Marvel Is Practically Rebooting Its Universe In Secret Wars
Remember how Marvel was teasing its next crossover event Secret Wars — a revival of their original 80s crossover — with ads for previous popular storylines, many of them alternate worlds? Well, they’ve clarified what’s going on, and though they won’t call it a reboot, it’s basically a soft reboot. Once Secret Wars #1 is out, “there’s no Marvel universe, there’s no Ultimate universe. It’s all Battleworld,” a world made up of countries formed from all the different Marvel universes. That means alternate realities like Age of Apocalypse will be mixing with 2099. The main focus will be on the main Marvel-616 universe colliding with the Ultimate universe, as the latter has been winding down as of late.
Marvel is claiming that every universe has ended, but that would be silly. What this is likely doing is consolidating all the attractive bits from their alternate universes, especially the Ultimate universe, and incorporating them into 616. While it makes sense to kill the Ultimate line, I’d expect to see the main universe feel a bit more like that one in particular, if only because it is likely for the main universe to become more like the incredibly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe it helped inspire. (I’d say Earth-19999 is safe from showing up on Battleworld.)
So what can you expect, besides a high likelihood that Nick Fury (the David Hasslehoff-looking one) will look like Samuel L. Jackson and just ignore that Nick Fury Jr. nonsense they made up to transcribe Ultimate Nick Fury into Earth-616? For one, a reduced focus on mutants: Fox has played hardball holding onto the film rights to X-Men, so Marvel has slowly been raising the prominence of the similar Inhumans in both the comics and in the MCU’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to use as their replacement (and not give Fox any more story ideas). For another, the tone and characterization will probably reflect the MCU even more than it currently does; I’d bet Thor has a permanent beard now. It makes sense for Marvel to create or reboot comics that are ready to adapt to film or TV; notably, Guardians of the Galaxy closely resembles the relatively-recent 2008 reboot of the team instead of the crusty old 70s team.
That doesn’t mean that all that prior continuity is going away, because it all still happened. But instead of retconing the past, expect Secret Wars to present a new status quo and a few minor changes in order to help synthesize the comics and the movies. For some, this will be annoying, but for this casual fan who loves the movies, it excites me.
Source: io9