At what point will there be too many Marvel movies, too much continuity, for new fans to join the series?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe started eight years ago. As of today, there are fourteen Marvel films. We'll get three more next year, and three more the year after that. I'm not sure if any film franchise has made that many films in that short a period of time.

In the beginning, the shared universe was a brilliant idea. Like the Iron Man movies? You'll probably go see The Avengers. Didn't like Iron Man, but liked Thor? You'll still probably go see The Avengers.

If you're like me, you've seen all of these movies in theaters as they were released, and for the most part, they're pretty great. But at this point, how does a new fan join in?

Over at r/marvelstudios, they can't even conceive of the idea that someone hasn't seen all the Marvel films, but I have a one year old daughter. By the time she's old enough to go to the movies, there will be will over 20 of these.

Even if someone wants to jump into the series right now, they have a lot of homework to do. The writers of Civil War expressly stated that they weren't even considering new fans to the series anymore.

On the one hand, this makes sense creatively. The Star Wars movies don't really recap the previous ones; the opening crawl usually tells you what happened between movies. But there's a lot fewer Star Wars movies to catch up on than the MCU.

TV Tropes has a term for this: Continuity Lock-Out. I'm really curious how Kevin Feige and the rest of the team at Marvel plan to solve this. Every franchise needs to bring in new fans as old ones grow bored and move on to other things.

The Bond movies addressed this problem by basically not having any continuity for most of the series' history, but that's not really an option for the MCU. Will they reboot, at some point, like the comics did? Will they go back to stand-alone movies that don't require having seen the previous ones? Or is this ultimately how the superhero movie bubble will finally burst?

Edit: There's been a few comments to the effect that, you don't need to have seen the other movies to enjoy the current ones. First, I don't think you need to see all of the movies necessarily; you can skip the Thor films and still enjoy Civil War. But you still need to have watched a lot of the previous movies, including Age of Ultron, Winter Soldier, and probably a couple Iron Man films.

Second, I'd love to hear from somebody who actually started in the middle of the series, and what that experience was like.

Submitted November 04, 2016 at 10:43PM by littletoyboat http://ift.tt/2fp8PPQ