The funniest thing about Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars is that they are being sold as the grand collision point for the modern MCU, when half the modern MCU feels like something Marvel would rather pretend never happened.
That is the real walk of shame here. Not one bad movie. Not one weak Disney+ show. A whole shelf of dangling plots, abandoned characters, post-credit teases, political detours, alien invasions, legacy handoffs, and “next generation” setups that were supposed to matter until audiences made it very clear that they did not.
So before Marvel tries to clean the board with Doom, incursions, portals, variants, and whatever other multiverse duct tape they have left, we should be honest about what probably should not survive.
The Captain Marvel Problem
The MCU spent years insisting Captain Marvel was going to be a major pillar. Then the audience response kept saying the same thing in different ways: no.
The Kree, the Skrulls, the cosmic politics, the setup around Carol’s world, even the big team-up energy around The Marvels all feels like dead weight now. Marvel can bring Carol back for a cameo or a battle scene if it wants, but the larger mythology around her corner of the universe is basically a storage unit full of boxes nobody wants to open.
The truly insane part is that the Skrulls should have been gold. A proper Secret Invasion arc could have replaced the entire multiverse mess. Paranoia, body snatching, heroes compromised, governments falling apart, Earth turning on itself. That is a Marvel event.
Instead, we got a Disney+ show where the Skrulls tried to trigger World War III, Nick Fury wandered around looking tired, and then the story just sort of stopped. There are hostile Skrulls on Earth. Humanity knows. The President declared war on them. Then Marvel moved on like someone deleted the group chat.
That cannot survive Secret Wars. It barely survived its own finale.
The Eternal Headache
Eternals is the cleanest example of Marvel writing checks it never intended to cash.
There is a giant Celestial sticking out of the ocean. There are cosmic judges looming over Earth. There is Kit Harington’s Black Knight setup. There is the Blade voice cameo that now feels like it came from another timeline entirely. There are whole mythological and cosmic implications that should have changed the MCU overnight.
And yet the practical answer is obvious: Marvel is probably going to leave most of it on the curb.
That is not because every idea in Eternals was impossible to use. It is because the movie landed with the force of a wet towel, and the MCU has been acting embarrassed about it ever since. You can maybe salvage a reference. You can maybe use the Celestial corpse as a plot object. But the actual character threads? The judgment of Earth? The promised follow-up?
Gone. Or at least they should be.
The Disney+ Graveyard
The Disney+ era is where Marvel really started generating continuity debt.
Moon Knight ends with a major third-personality tease. Secret Invasion leaves Earth in chaos. She-Hulk introduces Hulk’s son Skaar in a scene that does more damage to future Hulk storytelling than people admit. Echo tries to tie Kingpin and Daredevil into a mystical family-trauma finale. Ironheart exists in that strange Marvel category where the studio clearly wanted a new important hero, but the audience treated the whole thing like background noise.
This is what happens when every project is built like a launchpad and almost none of them become rockets.
The MCU used to make post-credit scenes feel like promises. Now they feel like spam emails. “Here is a sword.” “Here is a son.” “Here is a new Avenger.” “Here is a cosmic problem.” “Here is a street-level spinoff.” “Here is another legacy hero.” Eventually the audience stops treating these as hooks and starts treating them as clutter.
Doomsday should not try to honor all of it. That would be madness. The smarter move is brutal triage.
The Legacy Heroes Nobody Asked For
Marvel still seems very attached to the Young Avengers idea, and we honestly do not know how many times the audience has to reject this before the message gets through.
Cassie Lang. Kate Bishop. America Chavez. Skaar. Yelena. Kamala. Riri. The list keeps growing, but the excitement does not grow with it. There are individual actors in that pile who can work. Florence Pugh has actual movie-star credibility, and Yelena at least has a shot if Marvel writes her like a person instead of a replacement part.
But the broader strategy has been obvious for years: retire or sideline the icons, then slide in younger legacy versions and expect the brand equity to transfer automatically.
It does not work that way.
Sam Wilson as Captain America is the loudest example. Marvel can keep trying to make that the new center of gravity, but the audience response has been stubborn. Anthony Mackie can be charismatic. Falcon can be cool. That still does not mean the public sees him as the Captain America the franchise can rebuild around.
The MCU keeps confusing “we have declared this important” with “the audience cares.”
The Threads Worth Keeping
To be fair, not everything from the post-Endgame wreckage needs to be dumped.
Spider-Man still works because Spider-Man is Spider-Man, and No Way Home gave Marvel a rare clean emotional reset. Doctor Strange and Clea can still connect to Doom and the multiverse without too much strain. Thor can be repaired if Marvel stops treating him like a sketch character. Wakanda can continue, though Marvel needs to be careful not to bury Black Panther under side plots and substitute kingdoms.
Even Guardians Vol. 3 worked, but that is exactly why it should probably be left alone. James Gunn gave that corner an ending. Let an ending be an ending for once.
The point is not that Marvel needs to erase everything after Endgame. The point is that Marvel needs to stop pretending every failed setup is sacred lore.
Final Take
Doomsday and Secret Wars should be Marvel’s chance to admit what the audience already knows.
The MCU has too many abandoned threads, too many unwanted replacements, too many Disney+ leftovers, and too many “wait until later” promises that later never justified. A reset will only work if Marvel is willing to be ruthless about what deserves to come forward.
Keep the characters people still want. Rescue the ideas that still have juice. Let the dead-end storylines die.
Because if Secret Wars becomes another excuse to drag every failed experiment through a portal and ask the audience to clap, Marvel will not be cleaning up its continuity.
It will be turning the walk of shame into a parade.
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