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Spider-Man: No Way Home felt like the end of something, didn't it? Surely things couldn't get much bigger or more punch-your-cinema-seat, launch-your-popcorn crowd-pleasing than that.
Certainly, Marvel couldn't ask for more from its box office. Tom Holland looked like he was trying to give himself a route out with an Uncharted franchise, and unless the Shang-Chi sequel gets Ainsley Harriott to barge in shouting "Why hello Jill!", we're not going to get a real life-meme crossover to challenge the three Spider-Men pointing at each other.
But it turns out that No Way Home wasn't the end of anything. Tom Holland's Spider-Man is getting another film – in fact producer Amy Pascal has promised another trilogy, though it's not confirmed Holland will do all of them – and Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige has confirmed the wheels are in motion.
"All I will say is that we have the story," Feige told Entertainment Weekly. "We have big ideas for that, and our writers are just putting pen to paper now."
Which feels both quite good – Holland and his Spider-Man crew have been a lot of fun, and there's not a dud among his movies – and a bit disconcerting. Among the other announcements Marvel has made in the last day or so, there's a bit of a theme developing: the studio is consciously taking things back to first principles, and bolstering its very slightly listing ship with the things which made the first three phases of the MCU such juggernauts.
The Marvels is, Feige said, "only akin to the first Avengers movie and seeing the six of them together in a frame". Then you hit the news that Harrison Ford has signed up to play American president Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: New World Order. He's a special case, even compared to Christian Bale and Russell Crowe popping up in the last Thor film.
Ford stands in the lineage of Hollywood megastar blokes of yore – a time when they could have opened a film on their own, when their wattage meant bums on seats – to have jumped for a Marvel cameo. Like Robert Redford tweaking his Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men personae, Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, Anthony Hopkins in Thor and the former Thaddeus Ross, William Hurt.
"With Harrison," Feige said, "you think about Air Force One, and you think about some of his confrontations with the president in Clear and Present Danger."
Feige himself even sounded a bit misty-eyed when he started talking about the prospect of Ryan Reynolds (first appearance in a Marvel film: 2009) hooking up again with Hugh Jackman (his first Marvel entry was in 2000) for Deadpool 3.
"I remember sitting behind the camera — well behind the camera — at [Jackman's] audition for the film," he said. “It was his first on-set audition, and he flew up to Toronto to do a read with Anna Paquin. For him, and for me, and I think for all of the fans of Marvel, it's unbelievable what has happened in those 23 years."
The last two of those 23 years, though, have been slightly up and down for Marvel. Spider-Man: No Way Home was an unqualified triumph, but attempts to repeat formulas which have worked before (getting Taika Waititi to put a donk on Thor) and to rustle up some arthouse clout (multiple Oscar winner Chloé Zhao's leaden Eternals) didn't show a clear path it could take head next.
The general sense of a lack of direction hasn't been helped by turning round absolutely loads of TV shows either. It's easy to take your eye off the ball and realise that everything's changed in the six months and two series that have happened since the last Marvel thing you watched. Speaking personally, Marvel shows have become a triage process rather than a televisual event. Some of us have lives to live. I cannot spend all of mine watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I simply cannot.
So the idea is to refocus: do fewer TV shows, break the Grand Old Man Of Cinema glass, keep Holland around for at least one more spin, get another Avengers-style team-up in the pipeline. It seems sensible.
Marvel has, perhaps, recognised that it had maxed itself out. Its third phase was a series of rolling pop cultural moments; in the last couple of years it's felt more like a never-ending parade of content, an ambient hum. Now it's given itself a chance to get out of its own way again.
