Shang-Chi Came Out 5 Years Ago. Why Is Doomsday The First We're Seeing Of Him Since?
Shang-Chi is one of the only successful new additions to the MCU since Endgame, so why has he been MIA?
This December, Shang-Chi will be one of the many heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe who will gather to fight Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. When that movie comes out, it will be the first time theatergoers will have seen Shang-Chi since his debut film, which came out five years ago. Considering that the mystic martial arts hero is one of the only new additions to the MCU since Endgame that can be considered a real success, the half-decade absence from the big screen feels far too long.
Technically, Shang-Chi has appeared in the MCU since Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings came out on September 3, 2021, but those appearances weren't in movies, live-action, or even in the normal MCU continuity. His return had been relegated to the animated Disney+ series What If…? and Marvel Zombies shows. Shang-Chi didn't even show up in a post-credits scene of any of the movies that came out between Legend of the Ten Rings and Doomsday — and there were more than a dozen of them.
It almost feels strange to see Simu Liu reprising his role in the Doomsday trailers, because he feels like he's from another, forgotten era of the MCU. After Endgame gave many of the original MCU heroes a grand exit, including Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark and Chris Evans' Steve Rogers, it seemed like Marvel was going to develop the bench, to use a sports analogy. Following an overdue Black Widow movie that wound back the clock to give Scarlett Johansson's spy a standalone film, Shang-Chi was the first major new addition to the franchise as it entered this new era.
The movie isn't perfect. The final set piece is a prime example of the MCU's tendency to let the third act devolve into a CGI-driven mess, which was especially a shame considering that the (relatively) grounded and practical martial arts that made up the rest of the movie's action were so fun. Thematically, Shang-Chi aspires to a relatable child-of-immigrants story, but the emotional stakes don't fully gel with the genre stakes. Shang-Chi's situation isn't that relatable; he's the scion of a covert organization that's been secretly pulling the strings of the entire world for generations. (How the Ten Rings, Hydra, and the Hand didn't get in each other's way is a mystery.)
The good parts of Shang-Chi, though, are great, and they added something that the MCU needed. The aforementioned action scenes, especially a knockdown brawl inside of a city bus, offer the sorts of kinetic, choreography-first fights that few other movies in the franchise can boast. Leaning into the mystical martial arts side of Marvel was a frontier the movies hadn't really fully broached (we don't talk about Netflix's Iron Fist), and Shang-Chi helped diversify the MCU's roster of heroes. Liu is charismatic and an able hero, and he fits right into the MCU mold. That said, Shang-Chi's best quality is Tony Leung, who is quite possibly the single best actor to ever appear in a Marvel movie. Leung is such an expressive performer that with one shift of an eyebrow, he makes his character — a drastically reworked version of the very racist comics character The Mandarin — one of the MCU's best villains.
Tony Leung as Xu Wenwu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
There's a lot to like about Shang-Chi, and the movie even ends with an exciting stinger that suggests he's going to be a big part of the MCU going forward. It was exciting to think about what these new adventures might be. That's not something that can be said about most of the other MCU movies from this era. The failure of Eternals right after Shang-Chi all but assured that those characters wouldn't have a bright future in the franchise. After that, rather than work on developing new fan-favorite heroes, the MCU got lost chasing the multiverse. Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Deadpool & Wolverine, and looked to alternate versions of familiar characters rather than new heroes. Other movies like Thor: Love and Thunder, Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3, The Marvels, and Captain America: Brave New World focused on existing heroes. Thunderbolts* too, to a somewhat lesser extent. Outside of Shang-Chi, the only fresh additions to the MCU came in the Disney+ TV shows (which had a not-great track record of success) and Fantastic Four: First Steps, which was set in an alternate world. And, while the Fantastic Four might've been new to the MCU, there had already been Fantastic Four movies and the characters were much better known than Shang-Chi.
Then came the reveal that Downey was returning to the MCU as Doom and Evan would be reprising his role as Captain America. Less than a decade after Endgame's grand hurrah, the MCU went back to its biggest stars. That Shang-Chi is in Doomsday at all almost seems like a miracle. Maybe it wouldn't have felt that way if he could've made an appearance — even a little one — in another movie in the five years between Legend of the Ten Rings and the latest Avengers. No other Marvel hero has gone that long from their standalone debut film to an Avengers movie, especially not without a cameo during the gap.
Hopefully, Shang-Chi will be in next year's Avengers: Secret Wars. Maybe he’ll even get a standalone sequel at some point. The next time he shows up in a Marvel movie can't be closer to the 10-year anniversary of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings than it is to now.
