Is this why The Inhumans film didn't happen?

Film Despite its nearly eight million views, this is the first time I've seen the MCU's Phase Three announcement from back in 2014. At the time, I remember shuddering that the second Avengers film wasn't going to be released until I was in my mid-forties. Fortunately, I made it and now anticipate the upcoming Phase Four announcement.

It's worth noticing how dates and elements changed in the meantime.  The Sony deal led to everything moving down the schedule to make way for Spider-Man: Homecoming and the relative success of Ant-Man the insertion of a sequel.  But the big anomaly is The Inhumans film, which was quietly cancelled, to re-emerge as a frustratingly average television mini-series.

Why?  One of MARVEL's strengths has been to see what the audience responds to and monopolise on that, making course corrections when necessary.  Thor: Ragnarok was in part a result of the relatively poor critical reception for The Dark World (even if it still did well at the box office).  More Black Panther material was apparently filmed for Infinity War because it did quite well.

I think this video captures the moment The Inhumans as a film was cancelled.  As every other title card emerges on the screen, this audience, made up of comic book experts, go absolutely batshit crazy to the point that the mic on the camera phone sneakily recording it is completely blown out and unlistenable.

When The Inhumans is announced?  Crickets.  Well, not quite.  There's still some cheering but its markedly more muted than for the rest of the announcements and when Kevin Feige returns to the stage afterwards, he sounds slightly defensive as he attempts to justify the selection to a crowd which clearly hasn't reacted in the way he'd hoped.

Was this enough?  Did the reaction of fans at this event cause the hesitation?  Maybe?  As I've suggested elsewhere, reaction to franchises tend to be fan led, and if fandom wasn't in general that fussed about seeing The Inhumans at the cinema, then there was the potential for this to be a difficult sell which was justifiable considering the size of the budget.

But there's also the possibility that as pre-production began on the AIWE doulogy, the idea of having a large population of incredibly powerful beings, even at half strength post-click, was difficult to insert into an already busy couple of films.  Perhaps there's a version of Endgame floating around with Medusa or Nahrees joining the time travelers.

Instead we got the tv series which despite the budgetary input from IMAX couldn't afford to animate Medusa's hair in every episode so had it shaved off and left Lockjaw off-screen with about the same level of nuance as K9 in Season 18 of Doctor Who.  About the only good thing which came out of the series was cancellation because it meant Anson Mount was free to play Pike on Discovery.