Marvel has pretty much-eclipsed Game of Thrones as the current big cultural phenomenon, largely thanks to Disney+’s decision to air television shows set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that feature the actors and characters from the movies. And the Twin Peaksian weirdness of WandaVision became the biggest topic of conversation on the internet for about two months.
Now, as if to take a final victory lap and do a little dance on the grave of A Song of Ice and Fire, the franchise that could have been but clearly is not going to be, Marvel has signed Emilia Clarke, who played basically the main character of Game of Thrones, to be a part of Secret Invasion.
Secret Invasion is going to be a big deal just by virtue of having Samuel L. Jackson in it as Nick Fury. It’s a continuation of the story from Captain Marvel featuring the Skrulls, but we don’t really know how it’s going to play out. In the comics, the titular secret invasion is literally that, the Skrulls used their shape-shifting abilities to come to Earth and build an invasion force in secret, blending into the populace until it was time to strike. Captain Marvel presented the Skrulls as much more sympathetic in contrast to their enemies, the Kree.
The thing that Marvel has going that Game of Thrones didn’t is that Marvel doesn’t need to have an ending. Game of Thrones was unable to deliver a satisfying one, and George R. R. Martin seems unlikely to ever finish the novel series, so that’s it. But Marvel comics have presented themselves as an unending, open-ended superhero soap opera for 60 years. Avengers: Endgame was a kind of ending, but we knew there were more movies right around the corner. It only ended a chapter, not the whole book.