James Mangold has become The Anti-Monitor.

I, for one, welcome this.

Time to scrape away the barnacles and start fresh!

Seems like he's talking more about interconnected cinematic universes rather than multi-verses.

So this is another "They're not cinema" type dealio.

Subject to hanzo's point, Mangold is correct. The studios are looking for a particular driver of a guaranteed audience. In the old days that was the star system and that has continued up through the very recent past. What made you come out to see a movie was the star. I'd like to get back to that, rather than interconnected stories that are a branded promise.

Well, adapting a shared-universe property that comes with all kinds of continuity, and established characters, and fan expectations, and expectations from the studio that you'll maximize their IP no doubt would feel like a creative straitjacket for a movie director. At the end of the day you're expected to do somebody's else's story, somebody else's way. Might make for an interesting technical challenge and a good payday, but it's probably not the sort of thing many aspiring directors dream of doing. Even comic book geek directors who've always dreamed of making an Avengers movie or whatever have dreamed of doing it THEIR way, not the way the producers and marketers and special effects concept people tell them to do it.

I think I'd like something in between, mirroring the level of continuity we mostly saw in Silver and Bronze Age Marvel and DC comics. Each title was it's own self-contained oasis but could pull in characters to guest-star whenever it served the title character. They could team them up in Justice League / Avengers type books, but you'd never need to read, say, Batman or Thor to know what's going on in their team books.

I feel this is the way the first two waves of Marvel Studios movies were -- remember when we saw Captain America's shield in Tony's lab in the background and people got all excited? That's how self-contained they were at the start. IMHO, they should just go back to that.

Mangold is way behind the times.

Storytelling died in May 1977 when Marvel began publishing What If?

These people horrify me.

I'm intentionally ignoring The Flash of Two Worlds. For no reason whatsoever.