Phase 4 — The Blip & New Beginnings (2023)

The Blip recovery era covers the MCU titles set in the immediate aftermath of Avengers: Endgame — primarily the Disney+ series launched from 2021 onward. WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law all deal, in different ways, with what it means to live in a world that lost half its population for five years and then got it back. The emotional register of this era is explicitly grief-inflected.

The Disney+ expansion of Phase 4 represents the franchise's most ambitious structural experiment: treating television as a continuation of the theatrical narrative rather than supplementary spin-off content. WandaVision, in particular, earns its place in any discussion of the MCU's best work — a formally inventive miniseries that uses the history of American sitcoms as a grief metaphor and lands its emotional conclusion with genuine force. For the Blip era to work, prior Infinity War and Endgame familiarity is essential: this phase is explicitly about aftermath.