Avengers: Secret Wars could give the MCU the ultimate superpower: a reboot

polygon.com:

Marvel Studios has always known how to throw a Hall H party, and though there were worries that the irregular nature of the first in-person San Diego Comic-Con in three years would keep things muted, the studio delivered. We know a lot now that we didn’t know before. And glimmering on the far end of Marvel’s new timeline is one ominous name: Avengers: Secret Wars.

Marvel Comics has infamously published multiple Secret War events, but there’s only one that is likely to have inspired an arc that includes exploring the multiverse and introducing the Illuminati. And that’s Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić’s Secret Wars, a cosmic natural disaster that ended in the complete destruction and improbable recreation of the Marvel Multiverse.

This is all to say: If the Marvel Cinematic Universe wanted to make sweeping changes to its internal continuity, Secret Wars would be one of the only truly “Marvel Comics” ways was to do it.

That’s in part because Marvel Comics historically does not reboot its full continuity, ever. Unlike DC Comics, whose setting is built on an every-25-years-or-so cycle of resetting and reimagining its characters, you can trace an unbroken line from the Tony Stark of 2022 to the Tony Stark of 1963.

2015’s Secret Wars bucked that trend — not in a way that broke the line between 2015 Tony and 1963 Tony, but in a way that had significant editorial repercussions nonetheless. Namely, Secret Wars killed a Marvel Universe.

Marvel’s Ultimate line, founded in 2000, was arguably the publisher’s biggest success of the decade, an alternate Marvel universe where modern writers and artists had freedom to take the company’s most famous characters and start all over again. And it’s got a heavy hand of influence in the