Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

[Mr Light]

Yeah they've already said it would be way too confusing for audiences to show Coulson alive, since nobody watches the tv show. Here's another thought; they could show the SHIELD tv team minus Coulson and just not explain who they are; they're just a generic SHIELD team fighting aliens.

 

[dahj]

Yeah they've already said it would be way too confusing for audiences to show Coulson alive, since nobody watches the tv show.

If this was 1982 I might agree, but we're living in the age of the internet.
For people who care that much about continuity in these films it would have been impossible to miss he's alive on a TV show even if they've never seen a second of it. People who don't care about continuity wouldn't be bothered by it either way.

 

[Star Wolf]

If this was 1982 I might agree, but we're living in the age of the internet.
For people who care that much about continuity in these films it would have been impossible to miss he's alive on a TV show even if they've never seen a second of it. People who don't care about continuity wouldn't be bothered by it either way.

I agree it is a strange prejudice to take that someone watched the second post credit stinger and won't be confused but then that they will be confused about a TV show with its own collection of magazine stories and message board post attached to the movie's extended universe. I think it comes down to "I am a MOVIE director" and I won't be limited like little brother over there who still has to do what a TV show runner makes him do

 

[Christopher]

I agree it is a strange prejudice to take that someone watched the second post credit stinger and won't be confused but then that they will be confused about a TV show with its own collection of magazine stories and message board post attached to the movie's extended universe. I think it comes down to "I am a MOVIE director" and I won't be limited like little brother over there who still has to do what a TV show runner makes him do

Is there anything in the post-credit stingers that's really indispensable to understanding subsequent films? They're mostly just teasers for things that get re-established later on anyway -- they raise questions for the audience that a later film answers (What's an Avengers Initiative? What has Coulson found in Nevada? Who's the purple guy with the chin?). Sometimes they're even excerpts from a later film. And some are just punch lines with no long-term significance (like the shawarma scene or the Howard the Duck cameo).

It's just part of a lot of series writing to keep in mind that not everyone in your audience will see everything that's out there. So you have to find a balance between being consistent with another part of the whole and being independent enough from it that you don't confuse those unfamiliar with it. Which is done by reintroducing elements, explaining and re-establishing them when they're brought in rather than simply expecting the audience to know them. For instance, look at how Arrow brought in John Constantine earlier this season. Rather than expecting the Arrow audience to have seen Constantine, they took the time to reintroduce him and explain his abilities and his world, with only a few subtle allusions to his own show. The issue with Coulson isn't that it's impossible in general to reference something the whole audience hasn't seen -- it's that it needs to be explained in-story, and explaining something as big as Coulson's resurrection would be so complex that there just wouldn't be room for it in a movie that's already got to serve a ton of other plot and character threads.

 

[dahj]

^^
"I thought you were dead?"
"I got better."

What more is there to explain?

It's not unprecedented, in Thor, Thor destroys bifrost cutting himself off from Earth, and then in the Avengers he's just there...

 

[Reverend]

^They specifically address that.

Besides, that requires a lot less explanation than Coulson just showing up. He wasn't just some secondary character killed off for dramatic effect. His death was significant and meaningful in that it's what motivated the Avengers prior to the final fight with Loki and brought them together as a team.

It can be done, but it'd need more than just a single line of dialogue.

One way to do it would be if they eventually did an AoS movie (unlikely in the foreseeable future but not impossible) and have an original Avenger (preferably Cap or Tony) at least cameo so they can do that "how are you not dead!?" scene.

 

[DWF]

But the Bilfrost is there in The Dark World with no explaination of how it was repaired.

 

[Reverend]

But the Bilfrost is there in The Dark World with no explaination of how it was repaired.

Well it was build by Asgardians in the first place no? Stands to reason they'd know how to rebuild it in time.
I mean you don't question how in AoU Stark/Avenger Tower is rebuilt and remodelled without explanation, since it's pretty obvious, no?

Incidentally, I think there's an explanation in one of the tie-in comics which said Odin used the power of the tesseract to rebuild the bifrost, but I don't generally consider that stuff binding as very few in the audience are ever going to read it.

Personally I'm fine with them getting it back up and running on their own, just that it wasn't ready yet when they (most likely Heimdall) spotted Loki was alive and on the move with an army of Chitauri at his back.

 

[dahj]

It can be done, but it'd need more than just a single line of dialogue.

But they did the whole lengthy explanation on the show.
Acknowledging it happened is more than enough, and then people who really want to know the details can check em up, there's no need for re-explaining.

Look at the begining of Age of Ultron. They're getting back the Loki's scepter, but nobody explains "oh S.H.I.E.L.D. had it, then Hydra destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D. from the inside, took all the magical stuff ,scepter included, brought it to Strucker, yadda, yadda, yadda."
"Strucker has Scepter" is sufficient information that needs to be imparted, rest you can watch if you wish in Cap:WS or AoS, but you don't have to.
Likewise "Coulson is alive" would be enough information.

 

[DWF]

Well it was build by Asgardians in the first place no? Stands to reason they'd know how to rebuild it in time.
I mean you don't question how in AoU Stark/Avenger Tower is rebuilt and remodelled without explanation, since it's pretty obvious, no?

Incidentally, I think there's an explanation in one of the tie-in comics which said Odin used the power of the tesseract to rebuild the bifrost, but I don't generally consider that stuff binding as very few in the audience are ever going to read it.

Personally I'm fine with them getting it back up and running on their own, just that it wasn't ready yet when they (most likely Heimdall) spotted Loki was alive and on the move with an army of Chitauri at his back.

More than likely it was magically created b y Odin, but that's ot even kown in the movie version. In the comics the bridge was broken by Surtur and eventually magically fixed by Odin. But there's ot evena reference in TDW about how it was restored.

 

[DWF]

But they did the whole lengthy explanation on the show.
Acknowledging it happened is more than enough, and then people who really want to know the details can check em up, there's no need for re-explaining.

Look at the begining of Age of Ultron. They're getting back the Loki's scepter, but nobody explains "oh S.H.I.E.L.D. had it, then Hydra destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D. from the inside, took all the magical stuff ,scepter included, brought it to Strucker, yadda, yadda, yadda."
"Strucker has Scepter" is sufficient information that needs to be imparted, rest you can watch if you wish in Cap:WS or AoS, but you don't have to.
Likewise "Coulson is alive" would be enough information.

I would be surprised if Coulson's return wasn't common knowledge by this point.

 

[bbjeg]

I thought Shield's info dump would have confirmed Coulson's reanimation and/or continuing existence.

 

[Reverend]

I thought Shield's info dump would have confirmed Coulson's reanimation and/or continuing existence.

Not *everything* was actually on those servers as it turns out. Both Hydra and Fury clearly had a lot of off-the-books operations, clearly T.A.H.I.T.I. was one of them.

But yeah, by this point it's getting increasingly hard to believe that word of Coulson's return hasn't filtered back to at least some of the Avengers, particularly given that more that one US government agency has had direct contact with him. I suppose Maria Hill may be partly responsible for running interference on that front, perhaps even covertly putting some covert filter into JARVIS's protocols to erase any trace he came across, but even that can't accout for anything going forwards.
I was going to cite Sif keeping quiet for going on three years now, but then I remembered that she is over 1000 years old. Three years is hardly any time at all from her POV and I suppose she is bound to honour Coulson's request to be the one to inform Thor...eventually.

 

[JD]

All they would really need to say is that S.H.I.E.L.D. resurrected him as part of a secret program. They really don't need to get more detailed than that.
As for the 67 characters, I doubt all of them will be in the final movie. It sounds to me like those are just the characters that are available to them right now. I don't think they've even started on a script yet.

 

[Christopher]

I thought Shield's info dump would have confirmed Coulson's reanimation and/or continuing existence.

I'm not talking about explaining it to the characters, but about explaining it to the audience. It's easy enough to assume that the Avengers in Age of Ultron do, in fact, know that Coulson is alive. But actually including that as a story point -- in a substantial and emotionally meaningful enough way that it wouldn't have gratuitously cheapened the events of The Avengers -- just wouldn't have been feasible unless it could've been a central part of the film's plot.

 

[WiredPlanet]

Enchantress?

was there a female Quasar?

kinda fits in with these comics?

 

[Mr Light]

Ugh. Compare Bendis-speak Thanos dialogue versus the way he talks in Hickman's Avengers. "I'll kill you! I'll kill you all! I'll kill your whole universe!"

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I thought Shield's info dump would have confirmed Coulson's reanimation and/or continuing existence.

They made a specific point that Daisy was wiping all records of their existence.

That being said, I kind of hope they subvert Coulson's return:

Coulson: "I'm alive."
Stark: "Yeah, we know. It's kind of the worst kept secret ever."

And that's all the explanation needed.

 

[Christopher]

And that's all the explanation needed.

Maybe if you only care about factual continuity, but that's one of the least important factors in the decision. Coulson's death in The Avengers was an immensely powerful moment emotionally, not just as some cold, shallow factoid. And so bringing him back in a later movie without giving his return some emotional meaning and weight would be wrong. It would be as if in Return of the Jedi, Yoda and Obi-Wan had told Luke, "Nope, Vader was just kidding you, he's not your dad" and then it were forgotten after that one line. Or, heck, as if they'd opened Star Trek III with "Captain's log, supplemental. Now that Spock has been successfully resurrected by the Genesis Planet and returned to active duty, we are proceeding to our next assignment." That would obviously be terrible. You simply do not put an emotionally powerful event in one movie and then reverse it with the minimum possible effort in the next. Not unless you're a really, really bad storyteller, which Joss Whedon obviously is not.

The only reason Coulson's resurrection worked dramatically and emotionally in the TV series is that they had the room they needed to make it an ongoing focus of the story and to make his revival a source of problems and personal angst for him, rather than just a handwavey erasure of a powerful moment. The only way it could've made sense to bring him back in the movies is if they could've done something similarly extensive and meaningful, and not only did they not have room, but it'd be kind of redundant since the series has already done it. Sure, the whole discussion is predicated on the fact that many moviegoers won't know about the show, but the show is still part of the larger universe, and you want to make choices that balance the needs of both the individual parts and the larger whole. In both regards, Coulson's life after death is a thread that's better served as part of the TV side of things.

 

[dahj]

^^
Coulson isn't Spock, he's more like Wedge Antilles.