Marvel's Continuity Errors: Born Again

Where.

The fuck.

Is Spider-Man?

    I've been watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the Marvel Cinematic Universe was something that could be watched. I still have my ticket for Iron Man's opening weekend somewhere in my basement. At the time, I didn't really understand what, or how unprecedented, a "cinematic universe" actually was. These are superheroes, they work together, the Avengers hang out, Spider-Man has friends. To child me, growing up with a myriad of cartoons, game adaptations, tv shows, comic books, posters, toy sets, and all manner of other adaptations where superheroes fraternized on a regular basis, the idea that these heroes should fight crime together on the big screen to me was... obvious?

It wouldn't be until 2012's Avengers released that I truly understood (and could be functionally cognitive about) the magnitude of what was actually happening. The Steve Rogers from that one Captain America movie is beating up Chitauri with the Thor from that one Thor movie. The Hulk wasn't the Hulk from that one Hulk movie, but who cared? I was 12? Big green monster throwing cars at aliens was a good enough distraction for me to not care about why Bruce Banner didn't look like Bruce Banner but was still definitely Bruce Banner. Also, Iron Man was there, that Iron Man, the same Iron Man from the movie I went to see on opening night with my dad.

This magic would make Avengers my favorite movie of all time until I was in my 20s. The older I got, the more I realized that it wasn't a flawless masterpiece, but I was increasingly able to appreciate what actually had been done to pull it together.

Marvel and Disney together sold audiences a promise, that these characters would interact, all of them. They had to, it had to feel interconnected in a way movies hadn't accomplished on such a large scale prior to it. While I had questions about where Spider-Man was the entire time,  Andrew Garfield was suiting up elsewhere, and I didn't really care as much about whether or not he specifically was part of the Avengers. He's only mostly ever been a part-time Avenger in the comics so, fine, I guess.

The important thing was that, for the most part, the continuity in the MCU was damn near flawless, every hero was either present or had an alibi, the timeline followed the real-life progression of time. 2012 events in Marvel movies happened in 2012 in real life. Neat.

Marvel never forgot or deliberately ignored continuity details. Even when fewer people had seen Thor than Iron Man, there was a pervasive insistence that the events in all of the movies mattered and would have immediate consequences, and that insistence is the high tide that rose all ships.

In 2015, Sony and Marvel would ink a truly bizarre and unheard of deal: Sony would let Marvel's prodigal son, Spider-Man, play around with the big kids at the Mouse's House. I remember the headlines, the fan art, I remember exactly where I was when I found out (9th grade biology class); this was fucking huge. In the words of Doctor Strange, this was huge "on a scale hitherto undreamt of". 

So huge in fact, that Marvel would fast track his debut, throwing him into the following year's Captain America: Civil War. Spider-Man is Marvel, Spider-Man is Superheroes. He's the most marketable character in fiction and, by some estimates, the highest earning piece of merchandise in history. Subsequent features including Spider-Man would reflect this in their gargantuan Box Office numbers. He was, is, and forever will be, a Box Office juggernaut, even on his worst day. 

In the Post-Endgame soft-reboot-esque landscape of the MCU, Spider-Man would find himself metaphorically shot out of the sky, down on his luck, and returning to his non-space-faring roots as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Roaming the streets of New York and helping the little guy, Spider-Man was finally back to his equilibrium state, after four years of running around with aliens and gods, and alien gods.

On the smaller screen, Marvel had had little to no interest in manufacturing their own smaller scale TV shows, instead choosing to license out a handful of their street-level heroes to Netflix under the banner of "The Defenders". This included Daredevil, Luke Cage, and quite a few other heroes that range from historically significant legacy heroes to glorified side characters.

While the Defenders were very much handling their own business on the ground between 2015 and 2018, they would acknowledge their presence in the MCU by loosely referring to "the big green guy" or "the incident" (referring to the Alien invasion of New York in 2012). However, as time went on, and their stories needed to be more grounded and less impacted by the events taking place in theaters, Netflix's Defenders fell further and further away from MCU continuity, before eventually being retconned out of the larger universe entirely.

This was the first major fracture in the continuity. As Marvel progressed closer and closer to the end of it's near impossibly manicured "Infinity Saga", the Universe began to show its cracks, real-world legality and licensing would infringe upon this magic as studios warred over ownership of the most profitable brand IP in history. How could Universal let go of The Hulk when Marvel was making billions on a quarterly basis? How could Sony let go of Spider-Man? How could Fox let go of the gargantuan X-Men?

As The Defenders fell out of continuity and eventually be cancelled, and Marvel began to dabble in the multiverse, as licensing agreements would be juggled like balls of fire, Marvel and Disney's universe got sloppy. Among an increasing number of continuity errors, infamously, Spider-Man: Homecoming would get the date of the invasion of New York blatantly wrong, leading to MCU executives to declare that the MCU did not actually progress in real time, but that the events were on some vague sliding timeline where events happen in some order but not really, just maybe don't look into it too much.

All of this would eventually culminate in the "Multiverse Saga" where a bunch of inexplicably ludicrous shit happens and audiences could no longer follow anything going on because the sanctity of the Cinematic universe had been tainted by inconsistent time travel and multiversal nonsense that would always get loosely explained away by "eh, don't look into it too much". While this is possibly forgivable, a far more egregious offense would be that Marvel would begin to blatantly ignore major events if the movies didn't perform well enough at the box office (see: The Eternals positioning half of a fucking Celestial in the Indian ocean and it going unaddressed for four years but also the timeline is on a slider now so it doesn't matter how many real world years it's been, but it does).

This issue is critical, because while the promise of the MCU began as "all the toys together in the toy box", the more important narrative was that "the toys lived in an immersive world that audiences can live in", things can't be inconsequential or go unaddressed for half a decade. But God forbid a movie underperforms, then whatever outrageous shit happened can go unanswered until it's convenient to bring it up again (this isn't about Brave New World, so I won't even get into what a shit show that was).

Lastly on this note of how all these characters got to where they are today, Marvel would eventually announce the 2025 return of Charlie Cox's Daredevil as "Daredevil: Born Again", a promise to once again solidify the Devil of Hell's Kitchen firmly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The show's primary function in the greater Universe was to tell stories about Daredevil that happen in the MCU, with a focus on smaller scale things instead of Time Travel and Incursions and aliens, and gods, and alien gods. Much fanfare, Geezaws likes.

However, Born Again would come and go, and Marvel's ever-so-important New York would be usurped by Crime Kingpin Wilson Fisk, who would have a brutal police kill squad roam the streets with impunity, shut down the entire city's power grid, and try and establish a global crime facility in Red Hook. These are not small concerns, arguably too small for the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, but not small at all. In it's season finale, Born Again had outgrown Hell's Kitchen, and had now concerned itself with a potentially global threat. 

Despite all of this happening and the seemingly blatant inability for Marvel to keep its shit together, they have done quite a miraculous job of making sure that virtually no other heroes are in New York while Born Again is unfolding. If we assume that the Netflix universe isn't canon and only Daredevil and it's current gallery were ever canon, then the only heroes in New York are Daredevil and The Punisher, both of whom are active in handling Fisk's operation.

Right?

Echo is in Oklahoma, Kamala Khan is in California presumably forming the Champions with Kate Bishop who is theoretically being trained by Clint Barton, Marc Spector is most likely in London. Everyone's accounted for. No one is available to help Daredevil's war on Fisk in New York City except for The Punisher. Which is why, when Daredevil suggests to build an army, the only people present are a handful of police officers, especially since the Punisher had been kidnapped by Fisk's kill squad by the end of the season.

...

...

...

Actually, hold on.

Where.

The fuck.

Is Spider-Man?

As previously described, Marvel has had a long history with continuity errors, but the truth is that in the last few years they've seemingly tried quite hard to cross their T's and dot their I's, and tie up some older loose ends. Other minor issues are largely forgivable offenses. But with New York under martial law, haunted by a 60 body serial killer in Muse, and suffering an all out war permeating the entirety of Manhattan, the fact that "New York's Hero", Spider-Man, is nowhere to be found, might genuinely be the single most egregious offense in the MCU's 17 years.

Spider-Man is bigger than Marvel, he's bigger than Superheroes in general, he has a fucking Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float. He's an icon, he might be the icon. His entire deal is that he's the hero of New York. So for him to be MIA while all of this is going on is, quite simply, a disgusting bastardization of the character.

There's all sorts of technicality involved, Marvel gets to use Spider-Man in TV shows shorter than 30 minutes but everything above 30 minutes is apparently considered feature film length, I'd imagine neither Disney nor Sony want to put Spider-Man in an R-Rated production, you risk overshadowing Daredevil in his own show by putting Spider-Man in Born Again: I get it.

But also, I don't.

When your entire brand is based off of the feeling of interconnectivity then you cannot procure situations where characters that narratively must connect, don't. You risk either devaluing the characters in question or, worse, devaluing the interconnectivity of the entire brand.

Daredevil has already been removed from the MCU once, it cannot happen a second time. The alternative is that Spider-Man is being narratively alienated from the MCU, which is not only more baffling from a casual audience perspective, but is one of the worst financial misfires any studio could fathom.

The MCU lives and dies on its feeling of immersion and interconnectivity, otherwise it's just a bunch of superhero movies and shows that someone could watch whenever, and if the MCU isn't must watch event content, then it's "I'll watch it when there's nothing else on or if a character I care about shows up" content. Whereas other franchises may get by with continuity errors because they're not necessarily integral to the story, continuity is integral to the MCU. Continuity Errors are irreparable fractures in the entire brand.

This must, must be rectified.

There are two ways this can go down.

1) The more likely solution is that the War on Fisk plays a pivotal role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. However, something tells me Sony doesn't want their movie infringed upon by Daredevil, and Daredevil does not deserve to have his show culminate in someone else's movie.

2) The less likely solution is that Spider-Man shows up in Season 2 and has any viable excuse as to why he wasn't on the ground in Born Again. Though I imagine this would warrant yet another bespoke deal between Disney and Sony that I'm not sure either party is interested in brokering.

Neither of these options are easy to digest, but if neither of them are realized, Daredevil and/or Spider-Man risk being ousted from the MCU. However, even if they are ousted, they'll almost certainly be reintegrated whenever convenient.

But what won't and can't be reintegrated whenever convenient, is the audience's faith in the interconnectivity. While Marvel fans will always tune in, regardless of the interconnectivity, casual audiences will have no reason to watch everything to understand the whole story. If they don't have to watch everything, they will soon realize they don't have to watch anything. This issue has actually already started manifesting as a result of the Disney+ paywall and the Original Shows actually having severe implications on the franchise (see: Loki).

I didn't tell Marvel to swear that Born Again was canon, I didn't tell them to have Fisk shut down Spider-Man's New York, and I certainly didn't tell Marvel to run this story while Tom Holland's new contract was being finalized and not include a clause for TV cameo appearances.

Here we are though, and as much as I enjoyed the story of Born Again, to be told that the Universe is interconnected time and time again, the only thing me and other fans could wonder was:

Where.

The fuck.

Is Spider-Man?

And as the MCU threatens to keep going, a growing with new heroes debuting every year, new teams being established in various cities and countries, as Universes collide and the X-Men and Fantastic Four are thrown into the mix, as more TV shows that are canon but not integral (but maybe integral) debut, and as Blade keeps getting cancelled and rewritten indefinitely delaying Marvel's nosedive into vampires and dark fantasy (also criminally halting Mahershala Ali's career for half a decade), the main issue Marvel is going to face is constant reminders that they're ignoring interconnectivity and continuity. The question is always going to be some form of:

Where.

The fuck.

Is Spider-Man?

Marvel has to figure this out. With Daredevil Season 2 airing in March of 2026 and Spider-Man 4 launching 4 months later, we will have to see this crossover happen. It's integral to the audiences interconnectivity with the MCU as a whole. Bring back the magic.