So if there is consolation here in your disappointment in the “status quo reset” it’s in all the comic book fans speculations here, which of course is funny because you just talked about how great that you don’t have to follow the comics to get the film BUT it’s in the same (friendly) neighborhood that comics fans are feeling very “we’ve been here before”, because resets are extremely common in comics and Spider-man has had some DOOZIES, but Spider-man is particularly fun because what comes out of the resets isn’t always what you would expect and no one knows what to expect from Sony and Marvel Studios here. This cross-studio partnership shouldn’t be working this well! Everything about it is weird and brilliant and surprising. And this movie and some of the trailers attached seemed to make the case that the partnership is continuing, not splitting up. I’d be imagining it is indeed a hard reboot if the band were spitting up, but …

The movie ended with the trailer for Doctor Strange 2! That’s about the closest the MCU has gotten to the opposite of a “Here’s Blergo” end credits moment (which disappointed some who really wanted a “Here’s Blergo” in the showing I attended). Based on a tiny bit of comics knowledge from the combined schools of 90s Saturday Morning Cartoons and Modern Wikipedia, if I had to guess the reset isn’t going to last long and things are going to get really weird. (How weird, who can say; the comics nerds are split on it and that’s a lot of the supposition debating right now.) Other factors: Morbius is a Spider-man anti-hero/sometimes villain and up until this movie thought to be part of the disconnected Sony venomverse only, but its trailer may be hinting at more going on there and (thanks in part of Shang-Chi) we also know the MCU is moving Blade onto the table for other Marvel horror fun. One of the Spider-man resets in the comics was very horror heavy. Another got weird with lots of Venom and lots of clones of Peter Parker (only some of them aren’t Peter Parker unless they were, y’know comics twists) and cosmic horror shenanigans. At the moment ALL of these cards are on the table and no one knows which way the MCU is betting and if either or both or some MCU-specific solution is going to happen here. It’s playing multiple decades of giant reset button comics storylines that ended up making a bigger mess than what they tried to simplify back down to.

I get a feeling that this reset is yet another case where the MCU wants you to think there are so many possibilities of where the story goes from here and it isn’t necessarily a rehash of the movies we’ve already seen. It might be counting on a bit too much comics inside baseball knowledge that resets rarely stick (or even work at all) in comics and that what comes out the other side is often weirder than anyone expected going into the reset. (Including half the time the writers charged with writing the reset.)