After much speculation about what Marvel’s Secret Invasion TV show will bring to the MCU story, it looks like we have an answer, thanks to Kevin Feige’s appearance at Disney’s upfront presentation this week. We already knew that the series will come in six parts and adapts the comic book story arc in which the shape-shifting Skrulls infiltrate the Earth, and that the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn will be reprising their respective roles of Nick Fury and Talos, who were last seen in the post-credit scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home. The new details now reveal exactly where Secret Invasion fits in the MCU timeline and changes that Far From Home scene completely.
According to Kevin Feige, Secret Invasion will take place in the MCU timeline that has already been established in previous releases. For the first time since Avengers: Endgame, the show will take place “during the Blip, when half of the Universe was decimated by Thanos, and will explore the events that happened in that period." This does not seem like a great deal of information, but it implies several things that fans thought they knew about Fury are not as clear-cut as they believed.
In the final scene of Avengers: Infinity War, Nick Fury and colleague Maria Hill appeared to have been dusted by Thanos’ snap with Fury managing to send a distress signal to Captain Marvel just before vanishing. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, the post-credit scene revealed that the Nick Fury who appeared in that movie was not, in fact, Fury, who was off world in a space station, but Talos in disguise, while Maria Hill was also a Skrull replica. Many people took this to mean that Secret Invasion would take place after this scene, but instead, it looks like it will take place before.
Will The Real Nick Fury Be The Main Star of Secret Invasion, or his Talos Replica?
Placing Secret Invasion during the years of the blip, but still having Samuel L. Jackson as the main character suggests it will actually be Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos in the guise of Fury taking the lead in the series. This would explain how Fury can be a central character in a story set during the five years during the Blip, and would also mean the series will likely end with an explanation about why the real Fury is in space at the end of Far From Home, as well as set up The Marvels.
Many Marvel Studios TV shows have acted almost like appendices in a book, bringing some additional development to the biggest characters of the MCU without having to include it in a fast-paced movie. Secret Invasion seems to fall into this category, filling in some of the five-year gap between Infinity War and Endgame, as well as explaining how Talos came to be impersonating Nick Fury on Earth. With the series not expected to arrive until early 2023 and potentially having ramifications on The Marvels, that could explain how Captain Marvel’s next movie has been pushed back to a July 2023 release.