Endgame’ promises the future of the MCU will be diverse AF

This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.

There is an unmatched, unprecedented moment of glory in Avengers: Endgame’s climactic battle. 

Nearly every single woman in the Marvel Cinematic Universe comes together to take down Thanos. A glowed-up Captain Marvel is flanked by an incredible pantheon of warriors: Okoye swings her spear, Valkyrie swoops in like a goddess on pegasus, Shuri powers up the vibranium gauntlets she invented herself, and Pepper Potts looks up menacingly from inside her iron suit, joined by Gamora, Nebula, Mantis, Wasp, and Scarlet Witch. 

The momentum of their combined, literally awesome power — this wealth of diverse, woman-centric badassery all in one place — doesn’t just herald the destruction of Thanos. It promises to catapult the MCU into a new era of inclusivity, with women and people of color defining the future of the most culturally important multi-billion dollar film franchise in history.

Yet this moment, and its promise, is not without its faults.

It’s hard to even remember now, high off the buzz of possibility, how impossible this all seemed just a few years ago. The first three phases of the MCU gave us so little in the way of representation for marginalized identities, and the battle for more inclusivity was a long and difficult one paved with excuses and flat-out racism and misogyny.

But recently, with each new movie, it feels like Marvel has gotten closer and closer to engaging with the culture war raging in the background of the MCU. Spearheaded by a toxic subset of fans, the fight still continues over who gets to be a hero, and whether they’re allowed to reflect the diversity of our real world and the MCU’s audience.

Phases 1 through 3 of the MCU were centered around the “traditional” (a.k.a. white, male, heteronormative) comic book hero character and narrative. Yet as Marvel films and their audience became increasingly mainstream, some fans started to feel threatened by even the slightest shifts away from the “traditional” and toward something more inclusive.

Endgame reads like the studio’s definitive response to the question of who gets to define what a superhero should like look.

And certainly, those toxic fans can continue to cling onto boycotts and Rotten Tomato protests against titles like Captiain Marvel for the crime of having a female protagonist. But increasingly, it seems like they’ll have a hard time reversing the tide that’s starting to feel inevitable after Endgame. 

Because Marvel can’t hear the angry cries of trolls over the sound of the astronomical coinage that their most diverse films are making for them. And if this box office trend study is any indication, they’re making a smart bet on women and people of color continuing to be the film industry’s top patrons.

Avengers: Endgame reads like the studio’s definitive response to the question of who gets to define what a superhero should like look, and who the MCU should represent. And the answer is: everyone. 

It’s true that the majority of Endgame is a love letter to those who first established the cinematic universe over the past eleven years and twenty films. But every ending leaves room for a new beginning. And the final chapter of Endgame acts like more of a send off to the outdated white, straight male boys club that came with those origins. 

Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America each handed over their capes to a new generation of superheroes who epitomize the franchise’s greatest strides into a bold future, planting the seeds for what the future of the MCU.

Tony Stark sacrifices himself, but not before leaving behind a wife who clearly knows her way around an Iron (Wo)Man suit and a daughter who could easily take up his mantle in the future. That’s not to mention Shuri, who wasn’t given a ton of screen time in Endgame but whose introduction into the MCU through Black Panther already hints at who will become the Avengers’ new tech genius.

The beer-bellied, unkempt Thor, God of Thunder, looks out over New Asgard alongside the biracial and (debatably canonically) bisexual warrior goddess Valkyrie. “Your people need a king,” she tells him. “They already have one,” he corrects, with a meaningful stare at her. 

The final act of Endgame acts as more of a send off to the outdated white, straight male boys club that came with those origins.

After finally living out the quaint life he was once robbed of, an elderly Captain America sits by a river. Without much fanfare, he hands over his iconic red, white, and blue shield to Falcon — whose blackness inherently makes a statement about what the true face of American exceptionalism and greatness looks like.

Even Hawkeye finds a glittering hope at relevancy, though an opening scene that hints he’s teaching his daughter to become the next great sharp shooter.

The message behind all these passings of the torch scenes feels irrefutably obvious. And when you look at what’s happened to Marvel behind the scenes over the past few years, the studio seems primed to deliver on that message.

Infamously, a 2014 leaked email from Trump donor and Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter appeared to show him arguing against more diverse superhero films by citing the failure of past female-led superhero films like Supergirl, Catwoman, and Elektra. A Vanity Fair article with sources from inside the studio confirmed that Perlmutter fought against Black Widow merchandising “because he believed ‘girl’ superhero products wouldn’t sell.”

The profile also revealed that Perlmutter was quietly sidelined by Disney in 2015 for “outdated opinions about casting, budgeting, and merchandising.” And since then, president of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige has delivered on greenlighting more and more diverse additions to the MCU.

Aside from all the hints in Endgame, there are plenty of other bread crumbs in previous and upcoming films that promise the future of MCU will be diverse AF.

Captain Marvel not-so-subtly opened the door for not one, but two other female superheroes. 

It’s heavily implied that Maria Rambeau’s daughter, Monica, is being set up to become the superhero known as Photon in the comics — and Captain Marvel‘s ’90s setting ensures she’d be of age to join the Avengers in the modern day. 

The future of MCU will be diverse AF.

In less concrete terms, Brie Larson said at a press junket that “the goal” was to have the character of Kamala Khan — a Pakistani Muslim — eventually join the team as Ms. Marvel. Feige echoed that to the BBC, saying that Ms. Marvel “is definitely sort of in the works. We have plans for that once we’ve introduced Captain Marvel to the world.”

The studio is “fast-tracking” their first film to ever feature an Asian protagonist, an adaptation of the ’70s comic book series Shang-Chi, according to Deadline. Clearly hoping to recreate the success of director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, they’ve hired Chinese-American writer Dave Callaham and and half-Japanese filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton to ensure the story is told by people whom Shang-Chi hopes to represent.

Then there’s the highly anticipated sequel to Black Panther, which could easily borrow from the classic comics storyline where Shuri rises as the new Black Panther and/or Queen of Wakanda.

On the more frustratingly vague but still hopeful side, Feige and director Joe Russo have both teased introducing their first queer superhero. We remain suspicious of the fact that we have almost zero information on how or when. But Feige told The Playlist that at least two openly LGBTQ characters will soon join the MCU, and they’ll be “ones you’ve seen and ones you haven’t seen.”

Of course, Marvel has been reportedly working on a Black Widow solo prequel for quite some time now. We’ve yet to see a release date, but Marvel reportedly hired female writer Jac Schaeffer and a female director in Cate Shortland to spearhead it.

Sadly and ironically, though, it still feels like the first female Avenger to ever break into the boys club  continues to not get her due.

Black Widow — whose transformation throughout the franchise best embodies Marvel’s shift away from the “traditional” (i.e. abysmally objectifying) treatment of women in comics — gets shortchanged throughout Endgame. Sure, her sacrifice is heroic. But it also robs us of a significant amount of time with her, which matters when she’s the only woman from the original Avengers team.

Her untimely death leaves behind an absence that’s as noticeable as Hawkeye’s continued irrelevance as One More White Guy in the Avengers. She doesn’t even get to take part in the Endgame‘s badass lady power moment she helped make a possibility. 

This is a superhero franchise, so who knows if Black Widow’s death is final. But it kind of feels like she was sacrificed in order to drum up hype for her prequel. Personally, we don’t feel like you need to kill a woman in order to get folks amped for her first, long overdue solo movie. 

Black Widow is an emblem of how far the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come, but also how far we still have to go. As it turns out, changing a massive studio’s antiquated assumptions about women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks — while also battling a toxic subset of your fanbase — is a tough learning process. 

There will be new challenges for Marvel to overcome before it can get this diverse future of the MCU right.

Even with the entire cast of Black Panther, the MCU still centers disproportionately around white lead characters. So much so that Okoye had to be added to an Endgame poster only after social media backlash called out her notable absence. 

Tere will be new challenges for Marvel to overcome before it can get this diverse future of the MCU right.

And while Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn thankfully seems to have stopped arguing that the MCU might have a secret LGBTQ character, we’re still calling it queerbaiting until an LGBTQ character openly address their sexuality on screen. (And, no, the gay support group member in Endgame does not count.)

Some Chinese fans also reportedly felt insulted by the choice of Shang-Chi, whose comic origins are grounded in offensive stereotypes (though arguably, so were Black Panther and Captain Marvel).

The progress we’ve already seen is not without its growing pains either. While many loved Captain Marvel, others critiqued the insincerity of its brand of feminism. Some of the biggest faults with Captain Marvel stemmed from the pressure for it to make up for a decade of horrible female representation — ironically forcing the first female-led movie to do twice as much work as her male counterparts. 

Even that crowning jewel of a lady moment in Endgame feels manufactured to hope we’re too excited to remember how little representation we actually get — even now.

Sure, they get to do rad stuff for a single sequence in the big battle. But it’s like Marvel hopes pigeonholing and marginalizing its women into a “moment” will make us forget that the men get to be at the center of the rest of the movie. The moment, packed with a decade of pent up longing to have the MCU recognize women’s heroism, packs a punch for those who’ve needed to subsist on scraps. But it ends too quickly, because nothing so small can erase all that lost time.

To add insult to injury, it falls on reformed misogynist Tony Stark — who launched the white boy sexist MCU culture into existence — to truly save the world when Captain Marvel fails. Black Widow’s sacrifice goes practically forgotten as she gets overshadowed by her male teammate, even after their deaths.

These cultural-defining films can only gain from embedding themes of real-world injustice into their narratives.

There is no doubt that Marvel has gone above and beyond to not only listen to the years of criticisms over lack of representation, but also actually do something about it. But like Phase 1, the studio needs to do some work to refine its execution for the more inclusive Phase 4 era of the MCU.

Without a doubt, both Marvel and Disney will need to rethink parts of its process in order to allow different identities to tell their own stories in the right way. And before we can fully give it credit for all the inclusive seeds planted in Endgame, we’ll need to see the receipts for upcoming Valkyrie and Falcon films. 

But for marginalized folks who love comic book films, there’s never been a more hopeful time to be alive. As Black Panther definitively proved with its Oscar nomination and box office numbers, these culture-defining films can only gain from embedding themes of real-world injustice into their narratives. That’s essentially what the best superhero stories have always been about.

We have no doubt that the army of diverse superheroes and heroines are powerful enough to take down the embodiment of patriarchy that is Thanos. But the MCU will need to give them more than moments before it truly proves worthy of their power.