MCU: Does Marvel need a dark section of their Cinematic Universe?
By Mark Lynch
Marvel needs to find a place within the MCU for its darker content, mature storylines and more violent characters.
There’s no question that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a success for the last decade plus. They’ve had a blockbuster every year since Iron Man debuted in 2008, and the only thing that may halt this momentum temporarily is the current pandemic. Even then, it may continue if Black Widow is released on Disney Plus.
Speaking of Disney Plus, as great as it has been, this could hurt the Marvel characters that aren’t family-friendly. We all love Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man. The thing with those three is it wasn’t too difficult to make them PG-13 characters. Characters like Black Widow and Hulk were probably tougher.
However, going forward, the fans are going to want characters like The Punisher and Jessica Jones in the MCU. We saw how popular they proved to be on the Netflix shows and they would have continued to be well-received if they if the Netflix deal wasn’t canceled.
It’s long been theorized that those shows took place in an MCU that just didn’t talk about the. Going forward, however, we’re going to find out if that’s true as the characters will one day be incorporated into the big-screen universe. Now comes the question: Where do we put Marvel’s darker characters? Easy, you give them their own section.
A mature Marvel
Disney Plus has multiple sections of their streaming service. With a simple click, you can find Marvel, Star Wars, classic Disney projects and more. It would be easy to add another section to the platform… maybe even one that would require a password to access so underage kids can’t get to it.
This way, the service would be able to provide adult Marvel fans with some of the mature content that they can’t always get from the films – content geared to adults in the same way that the Netflix shows were. You could even call it Marvel MAX after the Marvel Comics explicit content run.
That’s not to say this content should have a bunch of obscene visuals or rely on over-the-top violence just because it can. There’s more to “mature” than cursing and nudity. Let’s give some examples.