Here’s why the Marvel movies and TV shows don’t crossover like they should

Nerd culture couldn’t be more popular right now, and duking it out for the crown with Star Wars is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, the MCU has grown exponentially, with multiple movie releases a year and Netflix trying to have their Marvel shows playing non-stop. We’ve reached the point where we’re seeing heroes like Hellcat and Robbie Reyes’ Ghost Rider.

And the great thing is they’re all for the most part being done justice! There are few complaints about how Marvel is handling their properties. One of the few issues fans have, however, other than a lack of compelling villains, is that the crossover between the films and the television shows is weak sauce.

Excluding The Winter Soldier’s impact on Agents of Shield, which was so strong to the point of making AoS actually a good show, there hasn’t been much. In Marvel’s ABC content, all we’ve really had is Agent Coulson and crew make comments on what occurs in the movies. And all the Netflix content does is keep having the Battle of New York pop up in conversation a handful of times.

There have been no Marvel film heroes on TV and vice-versa. Despite claims of “It’s All Connected”, Marvel TV Head Jeph Loeb has backtracked a little at the Television Critics Association press tour.

I can tell you that part of the challenge of doing this sort of thing is that the movies are planned out years in advance of what it is that we are doing. Television moves at an incredible speed. The other part of the problem is that when you stop and think about it, if I’m shooting a television series and that’s going to go on over a six-month or eight-month period, how am I going to get Mike [Colter] to be able to go be in a movie? I need Mike to be in a television show.

Whilst Loeb’s reasoning for why we don’t see more of a crossover is perfectly legitimate, this was obviously always going to be the case. If the MCU was planned to reach this point of complete saturation, then it was clear it was going to be too big to logistically coordinate all the connections. So why did Marvel push so hard the “It’s All Connected” idea? Loeb continues:

As I often get reported by you folks for saying #ItsAllConnected, our feeling is that the connection isn’t just whether or not somebody is walking into a movie or walking out of a television show. It’s connected in the way that the shows come from the same place, that they are real, that they are grounded.

Ultimately, it came down to the fact that we all just set our expectations way too high. I have another theory, though. And that’s that Marvel doesn’t want to leave itself without any tricks up its sleeve. And its biggest trick of all is Infinity War. The reason we aren’t seeing these crossovers is because if they’re being saved for what will likely be the last Avengers film for a while. If we were to see Daredevil show up in Spider-Man (though how sick would that be?!), before seeing them both in Infinity War, it’d take away from that spectacle.

I fully believe we’re going to see every Marvel hero in the third and fourth Avengers films. Until then, we’ll have to settle for what we’ve got: superhero films and tv shows that are consistently awesome.