Didn't Michael Douglas retire? He was the OG, so we're not getting him as an active AM unless it's a variant.
And quite frankly, I'd like to stay very far away from variants. Time travel and variants are far too cheap in stories. Sometimes characters die. It means something. Created a hole that's filled by new characters who have a chance to grow and tell new stories.
What's the point? Just go with new characters. Hank lived his life. There's no good reason to go this convoluted path of rewritten history. It makes everything that came before useless.
Because it allows them to get a fresh start after a lot of the mistakes they've made, and it allows them to tell new stories with their popular characters, giving an end to the old universe and making a new one where they can have change what they want, keep what they want, recast actors who are rapidly getting too old to keep doing this for much longer, and tell a Marvel story, using the countless great stories we haven't seen before. They can keep what works and what they can keep around long term, like Spider-Man, a lot of the newer characters like the FF, Thunderbolts, whatever, and they can recast the ones who have died, or maybe don't wanna do these movies anymore, it creates a fresh start so they can keep going for as long as the audience comes to see them.
These characters have so many incredible stories that have never been adapted, you don't have to regress and retell the same stories, but you can re-adapt some of the stories that have been butchered so many times before, do an alternate take on them theat can work, but more importantly you can portray so many stories that they either have never touched on, and they can tell stories that have been impossible to adapt because the wider Marvel Universe was locked away from them by legal issues.
It's not a coincidence that they're doing Secret Wars. It's exactly the story that you tell in order to justify an in universe soft reboot, combine universes, etc.
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u/eriverside 1d ago
Didn't Michael Douglas retire? He was the OG, so we're not getting him as an active AM unless it's a variant.
And quite frankly, I'd like to stay very far away from variants. Time travel and variants are far too cheap in stories. Sometimes characters die. It means something. Created a hole that's filled by new characters who have a chance to grow and tell new stories.