Clark Gregg’s Direct Message for Marvel Fans Concerns About How Agents of SHIELD Fits into the MCU Canon

After scoring a monumental victory with 2012’s “The Avengers,” it was almost inevitable that the Marvel Cinematic Universe would continue to grow in popularity. The following year saw not only the release of “Iron Man 3” and “Thor: The Dark World”, but also a television show on ABC that would serve as a multimedia expansion to the films. “Agents of SHIELD” resurrected fan-favorite character Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) to lead the entire series on cases that existed on the outskirts of the MCU’s supers. The connections were often the result of the SHIELD team cleaning up messes, until the big twist of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” blew up the entire premise of the series and revealed that one of the main players had been a secret HYDRA member the whole time.

“Agents of SHIELD” continued to weave threads into the MCU films, but they occurred less and less frequently over its impressive seven-season run. I remember when some people thought it wouldn’t last more than a season or two. The lack of cinematic references, however, got to the point where sects of the Marvel fandom questioned its canonical presence. During a panel at New York Comic Con 2025, Clark Gregg vigorously pushed back against this notion by paying tribute to fans who didn’t care about any of that (via Popverse):

“There are people who talk about canon […] You can go fuck yourself. We are proud of what we have done. We are proud, really deeply proud, of the connection we have with people like you who come to visit us and spend time with us.”

Some of Gregg’s comments may seem blunt, but he has good reason to feel this way. For all the times “SHIELD” responded to whatever was happening in the movies, like Coulson sending Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) a helicarrier to help him at the climax of “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” its big-screen counterpart hardly reciprocated. It was a mostly one-way street that pushed the series to exist on its own merits and, as a result, forged its own legacy. Instead of waiting to see big-name superheroes, viewers have become accustomed to spending time with characters like Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), Daisy (Chloe Bennet), Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), and Mack (Henry Simmons), among others.

Being largely free from movie continuity gave “SHIELD” the opportunity to run wild with deep characters and stories from the Marvel comics. From this point on, it’s the ABC series that’s responsible for bringing the best on-screen incarnation of “Ghost Rider” to life. The final episodes of “SHIELD” were a season-long riff on “Avengers: Endgame” that saw the main ensemble jump around in time, and it was a lot of fun that gave everyone a sense of closure. The novelty of the MCU’s interconnectivity has largely worn off since the MCU began directly tying its films to its Disney+ projects. This shows how these universes can often be hampered by having to stick to canonical events that you may or may not have known happened. If something is only as good as how it relates to something else, then what are we doing here, folks?

Every season of “Agents of SHIELD” is currently streaming on Disney+.