established MCU timeline placed that gap at only four years. Infinity War co-director Joe Russo called the Homecoming time jump "very incorrect", and Infinity War quietly corrected it by specifying that its events were taking place only six years after The Avengers. Civil War had also created a separate continuity question, with dialogue suggesting eight years between Iron Man and Civil War when the established gap was closer to five or six years. The public reaction to the Homecoming mistake was significant enough that Marvel Studios released a new timeline document covering all three phases.

  Producer Brad Winderbaum described the Phase Three approach to continuity as films that "happen on top of each other" while being less "interlocked" than Phase One. Black Panther begins just one week after Civil War. Homecoming begins a few months after it. Ragnarok is set four years after The Dark World and two years after Age of Ultron. Doctor Strange spans roughly a year, starting in early 2016. Ant-Man and the Wasp is set two years after Civil War and just before Infinity War, and its mid-credits scene shows Hope van Dyne, Hank Pym, and Janet van Dyne being disintegrated by Thanos's actions at the end of that film.

• 6. Diversity, Villains, and Critical Reception

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  Black Panther grossed $1,374,959,729 worldwide against a $200 million budget and had a "cross-nation release" in Africa that was a first for a Disney film. Ryan Coogler directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole. Critics at publications including Collider, ComingSoon.net, and The Mary Sue ranked it as either the best film of the phase or among the best films in the entire MCU.

  Conner Schwerdtfeger at CinemaBlend argued that Phase Three avoided "superhero fatigue" by diversifying character personalities, genres, and filmmaking styles, and credited the introductions of Black Panther and Captain Marvel as part of that effort. Douglas Laman at Collider singled out the progress on representation. Rich Knight at CinemaBlend attributed the phase's stronger quality partly to better villains: he ranked Thanos and Killmonger as the two best, both having motivations that audiences could understand and even agree with, and placed the Vulture third. Knight called the reveal in Homecoming that the Vulture is the father of Spider-Man's homecoming date the best twist in the entire MCU franchise. Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly was more skeptical overall but still identified a trio he called the "MCU Holy Trinity": Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Ragnarok, and Black Panther, saying they each "looked back in anger, at the MCU's history and beyond, with self-awareness and self-critique".

  The phase's eleven films received eleven Academy Award nominations and won three, six BAFTA nominations with one win, and ten Grammy nominations with two wins. After Phase Five was released, Rachel Ulatowski at The Mary Sue wrote that all eleven Phase Three films were "well above mediocre", a consistency that Jeff Ames at ComingSoon.net called "one of the more astonishing periods of sustained success in cinematic history." Far From Home, which closed the phase in July 2019, was the first Spider-Man film ever to cross one billion dollars at the box office, earning $1,138,121,790 worldwide.