Question for discussion: why is continuity pretty highly regarded in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while the median opinion of continuity for Trek appears to be "If you can make it fit continuity, sure, why not?"
Because the MCU gets
way more credit for its continuity than it really deserves. I mean, if you really sit down and think through MCU continuity, it all falls apart pretty quickly. For instance: How is it that SHIELD was in the middle of building a big giant Triskelion building on Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River in 1989 (as established by
Ant-Man), and yet it was so obscure as an organization that Agent Coulson kept giving out its name in 2010 or 2011 without anyone having heard of them (per
Iron Man)? (It's even worse in
Agents of SHIELD, which establishes that SHIELD's existence was literally unknown to the public until
The Avengers -- as though no one was going to ask what the giant skyscraper of an HQ was doing just off the Lincoln Memorial!)
And there's more: If Hydra agents controlled a significant percentage of SHIELD before they were exposed in 2014, how come they didn't just steal the Tesseract away to a Hydra base decades before Fury began trying to experiment with Asgardian technology? If the Winter Soldier was a brainwashed Hydra assassin, why did he wear a Soviet red star and speak Russian? (Seriously -- why would you brainwash an English-speaker with your Russian branch? Much easier to brainwash someone using the language of their birth.)
Avengers: Endgame establishes that you can't actually change your own past and time travel just creates new branching timelines... and then somehow magically Steve Rogers is there at the end, elderly, after having traveled back in time, having used up all his time travel serum, and somehow he's magically back in his own timeline instead of the branching timeline he created by staying with Peggy. In
Spider-Man: Far From Home, we find that the overwhelming trauma of the Snappening -- with its cities so devastated that they're partially in ruins even five years later -- is just brushed aside for the fun and whimsy of Peter's adventure. We're supposed to buy that the clash of the Avengers was a huge deal that could lead to serious prison time in
Civil War, but then
Ant-Man and the Wasp reveals Scott only gets house arrest? And how exactly did the Hulk end up on Trash Planet?
And that's not even trying to figure out how to add events from the MCU-branded TV shows in. I have no idea how or where to fit in Wilson Fisk setting half of Manhattan on fire in S1 of
Daredevil, for instance.
Then there's just the messed up timeline.
Avengers: Endgame establishes that the original
Avengers film took place in 2012.
The Avengers establishes that it takes place one year after
Thor.
Thor takes place the same week as
Iron Man 2, and
Iron Man 2 takes place six months after
Iron Man.
Spider-Man: Homecoming's opening establishes that it takes place eight years after
The Avengers, and dialogue establishes it is set six months after
Captain America: Civil War. Dialogue in CA:CW establishes that it is set eight years after IM. That gives us this timeline, using 2012 for
The Avengers as our baseline:
Year -1.5 (
Iron Man) = Late 2010 at the earliest
Year -1 (
Thor, Iron Man 2) = Mid-2011
Year 0 (
The Avengers) = Mid-2012
Year 6.5 (
Captain America: Civil War, 8 years after Year -1.5) = Mid-2018
Year 7 (
Spider-Man: Homecoming, .5 years after CA:CW) = late 2018 or early 2019...
But
Spider-Man: Homecoming is also supposed to be eight years after
Avengers, which would put it into 2020...!
As far as I can recall, I don't think I've ever read a review or a comment about the MCU which was along the lines of "These movies fit together nearly seamlessly, and I guess that's OK, but their efforts could have been better spent elsewhere." The MCU receives praise for its efforts, usually with acknowledgement that it makes the stories more believable and the characters more understandable.
Again, people severely overstate the continuity of the MCU films. Not only are they full of little errors, but, more to the point, up until the
Infinity War/Endgame duology, the continuity bits don't
really matter to the individual films. Yeah, it's nice that we've seen Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis before, but
Black Panther would not be a fundamentally different film if they were absent. Seeing Black Widow in
Iron Man 2 and
The Avengers adds some depth to her role in
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but honestly
The Winter Soldier could have been done immediately after
The First Avenger without much loss of quality.
Guardians of the Galaxy's crossovers pre-IW/EG are almost nonexistent. For most of the MCU films, the bits of continuity are just little Easter eggs either tacked on at the end (e.g., Thanos in
Avengers: Age of Ultron or Benecio Del Torro's character at the end of
Thor: The Dark World), or are minor elements compared to a larger plot. Hell, they event had to re-write their own continuity on the fly and insert a random scene of Cate Blanchett calling the Infinity Gauntlet on display in Asgard's vault "fake" in
Thor: Ragnarok so that the forging of the Gauntlet could be a plot point in
Avengers: Infinity War.
Really, MCU creates more of an
illusion of continuity than real full continuity. And their attitude towards continuity basically boils down to, "Try to make it look like it fits together, but don't let that get in the way of the story." Which is basically what the median attitude towards ST continuity is.
