‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ Star Iman Vellani Has a Surprisingly Simple Idea for Fixing the MCU

Marvel’s ever-expanding Cinematic Universe has spent years piling character upon character into its rotating ensemble of team-ups, crossovers, and multiverse-spanning events. For a franchise built on interconnected storytelling, more heroes sharing the screen has often seemed like the default answer to keeping audiences engaged.

Iman Vellani, who has spent years playing Kamala Khan across ‘Ms. Marvel,’ ‘The Marvels,’ and ‘Marvel Zombies,’ has a different philosophy. As one of the franchise’s most vocal and knowledgeable fans-turned-actors, she’s never been shy about sharing her honest opinions on where the MCU should go next.

During a recent interview about her career and comic book work, Vellani was asked what she would do if she were handed control of the MCU, and her answer was refreshingly simple. She said she would “[maybe] do less team-ups,” a stance that stands in direct contrast to Marvel’s recent trend of building increasingly massive ensemble crossovers.

On the surface, that answer might seem surprising coming from someone who has spent years publicly campaigning for Kamala to meet other young heroes in the MCU. But Vellani’s comments actually align closely with something she’s expressed before: the franchise works best when audiences have genuine reasons to care about individual characters, rather than simply being handed bigger and bigger crossover spectacles.

That philosophy has come up before when Vellani discussed Kamala’s future around the release of ‘The Marvels,’ where she expressed wanting the character to have room to exist within her own community in Jersey City rather than constantly being folded into larger ensemble stories. Her latest comment reads less like a rejection of team-ups altogether and more like an argument for using them more selectively and meaningfully.

Vellani’s own career arc within the franchise makes her comments particularly relevant. Kamala moved fairly quickly from her Disney+ introduction into ‘The Marvels’ and has since become part of Marvel’s broader plans for its next generation of heroes, giving her firsthand experience with how quickly a character can get absorbed into the larger machinery of crossover storytelling.

That distinction could matter even more as Marvel builds toward its next major ensemble event. ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ is scheduled for December 18, 2026, bringing together an enormous cast spanning multiple corners of the MCU alongside both the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, making it one of the studio’s most ambitious crossovers yet.

Vellani has continued expanding on this theme in other recent interviews as well. Speaking on the Revenge Of podcast this past August, she argued that universe-ending stakes can absolutely work for a story, but only if Marvel takes the time to properly build toward them rather than jumping straight to maximum spectacle.

That kind of measured pacing has become an increasingly rare commodity for a franchise juggling as many moving pieces as the MCU currently does. Vellani’s emphasis on earning big moments rather than simply escalating scale reflects a broader conversation fans have had about the franchise in recent years, particularly following some of its more crowded, character-heavy entries.

Whether Marvel Studios would ever take production philosophy advice from one of its younger stars remains an open question, but Vellani’s comments carry genuine weight given her deep, well-documented history as a lifelong comics fan. Her perspective offers a useful counterpoint at a moment when the franchise is once again ramping up toward its biggest crossover events yet.

For a studio that built its identity on the idea that everything is connected, Vellani’s suggestion that less might sometimes be more could be worth taking seriously as Marvel charts its path forward.

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