How Avengers: Secret Wars Resets the Franchise — The Battleworld Theory, Fully Argued

Avengers: Secret Wars is dated for 17 December 2027, the Russo brothers are directing, Michael Waldron is writing, and Robert Downey Jr. is the only cast member Marvel has publicly attached. Kevin Feige has described the film as the conclusion of the Multiverse Saga and a reset point for what follows. Every other sentence you have read about this film — including most of this one's neighbours — is speculation.

What 'Reset' Can Actually Mean

The word does a lot of unearned work in fan discussion. Mechanically, there are only three things a studio can mean by it, and they have very different consequences.

1. A continuity reset: the timeline is rewritten so that some past films no longer strictly happened. High risk, maximum flexibility.
2. A roster reset: continuity holds, but the cast turns over. Low risk, and the only version the MCU has actually executed before, at the end of the Infinity Saga.
3. A cosmological reset: continuity and roster hold, but the rules change — the multiverse is collapsed or re-sealed so that future films stop needing to explain variants.

Almost all confident online claims about Secret Wars are really arguments for option one. The evidence, we would argue, points hardest at a hybrid of two and three.

The Comics Blueprint: Hickman's 2015 Secret Wars

Reporting has consistently suggested the film draws on Jonathan Hickman's 2015 event, and Marvel has confirmed no such structure — but the comic is worth understanding because it is the only version of this title that ends with a reset rather than a tournament.

In Hickman's run, incursions destroy universes two at a time until only Earth-616 and Earth-1610 remain. When they collide, Doom steals the power of the Beyonders, salvages fragments of dead realities and stitches them into a single patchwork planet — Battleworld — over which he installs himself as god, with Reed Richards as the one man who remembers the truth. The story ends not with Doom defeated in battle but with Doom conceding that Reed could have done it better. Reed and Franklin then rebuild the multiverse from scratch.

The 2015 Secret Wars does not end with a punch. It ends with a villain admitting the hero was the better architect — and the universe being rebuilt as the concession.

Why the Casting Argues for a Roster Reset

Look at what Marvel has actually dated after Secret Wars. The X-Men arrives 15 December 2028 with Jake Schreier directing, Michael Lesslie writing, zero casting announced, and Feige on record preferring largely unknown young actors. Schreier has publicly shot down viral fan-casting rumours. That is a studio telling you, without saying it, that the post-2027 MCU is a new company town.

A studio planning a full continuity wipe does not need to be coy about casting — it needs to be loud about it, because the reboot is the selling point. A studio planning a roster handover keeps quiet until it can introduce faces on its own terms. The 2028 silence reads as the second thing.

Theory One: Battleworld as Third Act, Not Premise

The version we consider most likely: Battleworld is not where the film takes place, it is what the film's antagonist builds and the heroes have to unbuild. Doomsday converges heroes from three distinct universes on a collision course; Secret Wars then shows what Doom does with the wreckage. That structure lets Marvel stage the salvage-yard imagery fans want without committing a full film to a patchwork planet nobody in the audience has a map for.

Theory Two: The Incursion Is the Reset

Multiverse of Madness already taught the audience the mechanism. An incursion happens when the boundary between two universes erodes and they collide, and at least one is destroyed. Strange and America Chavez walk through a universe already reduced to rubble by one. The film even establishes that a hero can cause an incursion by dreamwalking. All the vocabulary for a franchise-scale collision has been taught to a mass audience, in a film that grossed near a billion dollars. Our full explainer on incursions goes through the rules in detail.

If Secret Wars is a reset, the cleanest in-universe engine for it is an incursion that consolidates the surviving realities into one — which conveniently also explains how Fox's X-Men and the retro-futurist Earth of The Fantastic Four: First Steps end up sharing a continuity with Earth-616 afterwards.

Theory Three: The Living Tribunal Sets the Terms

The long-shot. The Living Tribunal has appeared in the MCU only as a shattered statue in the Illuminati's headquarters on Earth-838, which is exactly the kind of detail Marvel plants and forgets — or plants and cashes. A cosmological authority ruling on what the reconstituted multiverse is allowed to contain would give the film an ending that is neither a fistfight nor a deus ex machina. It would also give the Watcher, already established as a character with a stated non-interference oath he has broken once, a reason to be in the room.

How Likely Is This? Our Verdict

The Three Tells to Watch For

• Casting announcements for Secret Wars. A long, legacy-heavy list argues for a farewell; a short list argues for a handover.
• Whether The X-Men's 2028 marketing treats its characters as new to the audience or as returning. That single choice reveals the reset model.
• Any reference in Doomsday's third act to incursions, salvage, or a surviving fragment of a dead universe — the vocabulary of Battleworld arriving early.

Until then, this remains what it says on the label: a theory. A well-supported one, we think, but not a fact, and not something anyone outside a handful of people at Marvel Studios can currently claim to know.