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Marvel TV chief Brad Winderbaum has been making the rounds to promote “Daredevil: Born Again”. He recently appeared on the Canadian podcast “Screen Off Script” where he was asked about his thoughts on a “full MCU reboot.” Winderbaum’s response made it clear the question was a hot potato he had no intention of holding.
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“So, you’re going to have to ask Kevin about the features,” Winderbaum said. “I’m on the TV side, but we do navigate the same waters and live in the same universe.”
While Winderbaum didn’t really answer whether or not the notion has been discussed, he did express his opinion on the idea: “I’m a comic fan, I’ve read comics since I was 12 years old, and I’ve seen what happens at comic companies when things get full reboots. And the truth is, every time there’s been a full reboot at Marvel or DC … it always feels like you can’t really fully reboot anything.”
DISNEY/Marvel Studios
The rumor that Marvel intended to reboot the MCU with “Avengers: Secret Wars” has persisted almost since before the film was announced. What’s interesting about the rumor is that it doesn’t reflect the comics.
The 2015-16 line-wide comic book event “Secret Wars” does not reboot the Marvel Comics Universe. It rebooted the numbering for all of its titles (i.e. all the titles went back to their #1 issues), but the narrative itself was not rebooted. The stories in all of those rebooted titles were continued from what came before. If anything “Secret Wars” simply added more to the pre-existing narrative by taking characters like Miles Morales, Old Man Logan, The Maestro, and The Maker and adding them to the Earth 616 continuity.
It does not seem like a particularly good idea to reboot the MCU, particularly because of something else Winderbaum says: “It’s a very difficult thing to do to a living, breathing fictional universe to just start from scratch, because of all of the fan investment and love for the stories that have come so far.”
In other words, at this point, the MCU encompasses 17 years, dozens of movies, TV series, and even a few “Special Presentations” on Disney+. If you reboot the MCU, you tell the fans that none of that happened, and to many that would come off like a betrayal.
“The Flash” may have rebooted the DCEU into the DCU, but the DCEU’s library was nothing like Marvel Studio’s. Yet despite it all, that reboot has incensed plenty of fans of Zack Snyder’s work who still campaign to undo the reboot. Imagine, comparatively speaking, what the response would be from Marvel fans to have 17 years of media deemed “not canon”.
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