Everyone saying “this cannot be beat” for years or decades is forgetting that the MCU is 11 years old.
There’s lots of time and lots of smart people in Hollywood. No one has matched up to Disney yet, but to think they won’t, or can’t.... that’s a mistake.
Candidates:
- If Avatar builds an amazing world and serial story, I could see Avatar 5 doing this. We don’t have any evidence today that it will, but we had no evidence that Endgame would do anything like this even two years ago.
- Lets say Chris Nolan took on another franchise, elevating a serialized trilogy of a re-made or new IP to superstar heights. (Bond? Side story in the lord of the rings universe?)
- Revenge of Star Wars. Star Wars 8 was awful and very poorly received. If SW8 had gotten the same reception as SW7, our collective mouths would be watering as we’d be wondering right now if SW9 could top Endgame. That’s not the world we’re in, but I could see Star Wars making a comeback with a built-up, amazingly excited, highly-anticipated movie sometime in the 2020s.