They put the Tesseract in Thor all the way back in 2011, carried through into Captain America and Avengers 1. You can see Thanos crushing it in the trailer for Infinity War, to remove the infinity stone that's within it. The other stones have also been littered throughout various other films. That's pretty far reaching as far as planning goes.
No theres more to it than that....How the Thor, Iron Man & Capn Trilogies fit into the Avengers movies....& all the new characters introduced with their own films
The comics are there as a guide for ideas, but the films tell those stories very differently ...Age of Ultron comic for example has two alternate Earths,.....Spidey, She-Hulk, Wolverine, The Fantastic Four, Luke Cage, Ant-Man etc are all involved
J
Going back and considering the content of the films in Marvel's various phases (Phase I: Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Cap: 1st Avenger, Thor, Avengers, Iron Man 2; Phase II: Iron Man 3, Cap: Winter Soldier, Thor: Dark World, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: AoU), I think it's pretty safe to say that
within each film, the stories aren't usually that closely connected to each other, or to the overall plot of the Phase finale (Avengers, and Avengers: AoU). There are things which are seeded in the initial films of each Phase that pay off in the final film, and the events of the initial films all are relevant to the final film, but the films are otherwise generally distinct from each other. In other words, if you watch Ant-Man having never seen ANY Marvel film before, the story stands as a single, contained film. You don't really need to see anything else to understand the rest of it. The longer the series runs, the more interconnected the films become and the more references they make to each other, but even so, the films overall do not
require that you know what came before.
The Star Wars films are different. They are serial in nature. Each story does not merely build upon the previous story -- each story is "required reading" to know what's going on to inform the overall tale. The initial chapter of the OT stands fine on its own. The final chapter stands...ok-ish on its own. But the middle chapters? It's really difficult to watch those as standalone films, disconnected from the greater whole. They still work as films in the sense of telling a contained story, but that story is so obviously part of a larger tale that it becomes impossible to really appreciate the film as a separate animal. That's different from Marvel's phases.
My point in all of this is that Marvel's phases are constructed more like a mix of an outline and a desire to leverage individual IPs than as a single, coherent tale where each film is like a chapter in a book. When people say "But I want it to work like Marvel movies do," my answer is "No, you don't. And that's not how Star Wars has ever worked or works." People seem to believe that there's no plan whatsoever, because Rian was free to move in a direction other than what JJ heavily implied would happen. I think that there is a plan, but it's nowhere near as detailed as people think, and that the same is true for the Marvel films.
I think what people
really want is what they perceive existing at Marvel as a kind of restriction on where you can take characters and what you can have them do within your films. In this regard, they likely think that Edgar Wright's take on Ant-Man proves that Marvel
forces not only a "house style" but also tighter controls on directors -- which is something they think is absent in the new Star Wars films.
I think they're wrong.
I think that Disney absolutely is controlling the direction of Star Wars, it's just not taking that franchise in a direction that these people
like. That's not to say "There's no plan" or "Directors are allowed to do whatever the hell they want." Clearly, that's not the case. Nor is it the case with the Marvel films. I would bet it's a very similar level of control. Towards this end, I think there are four good examples. On the one hand, Ant-Man and Solo. On the other, Thor: Ragnarok and The Last Jedi. The former films were taken away from their original directors and given to someone else who could handle the project the way the studio wanted. the latter required the directors to color within the lines, but otherwise let them go nuts with the crayon box. And the latter films are both VERY different from what came before. No argument there. I think what folks
want from Star Wars (well, some folks, anyway) is for the studio to be saying "No, you have to use THIS color of red, and you have to be sure you use the following specific colors, too..." And that's not how either LFL or Marvel handles their properties. People can take issue with that, but I think the comparisons to Marvel being better than LFL have more to do with just people's baseline enjoyment of the Marvel films than with any overarching plan that Marvel uses and which LFL does not. They both have plans, although Marvel advertises the
concept of its plan (as "Phases") more clearly as a marketing tool. They both also have house styles and such, but again, Marvel is more obvious about it and LFL isn't.
#8 was crafted carefully enough to avoid making any literal retcons. But it was still thematically way off.
I would find the difference more excusable if the step from #7 to #8 had been a difference in trilogies. Reboot, whatever. If there had been a number of years (real and/or fictional) between them.
But #7 literally walked into #8 the same way that Rogue One walked into ANH. Imagine if RO had spent the whole movie suggesting that Jane Erso was going to survive & have more of a story, and then ANH unceremoniously killed her off in the first scene for a joke. That's a bad move no matter how well the new script excuses it.
Again, I think this is more of an issue of a failure of the franchise to manage expectations. People expected essentially a continuation of JJ's approach to the film, which involves a bunch of BIIIIIIIIIG IMPORTANT MYSTERIES to hook your interest, which may or may not have any actual satisfying resolution to them, while otherwise basically just doing exactly what Lucas did, only louder, faster, and with quicker cuts and more action sequences. Case in point: Rey's parentage. Who here thinks that Rian Johnson saw that Rey was Obi-Wan Kenobi's granddaughter and said "That's dumb. I'm gonna make her a nobody instead." Anyone? Bueller? I think that the real answer is simply that Rey was always a nobody, but JJ wanted to hook you with a tantalizing sense that there might be some biiiiiiiig important story there, only he was never going to deliver on it. He'd probably have dragged it out through the next film, and only revealed it in the penultimate act of the final film that, in fact, her parents were drunken traders who ditched her for a case of hooch. (P.S. That still might not end up being the case, and what we may have is that
for Rey's story in the second film, what was important was that
she believed she was nobody. We'll see if that ever changes. I hope it doesn't.) Remember, JJ thinks that the sense of anticipation and speculation, the sense of mystery, is more important than the resolution. This is his "mystery box" approach to storytelling, and it's
garbage. It almost never pays off effectively, because he's
always more interested in the question than the answer, which is usually either stupidly obvious (in which case, why build it up as a big mystery?) or anticlimactic (in which case....why build it up as a big mystery?). I think what Rian likely did was decided to simply dispense with the mystery and get on to telling the
actual story of the characters and their experiences, which is much more interesting than analyzing breadcrumbs that lead to a mostly-eaten stale chunk of bread.
What I mean is that the rich history of the comics IS the Marvel master plan and it's always been there. Perhaps in a decade there will be enough SW content to have that depth of source material. I understand where you are coming from, however, I have some OCD and want things to fit together as well.
