You have to admire the willingness of Disney Plus to continuously alter and update the official Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline, when the platform doesn’t even have access to the entire franchise. Until the Sony deal kicks in, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home will remain unavailable, while The Incredible Hulk isn’t part of the content library in many major territories.
Undeterred, the streaming service has once again rejigged the chronological order of the world’s most commercially successful film and television mythology, thanks to the recent premiere of Marvel’s What If…?. That in itself presents an interesting conundrum when you remember the premiere takes place in 1943, with the second and third episodes unfolding in 2014 and the late 2000s respectively.
However, the Mouse House definitely made the smartest move by placing What If…? between Loki and WandaVision, when the events of Tom Hiddleston’s solo series brought the multiverse into play as the MCU‘s next major storytelling device, and Jeffrey Wright’s Watcher lets us know at the beginning of each episode that what we’re seeing is a branched reality that exists due to one small but significant change to events fans are more than familiar with.
For the most part, once What If…? draws to a close the rest of Phase Four is looking fairly straightforward and chronological now that prequel Black Widow, time traveling Loki and the multiversal episodic animation have debuted, so there shouldn’t be too many alterations coming now that the subsequent feature films and streaming exclusives will more than likely be in sequential timeline order, unless of course Spider-Man: No Way Home or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness significantly shift the sands of continuity.
