As the Multiverse Saga continues to expand, we’re going to be getting hit with all sorts of brand new Marvel Cinematic Universe terminology, which will hopefully end up being explained in a manner outside of exposition as Phases Five and Six progress.
One of the most baffling additions have proven to be incursions, which open themselves up to nitpicking and plot holes by virtue of their mere existence. According to John Krasinski’s Reed Richards shortly before he gets turned into human spaghetti with an exploding head, “an incursion occurs when the boundary between two universes erodes and they collide, destroying one or both entirely.”
That sounds fairly self-explanatory, but when you consider we haven’t actually seen any real incursions (at least by that definition) unfold outside of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness despite Spider-Man: No Way Home, Loki, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania tampering with the fabric of reality, it’s really little more than a word used to help prop up the overarching MacGuffin driving the franchise’s latest expansion.
One person who doesn’t seem to be a fan is The Marvels director Nia DaCosta, with Total Film noting that the filmmaker was “bristling at MCU changes to the comic books’ incursion lore”, before she herself made a point of explaining that the franchise’s methodology “was always very stressful to me.”
Will there be an incursion in The Marvels? Will it even matter? Will the term be liberally applied without really meaning what it’s supposed to depending on which project it happens in? All these questions, and maybe more, could be answered by the time the Avengers assemble again. Or perhaps not.