What If...? proves that Marvel Studios will never be able to tell a stand-alone story
Even Marvel's anthology series on Disney Plus can't resist becoming a little cinematic universe.

There are a few things about Avengers: Endgame that set it apart from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe canon, and one of them is the fact that it’s the rare movie in that series that has an ending. It is an ending, really. Endgame went to so much trouble resolving nearly every ongoing plot thread and character arc that it very much could have served as the final Marvel movie: The end to the grand experiment that started a decade earlier when Nick Fury showed up during the credits of Iron Man. But there will never be a final Marvel movie—at least, not if the studio has anything to say about it.
Marvel Studios and Sony had to get back together to plot what Tom Holland’s Spider-Man would do next. Marvel had to dip back in for more stories with Wanda and Loki and Sam Wilson. Even the trailer for Chloé Zhao’s Eternals—a movie about characters who exist far above and beyond the concerns of the Avengers—had a winky reference to the Avengers.
Black Widow was all about filling in a gap in the timeline while also introducing new characters to the larger mythology, and Shang-Chi snuck in a handful of familiar faces from the other movies (just on the off-chance you forgot you were watching something that was part of a larger universe). Even Venom: Let There Be Carnage, a movie tangentially related to the MCU, couldn’t resist the appeal of becoming slightly less tangential.
Disney+’s animated series What If…? seemed like a step away from this, or at least an opportunity for Marvel Studios to show that it can tell stories that aren’t all interconnected dots that reveal some grand design when you pull back far enough. However, last week’s episode effectively crushed any chance of that ever being true. Marvel Studios could tell standalone stories, but it won’t.
Before it premiered, What If…? was touted as an anthology series about alternate realities within the MCU’s multiverse. If the stuff that happens in the movies is one reality, specifically a reality where everything happened the way it was supposed to, then What If…? would feature multiple different realities where things happened differently, like Steve Rogers getting injured before he can become Captain America, Odin never adopting/kidnapping Loki, or Doctor Strange turning evil after realizing that no amount of magic could stop a specific tragedy from happening. Like “What If” stories in the comics, it offered a chance to tell stories that simply wouldn’t work in the main continuity—or maybe any continuity in the case of the Doctor Strange episode, during which his entire universe is wiped out.