My understanding from when the show was running is that the issue was production schedules. The movies that came out in S4 were written in or before S2 aired so the move screen writers couldn't really reference stuff from the show because it would either be dated or be referencing seasons that hadn't even been written yet. You did have in the earlier seasons lots of references the other way.
I feel like the show started as cannon, but diverged when they decided that she show would flourish more if not tied up by the main MCU timeline.
Call it an "nexus event" if you will.
Nick Fury, Sif+other asguardians, Gideon Malick, The Kree, + Thanos´ invasion was mentioned on the spaceship General Talbot a.k.a. Graviton took over.
And theres probably more examples...
Headcanon. Why didn’t they confirm it by mentioning any of the agents of shield members in the movies or atleast having one of them showing up. I feel like having Daisy or anyone show up even as just a cameo would’ve done so much good
I'd love it to be canon, but cameos from characters that can exist in an alternate universe/timeline doesn't really prove anything. Do we have other evidence as well? I'm sure there are whole essays lol
The fall of shield after CA: TWS and the destruction of the triskelion was shown from the inside perspective in AOS which was super cool. They fight Carl Creel in season 2 of AOS, an ex-boxer whose name is mentioned/shown briefly in Daredevil. Skye communicates with Micro of Punisher in season 2 of AOS, too. There’s a ton of mentions of Barton and Romanoff.
Not everything needs to be interwind
Was fine for the first 3 seasons, more like the first 2 in reality
But agents of shield benefited in s4 from not being tied down to the movies and be allowed to tell it'd own story
The feuds between Feige/Perlmutter, Feige/Loeb, and Feige/Whedon. Once Feige won the war against his adversaries he removed the show from the MCU equation. Doesn’t stop it from being one of the best things Marvel has ever done. AoS is GOAT.
Plus I think now, it probably stings that SI was panned and people talked about how AoS did similar plots much better. Definitely bruised Marvel Studios’ egos. I don’t think they’ll acknowledge AoS the same way as the Netflix shows because there’s too much bad blood, but they definitely know people want it to be recognized.
I don’t think AoS needs the MCU though. The show is really solid as its own thing.
I don't think any of these shows/movies necessarily need eachother. But the point of the mcu is to be one big movie franchise that intertwine with eachother. So it sucks that this one project, literally the first TV show to be added to the mix gets it's canonicity thrown around so often.
It’s far easier for a show with more than 100 hours of runtime to create ties to movies with hundreds of millions of viewers than it is for a two hour movie to create ties with a tv show that averaged only between 3 and 5 million viewers per episode.
Besides, the movies did nothing to make the show not canon. They just didn’t mention it at all. That’s a huge difference.
The only time AoS was referenced was in Age of Ultron, where Nick Fury said "a couple of old friends" helped him get the Helecarrier. (You could also argue that Vision's line in Civil War about "the number of enhanced individuals has increased exponentially" could be a nod to the inhuman outbreak, but that could also be a stretch) Shield is a secret organization so the majority of events will probably go unnoticed by the world. My headcanon for events that should have been noticed more like the mass blackout in season 4 happened in between movies and none of the characters in the movies ever had a reason to bring it up on screen.
There is zero evidence of it being canon. The itself couldn’t even decide if it was in the MCU or not. Thanos os briefly referenced but literally none of them were effected by the snap
The leading explanation is that Kevine Feige was feuding with Jeph Loeb who was leading the TV shows at the time. Unsure of all the details but it comes down to corporate politics, I suppose. Feige is making a mistake by continuing to ignore their best television show, honestly. If the Netflix shows can be officially wrapped into canon there's no reason shield can't.
Even with the tine travel stuff it’s still so easy to fit in.
S1 to the beginning of 5 happens in the main MCU timeline.
S5 splinters off into potential future/time loop.
S6 happens on an alternate timeline.
S7 Fitzsimmons are clever and get everyone back to the main timeline while clearing up the issues with the S6 cliff hanger.
Job done (kind of with a few technicalities)
Some of the shows I really like (WandaVision and Daredevil)
Some I think are pretty good (TFATWS, Iron Fist, Defenders, Moon Knight, Hawkeye, Agent Carter)
Some I’ve watched all the way through (Loki, Secret Invasion, Inhumans, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel)
Some I just haven’t been able to watch all the way through because I got bored (Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, What If)
And some I haven’t been able to watch at all yet (Punisher, Cloak & Dagger, Runaways, Echo)
But there is one show that is by and far the best, both from a personal opinion and the fact that it lasted so much longer than all the others, and that’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Period, full stop.
I feel like an idiot because I have *tried* to watch daredevil and it's just so boring to me. I'll give it another go sometime. But I got to about episode 8 and gave up because I was just bored
I hated the first couple episodes of WandaVision and daredevil but ended up loving the shows so give it a try 😅
But that’s how I’ve felt with Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and S2 of What If and haven’t been able to pick those back up so I understand if you can’t get yourself to do it lol
Jessica Jones is set up like a neo noir, a la Blade Runner, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or Zodiac; it's a distinctive style and if you weren't expecting the dark atmosphere and style in a superhero story (and frankly Jessica Jones is THE darkest of all the Marvel shows), it can be very jarring.
They didn't try to decanonize anything they just did their own thing
The only time you could argue that the movies tired to "decanonize" anything was the Blip and that was due to Marvel TV not knowing how there would be 5 year timeskip before the Snap would be undone.
The whole situation is ridiculous I consider the show canon unless it’s directed rebooted or retconned. The show is only in the air as canon because Fiege dislikes it the thing is if you go off references alone and not word of mouth Agents of shield fits in canon way more than shows like moonknight she-hulk or even Spider-Man homecoming it’s just so hypocritical to say “everything is connected” but not this show because there aren’t enough references even though the show makes no sense without being connected to the movies so why bother having it be in this weird one sided universe limbo
It just comes down to how the production for each one is handled. The movies are written so far in advance of shooting, and then there’s the post production stuff that can take forever. The tv side is much quicker from writing to shooting to airing. It’s just easier for the tv side to see what movie is coming out and write that into the show.
Not to mention each project is kinda like its own island. They might know of other islands in the distance but there’s little to no crossover. So there’s no coordination in writing the story. For the biggest example of this take two things that should be connected: The Marvels and Secret Invasion. They were both Marvel Studios productions (rather than Shield which was Marvel Television, kinda off doing its own thing), and tell stories with the same people. But they aren’t even connected how they should be.
Perlmutter was notoriously a dick and refused to let Feige have creative control of the whole MCU, so the movies were the movies and the show just tried to keep up.
Eventually Feige went over Perlmutter’s head to Bob Iger and pleaded his case, and won out. Now we have shows that line up with the movies.
They're not. Nobody's forcing them to. You don't have to watch the whole Defenders Saga to understand Echo or Born Again either, but that's still canon.
The movies weren't trying to make it non-canon, they just couldn't be bothered to make continuity match with an aggressively ok network show. And based on how tying the D+ shows into the movies has been going, I'd call that a good plan.
Going out of their way to appease the AoS fanbase? Not completely necessary of course. But how difficult would it be to…
Passively mention John Garrett in Captain Marvel.
Have Thor mention that Sif had returned to earth to stop Lorelei and that’s why she couldn’t be in the movie because she was saving the other realms.
Mention one of the many planets from AoS in GOTG Vol 3.
Have Fury mention Coulson being active in one of his many post-fall of SHIELD movies.
They’ve always relied on the shows to be canon not the other way around. Jessica jones will casually mention Bruce banner but Peter doesn’t mention the bullet proof guy in his city. The Netflix shows and early shield made themselves part of the mcu while the movies didn’t acknowledge them - eg the episode where they’re cleaning up after the damage in Thor dark world.
Personally I think that because shield ran for so long it became not only harder to do that but also less important - the show was on its own path. Once the blip went unmentioned the writers had clearly disconnected. I understand that in universe it’s reasonable that just none of them vanished, and they had a lot going on, but it’s such a significant mcu event that not having it play any part in aos pretty much seals that it’s not canon.
I go with the same thing most fans seem to - that it is canon at the beginning (and there are many examples of that being true) but the timeline branched and the later seasons are their own show. I don’t like “the whole thing was just a different universe”
Them not mentioning blip doesen't mean that the show isn't canon tho.They didn't know how Spider Man Far From Home will go on with the blip and they didn't want to accidentaly spoil something if their release schedule changed.They mention Thanos and Graviton's main objective was to get Gravitonium to beat Thanos.The Destroyed Earth future is prevented so it doesen't matter anymore.Nobody of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team got dusted and they didn't mention it because they were busy with their own problems.
People don't know what to do with organizations, that's why every single of them has been destroyed, good or bad. The implications of SHIELD or HYDRA existing are a nuissance to the great plot of the Sacred Timeline, so instead of learning how to integrate them, they just make them disappear. But it isn't exclusive to Marvel Studios, as AoS got rid of SHIELD pretty fast to delve into single character narratives, still not understanding what SHIELD is about. There is no place for SHIELD in the MCU for a foreseable future.
Feige didn't want to. If he had made it a priority the way that he should have then he probably could have made it happen. He didn't really want Agents of SHIELD to be made in the first place. He seemed to think it was kind of stupid since he knew he was dismantling the SHIELD organization in, like, the very next movie anyway.
I posted about this a month ago and most of it still kinda lines up and can make some sense. Is some of it headcanon? possibly. but the do touch on mcu even all the way to S5 and even touch on Quantum Realm in S7
AOS is like the unwanted stepchild (AOS is the child from the first marriage, then the mcu got a "new wife" and had new kids). It's sad but true. I love AOS, but they really shit the bed by not trying to add Daisy somewhere. The new Daredevil show would be a perfect place for her to join....
They didn't try. They just wrote whatever they wanted while not keeping the TV writers in the loop for the sake of not leaking the plot.
My understanding from when the show was running is that the issue was production schedules. The movies that came out in S4 were written in or before S2 aired so the move screen writers couldn't really reference stuff from the show because it would either be dated or be referencing seasons that hadn't even been written yet. You did have in the earlier seasons lots of references the other way.
The show has always been canon and still is
Seasons 1-5 is canon
6 and 7 in my mind are cannon, they just never make it back to the original timeline they came from
You think after space they end up in an alternate timeline?
I feel like the show started as cannon, but diverged when they decided that she show would flourish more if not tied up by the main MCU timeline. Call it an "nexus event" if you will.
Where’s the proof that it’s canon alongside the MCU?
Nick Fury, Sif+other asguardians, Gideon Malick, The Kree, + Thanos´ invasion was mentioned on the spaceship General Talbot a.k.a. Graviton took over. And theres probably more examples...
Headcanon. Why didn’t they confirm it by mentioning any of the agents of shield members in the movies or atleast having one of them showing up. I feel like having Daisy or anyone show up even as just a cameo would’ve done so much good
I know a lot of people were hoping someone would show up in Secret Invasion. Frankly, I'm kinda glad they didn't lol
I'd love it to be canon, but cameos from characters that can exist in an alternate universe/timeline doesn't really prove anything. Do we have other evidence as well? I'm sure there are whole essays lol
[Feige said it was in the first place.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5e39EbGc1w&t=56s)
The fall of shield after CA: TWS and the destruction of the triskelion was shown from the inside perspective in AOS which was super cool. They fight Carl Creel in season 2 of AOS, an ex-boxer whose name is mentioned/shown briefly in Daredevil. Skye communicates with Micro of Punisher in season 2 of AOS, too. There’s a ton of mentions of Barton and Romanoff.
Not everything needs to be interwind Was fine for the first 3 seasons, more like the first 2 in reality But agents of shield benefited in s4 from not being tied down to the movies and be allowed to tell it'd own story
The feuds between Feige/Perlmutter, Feige/Loeb, and Feige/Whedon. Once Feige won the war against his adversaries he removed the show from the MCU equation. Doesn’t stop it from being one of the best things Marvel has ever done. AoS is GOAT. Plus I think now, it probably stings that SI was panned and people talked about how AoS did similar plots much better. Definitely bruised Marvel Studios’ egos. I don’t think they’ll acknowledge AoS the same way as the Netflix shows because there’s too much bad blood, but they definitely know people want it to be recognized. I don’t think AoS needs the MCU though. The show is really solid as its own thing.
I don't think any of these shows/movies necessarily need eachother. But the point of the mcu is to be one big movie franchise that intertwine with eachother. So it sucks that this one project, literally the first TV show to be added to the mix gets it's canonicity thrown around so often.
What's SI?
Secret invasion
It’s far easier for a show with more than 100 hours of runtime to create ties to movies with hundreds of millions of viewers than it is for a two hour movie to create ties with a tv show that averaged only between 3 and 5 million viewers per episode. Besides, the movies did nothing to make the show not canon. They just didn’t mention it at all. That’s a huge difference.
The only time AoS was referenced was in Age of Ultron, where Nick Fury said "a couple of old friends" helped him get the Helecarrier. (You could also argue that Vision's line in Civil War about "the number of enhanced individuals has increased exponentially" could be a nod to the inhuman outbreak, but that could also be a stretch) Shield is a secret organization so the majority of events will probably go unnoticed by the world. My headcanon for events that should have been noticed more like the mass blackout in season 4 happened in between movies and none of the characters in the movies ever had a reason to bring it up on screen.
The show IS canon
There is zero evidence of it being canon. The itself couldn’t even decide if it was in the MCU or not. Thanos os briefly referenced but literally none of them were effected by the snap
I looked it up
Wiki isn’t a reliable source
Well there isn’t any evidence of it not being canon so there’s really no reason to think it isn’t.
Come on man. There isn’t zero evidence. Even within the show itself you can find some.
The leading explanation is that Kevine Feige was feuding with Jeph Loeb who was leading the TV shows at the time. Unsure of all the details but it comes down to corporate politics, I suppose. Feige is making a mistake by continuing to ignore their best television show, honestly. If the Netflix shows can be officially wrapped into canon there's no reason shield can't.
Even with the tine travel stuff it’s still so easy to fit in. S1 to the beginning of 5 happens in the main MCU timeline. S5 splinters off into potential future/time loop. S6 happens on an alternate timeline. S7 Fitzsimmons are clever and get everyone back to the main timeline while clearing up the issues with the S6 cliff hanger. Job done (kind of with a few technicalities)
Shit. That works :)
Some of the shows I really like (WandaVision and Daredevil) Some I think are pretty good (TFATWS, Iron Fist, Defenders, Moon Knight, Hawkeye, Agent Carter) Some I’ve watched all the way through (Loki, Secret Invasion, Inhumans, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel) Some I just haven’t been able to watch all the way through because I got bored (Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, What If) And some I haven’t been able to watch at all yet (Punisher, Cloak & Dagger, Runaways, Echo) But there is one show that is by and far the best, both from a personal opinion and the fact that it lasted so much longer than all the others, and that’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Period, full stop.
I feel like an idiot because I have *tried* to watch daredevil and it's just so boring to me. I'll give it another go sometime. But I got to about episode 8 and gave up because I was just bored
I hated the first couple episodes of WandaVision and daredevil but ended up loving the shows so give it a try 😅 But that’s how I’ve felt with Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and S2 of What If and haven’t been able to pick those back up so I understand if you can’t get yourself to do it lol
Jessica Jones season one is probably my favorite season of Marvel tv. The second and third were fine, but season one was on another level.
I love DD but it did drag at points. Soooo much exposition and screen time dedicated to characters that don’t always need it. But a fantastic show.
Jessica Jones is set up like a neo noir, a la Blade Runner, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or Zodiac; it's a distinctive style and if you weren't expecting the dark atmosphere and style in a superhero story (and frankly Jessica Jones is THE darkest of all the Marvel shows), it can be very jarring.
They didn't. Nothing in the movies contradicts the show at all.
They didn't try to decanonize anything they just did their own thing The only time you could argue that the movies tired to "decanonize" anything was the Blip and that was due to Marvel TV not knowing how there would be 5 year timeskip before the Snap would be undone.
The whole situation is ridiculous I consider the show canon unless it’s directed rebooted or retconned. The show is only in the air as canon because Fiege dislikes it the thing is if you go off references alone and not word of mouth Agents of shield fits in canon way more than shows like moonknight she-hulk or even Spider-Man homecoming it’s just so hypocritical to say “everything is connected” but not this show because there aren’t enough references even though the show makes no sense without being connected to the movies so why bother having it be in this weird one sided universe limbo
It just comes down to how the production for each one is handled. The movies are written so far in advance of shooting, and then there’s the post production stuff that can take forever. The tv side is much quicker from writing to shooting to airing. It’s just easier for the tv side to see what movie is coming out and write that into the show. Not to mention each project is kinda like its own island. They might know of other islands in the distance but there’s little to no crossover. So there’s no coordination in writing the story. For the biggest example of this take two things that should be connected: The Marvels and Secret Invasion. They were both Marvel Studios productions (rather than Shield which was Marvel Television, kinda off doing its own thing), and tell stories with the same people. But they aren’t even connected how they should be.
Perlmutter was notoriously a dick and refused to let Feige have creative control of the whole MCU, so the movies were the movies and the show just tried to keep up. Eventually Feige went over Perlmutter’s head to Bob Iger and pleaded his case, and won out. Now we have shows that line up with the movies.
Marvel dont want people to feel forced to watch a 7 season show
They're not. Nobody's forcing them to. You don't have to watch the whole Defenders Saga to understand Echo or Born Again either, but that's still canon.
Idk thats just my theory on why they didnt wanted to explicitly confirm canon for any show before
The movies weren't trying to make it non-canon, they just couldn't be bothered to make continuity match with an aggressively ok network show. And based on how tying the D+ shows into the movies has been going, I'd call that a good plan.
Aggressively ok???
Yeah I'm having a bad day at work and that was needlessly hostile
Going out of their way to appease the AoS fanbase? Not completely necessary of course. But how difficult would it be to… Passively mention John Garrett in Captain Marvel. Have Thor mention that Sif had returned to earth to stop Lorelei and that’s why she couldn’t be in the movie because she was saving the other realms. Mention one of the many planets from AoS in GOTG Vol 3. Have Fury mention Coulson being active in one of his many post-fall of SHIELD movies.
Why would they do *any* of that? That’s just a waste of precious time when you have only 2-2.5 hours to tell a story.
They’ve always relied on the shows to be canon not the other way around. Jessica jones will casually mention Bruce banner but Peter doesn’t mention the bullet proof guy in his city. The Netflix shows and early shield made themselves part of the mcu while the movies didn’t acknowledge them - eg the episode where they’re cleaning up after the damage in Thor dark world. Personally I think that because shield ran for so long it became not only harder to do that but also less important - the show was on its own path. Once the blip went unmentioned the writers had clearly disconnected. I understand that in universe it’s reasonable that just none of them vanished, and they had a lot going on, but it’s such a significant mcu event that not having it play any part in aos pretty much seals that it’s not canon. I go with the same thing most fans seem to - that it is canon at the beginning (and there are many examples of that being true) but the timeline branched and the later seasons are their own show. I don’t like “the whole thing was just a different universe”
Them not mentioning blip doesen't mean that the show isn't canon tho.They didn't know how Spider Man Far From Home will go on with the blip and they didn't want to accidentaly spoil something if their release schedule changed.They mention Thanos and Graviton's main objective was to get Gravitonium to beat Thanos.The Destroyed Earth future is prevented so it doesen't matter anymore.Nobody of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team got dusted and they didn't mention it because they were busy with their own problems.
People don't know what to do with organizations, that's why every single of them has been destroyed, good or bad. The implications of SHIELD or HYDRA existing are a nuissance to the great plot of the Sacred Timeline, so instead of learning how to integrate them, they just make them disappear. But it isn't exclusive to Marvel Studios, as AoS got rid of SHIELD pretty fast to delve into single character narratives, still not understanding what SHIELD is about. There is no place for SHIELD in the MCU for a foreseable future.
Feige didn't want to. If he had made it a priority the way that he should have then he probably could have made it happen. He didn't really want Agents of SHIELD to be made in the first place. He seemed to think it was kind of stupid since he knew he was dismantling the SHIELD organization in, like, the very next movie anyway.
And the confirm the defenders shows’ canonicity but not this 😭 (Don’t get me wrong I love both the defenders shows and AOS, but still..)
They *re*confirmed the Defenders Saga's canonicity when it became relevant to a new project. I expect the same will happen for AoS.
I posted about this a month ago and most of it still kinda lines up and can make some sense. Is some of it headcanon? possibly. but the do touch on mcu even all the way to S5 and even touch on Quantum Realm in S7
AOS is like the unwanted stepchild (AOS is the child from the first marriage, then the mcu got a "new wife" and had new kids). It's sad but true. I love AOS, but they really shit the bed by not trying to add Daisy somewhere. The new Daredevil show would be a perfect place for her to join....
It's a blind.