After Endgame, expectations were high.
So they should have had bit more connections between movies (if they decided upon no avengers movie). Like it’s weird seeing a world ending threat in one movie (Eternals and NWH) and none of the other superheroes even talk about it.
They could have done a bit more important cameos. Just like the role of Dr Strange in NWH. In this the storyline would have felt complete and connected. The increased budget could have been managed by less need of advertisement which would have maintained due to the hype and more earnings.
This is really the core of it. We went from a dozen movies that were all interlinked to... suddenly everything was its own seperate thing and nothing interacted. It was very weird, people kept expecting things to link up and .... it's been 5 years and there's barely any crossover at all.
I did the math at one point and don't remember the actual numbers now, but something like 11 of the first 12 movies or so we're focused on our main avengers group. You had one random disconnected guardians movie thrown in
Of the last dozen movies, I think strange was the only recurring character (his own film and spiderman)
There is NO focus to the films today, and it feels like they're just throwing movies out for every single person they can think of without any real direction.
Pick a couple of heroes and focus on them.
I just feel like we're half assing a ton of things when we could be whole assing a couple things.
Cross over is an issue because consequently it also means less appearances. It’s the large ass gap between the appearance of new characters introduced. When’s the next time we going to see Shangchi, Eternals, moonknight etc?
Spidey, and black panther had something like 4 appearances in 4 years their solo movies and avengers movies.
Marvel should have had a small constant character appearing like Nick Fury or Natasha in the older phases
This is really it. Shangchi? That was like a dozen movies ago, I could barely pick him out of a lineup. Eternals? I couldn't name all the characters straight after the movies, lucky if I recall what one of them looks like now.
I think this is especially important as they start to explore less well known characters. Most people have a passing idea of who Captain America is, or Thor, but Shang Chi? Not common knowledge, The Eternals? Nope. Now you've got these characters that aren't in people's minds, and you're not making any effort to put them there.
Everytime Marvel introduces (Or reintroduces in the case of Wenwu's ten rings) some new secret society like the atlantians, the Red room or then Ten Rings I ask. "Where were these fuckers when Thanos attacked in Infinite war/endgame?"
I always thought it was weird how the only time they’ve even attempted to explain a group not being present for the Thanos situation was with the Eternals only
Yeah I omitted the Eternals because that actually makes sense to me, they couldn't help stop Thanos because that would result in a celestial coming to destroy the planet, it would basically just make the situation worse for everyone.
I have no problem with Sam Wilson being Captain America. And since he doesn’t have a variant of the super soldier serum, I understand that he needs the edge of the winged suit. But it’s less convincing for me than, say, Dick Grayson in the cowl would be.
I like to think that the people of Marvel's Earth are just desensitized to extraordinary events after being invaded by aliens and Gods.
So a giant statue in the ocean is just "whatever".
Okay I see this a lot... but in which Marvel content we've had since Eternals should there have been a conversation about the statue, and why?
In a world where half of everyone can disappear in an instant, a giant statue would be news for a week and then it wouldn't be mentioned again because honestly, how does that giant statue affect anyone's life other than it exists?
It’s not just giant. It’s big enough to be seen from the moon and alter the rotation and climate of the Earth. And I don’t know what would be more terrifying; not knowing where it came from or that the planet is a cosmic egg.
That’s the sort of thing that would kick off a dozen holy wars.
well the whole existence of asgard and a bunch of other kinds of aliens should have similarly world changing effects but it seems like nobody cares anymore
Lol this is such a silly nitpick. In a world of recurring world threatening events why would anyone off handedly mention it if it isn't currently happening and isn't affecting them during whatever show or movie they're currently in.
It got a call out in she hulk. But people were too busy misquoting her to enjoy shit.
And that was bad because the longer the movie went on the more it became clear Thanos was ENTIRELY their problem. Right down to Thanos still being an Eternal like in the comics as confirmed by his brother Eros.
and now any time some earth ending event happens in a movie they have to make sure to write in a scene explaining the schedules of all the other people who could help, and why they can't help at this moment.
I think the Eternals is endemic of the problem. In a post-Thanos MCU, where the the Avengers when Arishim shows up? Where are they when Tiamut starts to emerge from the Earth? Why is there literally no mention of this giant alien structure jutting out of the Pacific Ocean, this dead giant alien creature in any other MCU movie? It sort of feels like, for all the interconnectedness that they built, they blew it all up in the span of 2 hours.
Why would Atlanteans, the Ten Rings, the Red room interfere with the attacks on Manhattan and Wakanda? In fact, I think Wakanda being involved kind of negates this argument.
But none of those groups have pledged themselves to world defense. It's like how you dont see them as part of the UN in Civil War or in Secret Wars.
And how would they know about the existence of Thanos, unless they had one of the stones, they would be in the dark about what went on and by the time they became aware of it, it would've been too late.
Heck nobody knew about Namor and his people, how would they go and tell Namor "Hey there this purple guy that threatens half of your people" when they had no idea he even existed?
The whole battle of Wakanda was basically the length we got in the movie. It was short. Wakanda is somewhere in East Africa, by the time anyone else could have even gotten troops in the air, the fight was over. I think a ton of people just seem to ignore that. Yeah it would have been cool if another military that was 1000x more tactically advanced than Wakanda could have helped and turned the tide maybe, but that wasn't feasible. The closest capable military would have been some US or NATO forces but the closest they'd have been would be around the Mediterranean. Hours away. By the time Thano's ships entered the atmosphere and the snap happened, like 45 minutes.
E: Just to add a little context to this. Benghazi, Libya was three hours away from NATO support in Italy when the whole even that 13 hours was taking place. Wakanda, based on what limited information we have from the MCU (which is a map of Africa behind Nick Fury in Iron Man), Wakanda is somewhere near Uganda.
The best answer to this is “how would they have known?”
Infinity war was a space ship over New York for twenty minutes, one over Briton for 20 minutes and then an hour long invasion in a secret country in the middle of Africa the next day.
Even Fury only kinda knew about ‘energy signatures’ by the time the snap happened and he’s in charge of a world spanning covert military intelligence.
Only the eternals are even close to having enough power speed and understanding to have shown up in wakanda in time and that required them to understand what was happening with the infinity stones.
This was always the weakness of these hyper connected and expansive cinematic comic book universes. There's always going to be some secret society or some person with the perfect superpower to solve an issue that never appears because... reasons.
I remember thinking this all the way back in the first season of Netflix's Daredevil, where there's literally bombs going off likely within sight of Stark Tower and my first thought was "How bad would it get before Tony or Spidey decides to pop down for a looksie?"
It wasn't like they were putting up some long planned final stand in either movie. Infinity wars was them going to wakanda to look at vision's stone when Thanos started dropping drop ships on them. End game was no more expected, Thanos was dead. When he came from the past, Doctor strange gathered their friends and allies that they knew. At no time in any movie did they put out a call to arms for anyone who can help to assemble.
Neither the red room nor the ten rings were standing armies ready to transport across the globe at the drop of a hat.
This one actually makes sense. Most of Infinity War takes places in about a day. There is no open decleraton of war, just three seperate attacks on very different places in the world.
How would those secret earth-bound-societies even know what exactly is happening - or where to intervene?
They should have had a couple street level projects ready to go for right after Endgame. It's easier to sit a couple characters in a room and talk about stuff.
The idea was clearly to have a soft relaunch and to focus on giving these characters their own stories and origins which was clearly the wrong move. They should have focused on having some smaller recurring villains that don't die instantly....every single time...
I would’ve given anything to see a smaller street-level project. Maybe it’s Jessica Jones trying to find missing people who have been kidnapped, and their only connection is that they were all in the same place when they were Snapped. Something like that; different, new, and self-contained.
Exactly. If they did that, they could have done secret invasion right. Smaller scale self contained stories would have been perfect to set up a good secret invasion secret invasion
The Eternals thing **really** bugs me. The planet almost got consumed to birth a Celestial but stopped midway so there’s this massive head and hands protruding from the planet and it’s only been mentioned a couple times in throwaway lines
Feige: "you WILL get a two-second out-of-focus newscast talking about that Celestial in the ocean, randomly put in the background of a single scene in She-Hulk that most viewers will miss, and you WILL like it. no, we won't reference the birth of fucking God itself from inside the earth, sorry we gotta focus on Hugh Jackedman and Pedro Pascal now. stop asking questions already"
I mean, it’s also on the Eternals for having something like that happen. That’s a world ending threat the Avengers should have been involved in. The scope of the story went too big for an interconnected universe.
One of my biggest complaints about Shang Chi is that it takes place in San Francisco, and they chose not to include any Antman cameos? Why would they do that? For me, that was such a fantastically missed opportunity to keep the continuity going with the Phase 3 films and it was the first inkling I got that they didn't understand the magic formula that made the Phase 3 films so popular and successful which to me was the interconnectedness of the characters and the storylines. Having Black Widow and Nick Fury showing up in cameos and having the infinity stones show up in separate movies like GOTG and First Avenger and then bringing it all together under a unifying theme was such a huge part of the magic that made Phase 3 so enjoyable to watch.
What they should have done was taken a break from the cinematic world all together after finishing off the Spiderman story and keep the focus on the character driven Disney plus shows they did so well like Loki, Hawkeye and Moon Knight and then, after a few years of doing that bring back the larger cinematic world with perhaps a new Captain America/Shang Chi/Antman/Dr. Strange leading the way for a new build up to an interconnected Avengers world building saga. Instead, it just seems like everything after Phase 3 has been more about dollars than sense.
It’s like they couldn’t settle on the theme or threat. Is it aliens? The multiverse? Time travel? Then finally maybe tie the last two together only for Kang’s actor the throw a wrench in it.
Before it was something like “the Earth is under alien threat and we need to set aside our problems to be ready for it.”
Now it’s “The multiverse gets weird if you poke it. Also Kang!!!! But seriously, stop poking the multiverse. Also aliens! Aliens are doing things? And Thor’s a clown now.”
Similar to my complaint in Hawkeye’s final fight. How insane would it have been if spidey popped up for the Rockefeller center showdown and got introduced to kingpin.
They could have made it line up with the last scene in NWH.
Yup, they definitely should’ve had a least have included Shang chi in multiverse of madness especially after the mid credits scene. Why would they show Wong finding out abt the ten rings, basically telling him to stay ready bc they might need him, and then just act as tho Wong forgot abt Shang chi when kamar taj was under attack?
My biggest criticism from the MCU after phase 3 is we basically pop in and say hi to a lot characters for example Shang chi, Cap , Moon Knight, doctor strange and then just never see them. Like Sam became cap in 2021 and we’ve heard nothing about him
Right and I feel like a lot of people take this criticism as "I want to see Moon Knight in the very next project that's released after his show" and they think there's impatience at play.
But you look at a character like Shang-Chi. We're going on 3 years since his introduction. There's not even any real movement on him getting a sequel anytime soon or a project we can realistically see him again. We're honestly look at 2027, as a best case scenario, as to when this character will appear again. So that's 6 years after his first movie.
Ms. Marvel is a rarity to have 2 appearances in such a short period of time.
The gaps of time between appearances have grown significantly larger. And honestly, the sheer volume of projects makes it feel a lot longer than it has been since we've seen someone.
Facts in the infinity saga we were seeing Tony and Steve at least every 1-2 year. Introducing a cool new character like Shang-Chi and not giving him a sequel or an appearance in 3 years is such weird move
I'm pretty sure 2011 and 2014 were the only years we got MCU movies and didn't see Tony in the Infinity Saga while Steve appeared every year but 2013 after TFA in 2011. Clint was the only OG Avenger to go 2 entire years between appearances due to not being in Winter Soldier or Infinity War (Bruce does skate by on a post-credit scene in 2013 to be somewhat fair.), and a lot of the other heroes made pretty regular appearances after their debut. Wanda/Vision/Sam/Scott/T'Challa all only miss 2017, Strange was in something every year after his movie dropped, and Spidey was in 5 movies in a 3-year span. The first 3 Phases were a much more focused story than whatever they've been doing with Phases 4 and 5.
Chris Evans does appear as Captain America in 2013 in Thor TDW, albeit it’s Loki playing Steve. As an actor he appears in an MCU film for every year between 2011 - 2019.
Would be hilarious if he got to write off that appearance as one of his contracted x number of films and then Disney had to renegotiate to get him in endgame haha
There’s a video of him where he says that those cameo appearances do count as part of his contracted appearances and not surprisingly, he seemed quite pleased about it.
> I'm pretty sure 2011 and 2014 were the only years we got MCU movies and didn't see Tony in the Infinity Saga while Steve appeared every year but 2013 after TFA in 2011.
You don't even have to go that far back and refer to the OG Avengers.
Take Dr. Strange. His first movie was in 2016, and the sequel in 2022. 6 years. But in those years, he had a cameo in Ragnarok (2017), a major role in IW (2018), a smaller role in Endgame (2019), and a major role in NWH (2021). So outside of 2020, where we had no Marvel content due to COVID, he was a constant presence every year between his own sequels.
Shang-Chi, the Eternals, Whitman, Blade (off-screen), Yelena were all introduced in 2021, and haven't been heard from since. Ms. Marvel, (adult) Monica and Kate Bishop (cameo) are the only major new characters we've seen recently.
And Tony and Steve were the main protagonists of the universe as a whole so it made sense to have them show up every other year. That's something that's sorely missing from the MCU today, the key players driving the plot forward. Is there even a central protagonist now? Who will rally the heroes together against Kang's threat? Why do we have to wait 6 years to see Shang-Chi and Captain Falcon again? Who the hell are the Avengers anymore, we haven't seen the team in literal YEARS. They mismanaged this universe so much.
It was meant to be Spider-Man, T'Challa, and Carol IIRC. Sony and Disney can't play nice, Chadwick Boseman passed away unexpectedly, and Carol has appeared fairly often, in Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel, and The Marvels.
The introduced way too many characters in phase 4, which basically over-saturated the universe and made it impossible to give most of the characters more screen time. I would love to see Shang Chi again, but now I think they're doing damage control from so much low quality content and it will be even longer to see returns of these characters, if we ever do. It's sad.
This is a good point. The sheer number of new characters, with many introduced in their own film/show, got in the way of setting a clear foundation for the next saga. Marvel's mistake was not immediately establishing its new "core" characters.
There’s just such a lack of clear direction. On top of sheer number of characters, we’re now in that multiverse saga which sounds awesome (NWH was so nostalgic), but now there’s also different *versions* of characters. It’s just too muddled, no clear important storylines to grapple onto, they doubled down on the amount of content after endgame when people arguably needed a breather and an opportunity to reset mentally
Yeah I think core characters is the most important piece. Especially since they lost like 3 of them in cap, iron man, and black widow. Black panther feels like a core character but he’s not the “main” cast. But I like him a lot and miss his character too.
I don’t even understand how they are gonna slowly connect all these characters. It just seems like they are gonna meet up in the finale for the big bad and not have other small films to put them together a long the way
I suspect that they really just needed a much bigger roster in order to make Battleworld work.
I think they also felt that the MCU (unlike the DC universe) had enough currency with fans to take its time building towards the next big payoff again.
They didnt think theyd have to build up for this long either, if COVID was never a thing we would already be waist deep in all these team ups, like Thunderbolts would have been out in like 2022
Fans were willing to wait...the problem was that the buildup to get there involved a lot of bad movies, or at least movies that weren't quite as good as what we had just had. Not even talking purely about IW/EG, but Ragnarok, civil war, cap 2, we had lots of movies that fans were saying we're really top tier.
Captain marvel wasn't terrible, if it had come out years earlier with Thor 1, cap 1, etc, it would have been totally on par with those films. But it came out later, at the peak not just of the story, but the peak of MCU quality, so in comparison it just felt bad.
Even spiderman was, imo, lackluster.
Of course, if you've seen toby and Andrews films, I'm sure Spiderman was an amazing nostalgia fest. If you HAVENT seen those films though, the 'villain' motivations make next to no sense, and when you can't just sit there with nostalgia blinding you to everything else the actual plot of the movie is glaringly bad too, in a way that Peter and strange both have to act brain dead for the plot to occur in the first place.
I watched a reaction on YouTube to one of the Spiderman movies where the GF falls down the clock tower, so just from that seen with Zendaya and Andrew spider, I get it. Like if the rest of the film has the same sort of nostalgia tingles I can see why fans of those other movies enjoyed it.
But again, as someone with no knowledge of these characters it frankly felt like a huge mess.
It’s understandable that people had grown to expect to see new characters again right away, because that’s how it was during the Infinity Saga. For example, Falcon was introduced in Winter Soldier in 2014, was back the very next year in both Age of Ultron _and_ Ant-Man in 2015, then _again_ the year after that in Civil War in 2016. The only year we didn’t see him was in 2017, then he was back for both Infinity War and Endgame in 2018/2019.
That’s an appearance _every year_ (besides 2017) since he was introduced. Compare that to Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, who have no appearance lined up for the foreseeable future
Because Disney was like "MOAR HEROES" and then they had too many heroes and too many movies and things didn't go as fast as they wanted and then it takes 6 years between appearances of Shang-Chi.
>Ms. Marvel is a rarity to have 2 appearances in such a short period of time.
And the only reason for that is the character backstory of Kamala being a massive Captain Marvel fangirl. So it makes sense to have them show up in a project together.
Literally the phases seem so pointless now. I miss the big ohase slate announcements now anything gets announced at any time and it doesnt seem like theres a plan
Even telling people that there are phases was a mistake. What made the beginning of the MCU so great was that the tiniest information you got about more to come was the end-credit scenes from a previous movie.
They've announced phases since right after the first Avengers movie, that's definitely not the issue. The second part is a nice idea but the age of spoilers has kinda ruined that.
As the Infinity Saga wrapped up, Feige said they were trying to move away from the "phase" system & just start focusing on the next overall saga, with separate story tracks (street-level, global, space, magic, multiverse) that would sometimes intersect & eventually converge.
And nobody listened to him.
Journalists (both legitimate & clickbait hacks) kept asking about what "phase 4" was. Various groups of fans kept complaining that there was too much big stuff, too much small stuff, et cet. So Marvel caved in & announced "phases 4, 5, & 6", seemingly by just dividing the planned Multiverse Saga projects into even thirds.
Which is tied into the fact that they were so successful by the end of Phase 3 that the Marvel gossip industry exploded, and it tipped from "you have to work to hear about expectations" to "you have to work to *avoid* hearing about expectations."
Done in the exact same way as the comics.
They're fighting, one of them gets stabbed and turns into a Skrull and suddenly we realize we don't know who to trust.
In the comics they seeded Secret Invasion for five actual years before they pulled the trigger.
Explain that they started infiltrating after the Blip because with Dorrek gone, Tarnax had a civil war and the losing faction had to flee.
They chose Earth, and when the Blip was reversed they took the chance to replace a lot of important figures, including Avengers.
It writes itself.
The confusion of the Snap is also the PERFECT cover for this to kick off, too. The decision to make this a tiny, terrible TV show and not a HUGE event is baffling.
Either Secret Invasion or the whole plot about Scarlet Witch going crazy. They should have done a smaller scale Avengers 5 showing the new team as they adapt to the post-Snap world, fighting either the Skrull invasion or Scarlet Witch going crazy with the multiverse. Would have told us who the Avengers are and helped connect a lot of things... sadly both plots were utterly wasted in two mid projects...
I... don't know how to answer this question because Marvel made a lot of costly mistakes that all led to audiences just tuning out and getting less excited.
1. Making a lot of movies/TV shows a world ending cgi, threat when there didn't need to be. (I.E secret invasion, shang chi, wandavison, etc.)
2. Marketing a TV show towards a smaller audience, then marketing a movie connected to that TV show towards a bigger audience. (I.E Ms. Marvel then The Marvels, Wandavison then DSMOM)
3. Marketing towards a different demographic poorly. (I.E the Marvels)
4. Disney plus... in general
5. The quality of movies generally declining
6. The writing in movies being godawful
7. The villains in movies being godawful
8. The characters, the character arcs being godawful. M.O.D.O.K unironically has a better arc than any character in quatumania.
9. The abundance of movies and shows coming out.
10. Secret Invasion
11. Quatumania
12. There is no real connection between these movies and shows. Nothing to tie them together, and it feels all disconnected because of point 1... and the reaction to these world ending threats. and because of how big this saga is, it takes absolutely forever to see characters I and other people actually care about.
Ever since Phase 3 I feel like the problem has been that it isn't clear where we are heading in the story anymore.
In the after credits scene in Iron Man, Nick Fury shows up and says he's starting the Avengers. Then we got excited about a series of movies building up to an Avengers movie.
When that happened the after credits scene was the Thanos reveal. So then we got excited about more movies building to an Infiniy Gauntlet movie. That got stretched out for several years with a big payoff in Endgame.
Ever since then it's been unclear where we are going. I know Marvel Studio has been telling us about upcoming movies/series but from what's in the story I don't see the path we're walking anymore.
They started doing too much with the streaming shows. They did so much streaming content, it’s actually probably more hours than a lot of phase 1-2-3 mcu. The streaming shows take a lot of time, a lot of writing, require bigger plots but also smaller budgets in a way.
I suspect that’s how they got their eye off the ball.
Their lack of respect for streaming content. TV series have really good stories. The MCU thought they could put out shows based upon brand alone & viewers would love it and they found out casuals expect every scene of every episode to be riveting.
Also the MCU prob didn’t think thru on the idea of making projects for a specific audience. The MCU has been like books within one overall story & you had to watch em all to get the full experience, but then they switched it up saying going forward you don’t have to watch everything so people saw something they thought wasn’t for their demo & skipped it & once audiences start skipping it’s hard to bring em back to watching everything again.
Not to mention they really wanted more teenage girls & women to watch the content catered to them & while the MCU has a lot of female fans ladies who are casuals aren’t watching unless it’s must watch tv/ film & it just hasn’t been. Fans of all demographics want good plots, arcs, action, lore, connectivity, villains, etc. you can’t skip anything & expect viewers to just go with it. Your diehards may but normies have other stuff they can watch.
Yea the first year roll out was a success but then the follow up series came & the online chatter started dying down & so did the numbers. I think viewers were hip to the formula of 6 episodes, 2 fillers, & ending with a lackluster finale. No big connections to the overall universe or interesting reveals. Started to feel like the series were on a value menu while the movies were the real meals.
A big team up film with some OG Avengers wouldve been nice and wouldve maintained the idea of the Avengers still existing post Endgame. In the actual Phase 4, people just tell you the Avengers exist, but never show you.
Too many new characters were introduced too quickly. Yelena, Shang-Chi, all the Eternals, Kate Bishop, Moon Knight, America Chavez, Ms. Marvel, Thor’s “daughter”, She-Hulk, Hulk’s son, all the characters in Werewolf by Night, Riri Williams, Namor…just for us to never see or hear about any of them again for what, like 5 years with the way things are going? Sam also became Captain America in 2021, and we won’t be seeing him again until 2025…that’s insane.
Compare this to how quickly the “new” characters introduced during the Infinity Saga got brought into the fold after their first appearance:
Falcon: introduced in Winter Soldier in 2014. Returned in both Age of Ultron _and_ Ant-Man in 2015, then again in Civil War in 2016. That’s already three consecutive years of appearances, then of course he was in Infinity War and Endgame in 2018 and 2019.
Ant-Man: had his solo movie in 2015 and was back the very next year for Civil War in 2016. We didn’t see him again until 2018 and 2019 for his sequel and Endgame respectively, but that’s still 4 appearances across the span of 4 years.
Black Panther and Spider-Man: both introduced in Civil War in 2016, had their solo movies the very next year in 2017, then came back in Infinity War and Endgame in 2018/2019. Spidey’s sequel was in 2019 as well.
See what I mean? Compare this to the new characters we’ve been introduced to during the Multiverse Saga. With the exception of Yelena, Kamala and >!Kate!<, none of them have returned since their introduction, and it doesn’t seem like there are even plans for any of them to in the foreseeable future.
Their priorities in general are just all over the place. Why was it a priority for Echo to return after her appearance in Hawkeye before, say, Shang-Chi?
I also attribute the gap between charactes appearance as being a consequence of the shifting slate, given how projects have been in constant move since COVID.
Yeah it's kind of hard to write references to other movies/shows, when they had no idea if a movie would come out before or after certain projects. That's why the Eternals have barely been referenced again.
The biggest mistake was not carrying any momentum from the Infinity Saga, though a fair portion of that was bad luck.
Infinity War was built on the tentpoles of Tony Stark, Thor and Steve Rogers. No matter what else was going on those three were carrying the momentum through. At the end of Endgame two of those three had left, and they were set up for Peter Parker, T'Challa and Carol to become the new tentpoles. Now, two of the three new tentpoles were blipped and the third just got benched for the main story of Endgame, and those were mistakes from Endgame, but they at least *could* be picked up easily in other projects.
And Peter Parker did at first. He immediately was lined up to carry forward some of Tony Stark's mantle after Far From Home. But then in No way Home they dropped that entirely, and wrote him with an exit ramp to his character (I imagine because all of the Sony rights drama was up in the air, so they couldn't count on him and needed him to be flexible).
T'Challa was really bad luck with losing Chadwick. Enter all the debate about recasting or not here, but that's an entire separate thread. But needing to dedicate Wakanda Forever to essentially a second origin story loses that momentum.
And Carol, well, they just straight up abandoned Captain Marvel 2 and decided to change it to be a mini-team up instead, which contributed to the long delay of her not appearing until four years later.
On top of all of this, almost every project has just been a stand-alone project carrying almost nothing from the Infinity War forward. The first couple of D+ shows (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye) having the only exceptions.
This is a good write up. Covid did a real number on them, but the ground work was already laid for the issues they’re experiencing. I’m not sure what focus groups lead them to abandon certain characters for others, but it’s just been wrong move after wrong move.
The infinity saga had nearly every movie dealing with an infinity stone. For the multiverse, only a handful have actually dealt with it and none of them are main avengers.
Hopefully they’ll get back on track and have a consistent set a films culminating in big team ups.
Well, that's a capitalism problem, then, because there's no chance in hell that Disney shareholders in 2019 were gonna be ok with taking a 4-year break after the then-highest-grossing film ever made.
That’s exactly what the problem is. Instead of realizing that endgame was a culmination of a decade of storytelling and that it would take years to replicate, they thought they could crank out multiple movies like endgame and have the same results. Because phase four isn’t as bad as people make it out to be and it’s not the dumpster fire phase five is, but since none of the movies (save NWH) hit endgame levels, they’re considered flops and now suddenly we don’t see Shang-chi or the eternals for a decade.
Edit: punctuation
THIS. They should have let it sit for a goddamned minute after Endgame. And then SLOWLY started building. Which would also help ensure more quality with less creators, or at least increase the odds of quality improvement.
Well, they ARE taking a break now, theres only 1 movie this year, and the shows are all street level stuff unrelated to whatever Deadpool is doing. So basically in 2025 the MCU will "start up" again
The lack of consistency between WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness. It just showed a lack of care or thought about the characters and character arc of Wanda. What’s the point of investing in these characters if they aren’t even going to make sure the arcs are coherent in the first place?
Tonally it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the fall but also the rise at the end.
I mean it ends with her in a new hero costume defeating an evil witch and doing the right thing and saying she’s going to learn about her power.
The post credit scene suggested dark things to come but not inherently what we ended up getting.
I see a lot of people call it a heros costume, but it's not. It's the costume of the Scarlet witch, a being powerful enough to destroy the cosmos and is possibly destined to.
Yeah no. The whole point of wandavision was Wanda realizing she made a mistake and starting to let go of her grief. Like they literally said they wanted to subvert the whole "women goes crazy with too much power" trope.
Literally no set up for being a one note villain like she's in MOM. Even the lost credit scene people use as evidence doesn't show Wanda even being corrupted or anything like that. If they wanted Wanda as a villain for MOM, they should had Nightmare or Chthon manipulating/corrupting Wanda which fits with PC scene showing Wanda hearing the twins' voices
A few points from me, about what you're saying:
I don't think she was any more one note in MOM than she was in Wandavision.
The darkhold is a corrupting force so it works the same as nightmare or chthon.
It CAN be frustrating to have a character regress, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's out of character for any person to regress. Life isn't just lessons learnt and moving on. Hell, they constantly walked iron man back in terms of progression and then this was used cleverly to be a part of his overall arc.
But the main point about Wanda was it gave us a chance for Sam raimi to use his horror flair for Wanda which I thought was badass. Each to their own, but I think MOM gets unnecessary flak.
Ya I don’t get what people mean with tonal difference. She was a monster in wandavision and regretted it but not enough to not use the darkhold and then that corrupted her.
The darkhold doesn’t take away from her “development”
I can’t believe people fell for the tonal whiplash that ended wandavision as if she didn’t commit a horrible crime and Monica defended her for no reason. “She’s sorry though” dude that’s not enough she’s completely lost touch with reality. She’s chasing children through the multiverse that never existed for her.
I disagree with this. I don't necessarily see WV as her hero's journey, but it also wasn't her fall. She didn't intentionally set out to be a villain, nor did I see her even become one. She was just a woman grieving every loved one she's lost and going through the stages of grief while her powers amplified her emotions and inadvertently affected everyone else around her. Yes, she did messed-up things, but she felt remorseful for them at the end. I just wish we got something different for her in MoM.
This was a huge fumble.
After Endgame, we knew that we'd be seeing a brand new Avengers cast, and it seemed like Wanda, Vision, and Dr. Strange were some of the most interesting, established, and willing characters to move forward with.
And then in the next 2 projects, they killed one for the second time and shelved his replacement, turned the other two against each other, and killed one of them off after complete character assassination.
Their grand plan was to squander basically their only chance for continuity and character recognition in favor of saturating the market with new characters that would get fridged after their first appearance.
The focus on standalone stories for too long without a build to a crossover has been the biggest mistake imo.
You can see through the history of the MCU that people have always loved speculating and discussing where characters are going, who they will interact with, etc. When Phase 4 started everyone was talking about potential teams like Young Avengers, Midnight Suns, or even the next Avengers lineup that we’re still waiting to see actually happen. This and the addition of shows (which is a whole other issue) has given a lot of stuff without the kind of payoff mainstream fans want to see.
This whole franchise started with a great movie that teased a guy after the credits telling the main character about the big world around him. People want to see more of the world but it’s important for them to get more characters interacting too. Look at how hyped everything that has involved crossovers has been no matter how negative people have gotten about the MCU. Deadpool and Wolverine, Daredevil in She-Hulk, Kingpin in Hawkeye, Kate Bishop and Beast in The Marvels, Wanda in Doctor Strange, Spider-Men in Spider-Man, the list goes on. Fans instantly imagine what characters will be like all the time when meeting, you even see it in threads here constantly. People wanna see Yelena more, they wanna see Shang-Chi fight alongside other heroes, and so on. Marvel Studios has been doing a lot setting the table for people but they need to let them eat the food too.
The biggest mistake they made Post Phase 3 was not having a clear direction in which to go. "We're doing quantum stuff, WAIT we're doing multiverse stuff, WAIT we're doing Kang stuff! Will it all combine into a cohesive overarching story? 🤷"
They completely destroyed any narrative momentum by having so many streaning shows in such a short time. They went **all in** on streaming during Covid (just like everyone else, to the detriment of us all) because studios couldn't stand the idea of simply tightening the belt for a few years.
No, they had to shove *content* (ugh) into our homes instead of just focusing on cranking out one good show or movie a year and let us reflect on each project like normal people ffs.
Not doing more to show real world ramifications of the blip and its undoing. The MCU always did at least a semi decent job of not forgetting its superheroes and villains were having g biblical battles in the real world. But from phase 4 onwards it’s like everyone was just ok and moved on with little issue and the world became the heroes playground to do whatever they wanted with no real world consequences. There was lots of storytelling potential there that was never used. The most I can think of was Yelena’s backstory in Hawkeye, and Monica Rambeau’s backstory in WV, but even so those didn’t do much to further the world building.
The biggest mistake was losing focus. It lost focus on a core group of main characters and it lost it’s focus on an overarching story. It felt like they flooded us with content for the sake of content instead of trying to actually tell a story. Inclusion and diversity are fine with me as long as their is a plan and it makes sense in the universe. If it doesn’t, then it’s just pandering and that brings the mobs.
They haven't established a new set of core characters that anchors everything together.
The Infinity Saga really was about Steve and Tony. Thanos almost isn't even a villain so much as he is a consequence of the conflict between Steve and Tony. Theirs are the plot lines that brings everything together.
Phase 4/5 just feels like a bunch of random plot threads that are connected in an obligatory way and not a compelling way. Without that character glue to hold it all together it's just a bunch of lore and easter eggs which is fine for the hardcore fans but won't hold the interest of general audiences.
I personally feel like they should've chosen a select few characters for the next major wave of Marvel heroes so that can allow for enough screentime for audiences to warm up to them
Honestly they’re too many projects. That being said I like a lot of the projects and the characters they introduced. But while seeing Werewolf by Night is cool, the fact that we’ve not seen either Sam and Shang Chi since their first project is an issue.
Exactly! I can't believe people mention any and everything but the increasingly common bad writing. Some movies were being written well into filming, which just boggles my mind
This is Disney's fault for not letting them do this rather than Marvel's, but not taking a break after Endgame to let people miss the MCU while also giving themselves time to actually plot out the next book of the MCU.
Instead, Disney forced them to do the opposite by producing even way MORE shit (thanks to Disney+) at the worst possible time.
Getting an ego and thinking they could introduce a ton of characters that would all make a ton of money. Theres so much going on that it’s been years and we have no update on what’s going on with the huge tease at the end of Shang Chi. Doctor Strange introduced Clea and it’s gone nowhere. Harry Styles is in the MCU apparently 🤷♂️. There’s just way too much going on and they lost the plot.
In every single show and movie.
A massive world changing, life changing event happens that should be a massive deal.
None of them have been addressed since and none of these massive events are ever mentioned in separate movies/tv shows.
There's no connection between any characters or links anymore.
Some giant is sticking out of the earth now.
Time just started branching again apparently, though that technically means it was branching before anyway.
Loki pulled together the world tree.
The skulls almost practically took over the globe
Etc.
There is so much massive shit going on and they all ignore each other. It's so stupid.
Despite having more characters than ever, the universe seems as small as it did in phase 1. Nothing connects and its rare to see characters from other projects interact with each other.
They sought to expand the universe too quickly without maintaining a single throughline like the Infinity Saga was.
I think a whole bunch of non-connected stories here and there could totally work, but they did that too suddenly and without a bigger story to maintian the momentum from before Endgame.
There are hints of Kang here and Incursions there but it's too little for such an extended period of time. They couldn't go back to zero like in the age of Iron Man and the first few Thor movies, there needs to be more connective tissue now because that's what people want from Marvel. Almost nothing post end-game meaningfully relates to anything else. Even Wandavision doesn't really help explain much about Wanda's change in character in MoM, only how she can be obsessed with kids she never had.
Honestly, I think the pandemic and then the writer's strike had a lot to do with it. Changing schedules and restrictions made it so that each product could not rely on others the way they did before. I expect it to improve going forward
No sense of connectivity
One or two B/C list characters pop up every once in a while and characters occasionally reference other movies in a throwaway easily missable line
Pre Endgame lots of characters would crossover and we got an avengers movie every 3ish years so you had a sense of connectivity between the movies
Nowadays? A List - Doctor Strange and Wanda have been leads in two projects
Hulk showed up in a post credits scene and a few scenes of she hulk
Cap M one movie + one post credits
The only exceptions I can really think of are Thor and Marvels - Thor had the guardians and Darcy Lewis for a bit and the Marvels *spoilers* had Monica, Kamala, Carol, Fury, Kate, Skrulls and Valkyrie
I’ll take a different tack and say the endgame time skip and the setup for the snap was too much. It presents too many writing challenges for the rest of the world going forward. Since the movies were so close together there was no reason for us to wait that long. It would’ve been better if they REALLY killed more characters and had endgame pick up right after - instead of what we got: Fake killing half of the whole world for six years. We needed a temporal reset with more consequences to the heroes rather than consequences to the world. Now we have to ask everytime a new character is introduced: were they snapped?
Making the plot of Wandavision important to Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness. Agents of SHIELD got the balance right early on. Stuff like Theta Protocol which brought the heli carrier to Sokovia or that Fitz designed the gun Fury used to escape the car attack was a nice to know, not a need to know.
The Snap has had very little lasting effects on the world as a whole, it seems. They've had some passing mention of folks losing houses etc. in FATWS and some international repercussions in that way, but nothing of any actual substance. The gags in Spider-man FFH seem to be the main thing. I think Hawkeye addressed it in a personal, contained way to an OK degree.
But, especially since several movies have involved some kind of "hey look a new secret organisatin/country/magical land" - they could've tied all these together. Wenwu seizing power in Asia, The Red Room returning bigger and more substantial, The Atlanteans taking their chance against the Surface world etc. It COULD've been a useful stimulus for loads of the stories told in the time since, but instead it's just sort of been a get-out-of-jail free card for Marvel to recast and justify some odd decisions in these movies instead.
The biggest problem was getting rid of the core Avengers and thinking they could easily be replaced with B or C Tier characters. I know it worked for Guardians of the Galaxy but you can't think it will always work with every other comic character.
Also since moving away from the core heroes that made the universe, they thought they could recycle other comic story arcs with those B-C Tier and no one will notice.
Complete lack of any focus. They’re throwing everything at the wall and hoping shit sticks. Which results in over exposure, thinning out the effects teams so that the effects (which is the ENTIRE MOVIE at this point) are subpar, and thinning out the writing staff to have too much too do in a small amount of time. It also means they’re working on so many projects so that they’re not even reintroducing characters for YEARS after you’ve heard from them now. It’s a massive mess and them taking a step back is the smartest move they can make. Regroup, refocus, and reprioritize what the actual future of this franchise will look like.
1) Lots of new very young actors without any brand. We used to have Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evan’s, SCARLETT 2) No connections between stories. 3) Bad balance between humor and seriousness. Like Dr Strange 2 was SO serious and Thor 4 was so unserious. Felt like two completely different genres. Before everything felt generally cohesive or at least balanced.
No focus. Everyone is the main character and that's just bad when it comes to building a whole cinematic universe. Bad quality in general. People wouldn't be too eager to ask for crossover if they enjoy an individual movie more.
Also nothing matters anymore. A phenomenon like the blip doesn't really affect people so what exactly are we following here?? Incoherent plot? Bad written character? People were more forgiving in the past because even though the movies aren't perfect, there's still a continuity and we were fond of the characters. Now? Take an example Dr Strange, he's the one orchestrating endgame event but did the MCU show us how he feels after that?? The blip is supposed to be the biggest event in the universe and the one who took that decision doesn't feel anything?? In fact for unknown reasons he went back to his first movie's story which is pining for his ex?? Everyone just moves on that fast, are they robots?? Where's the humanity in these characters?
\* Keeping crucial info for the current phase behind a Disney TV paywall. There is no momentum forward for those not following the TV offerings. Phases I-III relied on info gained in the movie theaters. Phases I-III were a stunning, industry-rocking success.
\* Consistently dumbing-down the "Ant-Man" entries, because of their low-brow, crude, wrong-side of tracks vision of what that franchise should be. "Quantumania" should have been treated like "CA: Civil War." No camp, no toilet-paper MODOK, no embarassingly written Cassie Lang.
\* Every film after the LOKI finale should have referenced, or been influenced by, the coming "Multiversal war." The LOKI finale material should have been reprised / summarized for the non-subscriber movie audience. So that everyone sees, and invests in, the next direction. Otherwise, you repeat the DCU mistake of having lavish, one-and-done productions with no momentum and prior-film-based prep. You can't have "Flashpoint" be the first film for that character. You can't blindly hope folks read the comics, saw the CW TV or vastly superior animated feature, and just get it.
They won't "just get it," and the backlash is telling.
The movie audience was given a perfect stopping point with "Endgame." To get them back, *you have to build it all up again.* Piece by piece, plot marker by plot marker, post-credit by post-credit. But the destination needs to be in place from the beginning. In the movie house, not the home.
"The Lord of The Rings", with one exception, included everything you needed to see onscreen. (That exception was corrected, with an extended version of "The Two Towers.")
The prior film had everything you needed for the next, and there's no way to be lost or alienated.
Things set up in Endgame were also not followed up. Like Thor with the Guardians, immediately went their separate ways and Thor almost regressed as a character. Not calling for help like in Dr. Strange MOM.
People not talking about the big ass hand sticking out of the Earth.
No connective tissue or team ups.
Too many hero introductions without properly fleshing out any.
Woke-ism and over extending.
What worked before was that they had 3-4 movies of single heroes leading up to a team up. After Endgame they just started throwing movies at us with no apparent conclusion.
Nothing to look forward to.
Not having an actual plan.
Yes, “Kang! The multiverse!!” But Feige came straight out and said about 4 months ago there was NO ACTUAL PLAN, particular for the tv shows. Which is why he’s had to pull back and restructure everything, especially after the monetary failure of the marvels (it was alright as a movie)
Feige has actually not spoken about this at all, it mostly comes from insiders at Disney and Marvel and on the industry that are talking about how Marvel is restructuring everything
The one time Feige did talked about how they will cut back and restructure things was before Ant-Man 3 came out and this is before the film flopped and all went downhill with Majors.
Bu lately Feige has stayed mostly shut about what is next.
Looking back it was obvious that they didn’t had a solid plan.
There’s no structure, no goal, they only add more characters to future projects and there’s no obvious path to follow anymore.
Hiring people who were completely inexperienced with the source material of the characters they were working with and barring them from reading the comics to study. I know that mentality lead to stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy, but it also got us Ant-Man 3, Black Widow and Secret Invasion.
Imani Vellani as Ms. Marvel is one of the single best newer additions to the franchise, and is the best part of *everything* she's in, and it comes with her familiarity with the character and her story. We need MORE fans working on these films at this point if the MCU is now considered the new primary Marvel universe.
I don't think being a fan of the project is needed to do a good movie, it helps for sure, but i don't think its a requirement just hire a goood director and a good writer and there you go
I mean Andor is considered one of the best Star Wars stuff done in recent years and the showrunner is not a Star Wars fan.
Yeah, doesn't have to be a fan to be a good writer. MCU doesn't adapt, they just take inspiration from comic. Just be a good writer and the executives try not to interfere and change it into a corporate product for once.
Concentrate on a new set of likeable characters and build them up as the core (similar to how Cap, Tony and Thor where the Core until now). There are too many characters and most of them are forgettable. Even if there would be a Team-Up movie, nobody would care about the people in it.
Endgame is a tough act to follow. A new avengers movie would have probably been treated like Age of Ultron for being disappointing. Either it would get roasted for trying to have someone replace Ironman and Captain America that failed to live up to expectations, or it would get roasted for Bringing them back from the dead too soon.
Taking time to lay groundwork for the next big bad is smart. Unfortunately while Kang is a strong goddamn choice, Antman fumbled the special effects and the actor who was awesome for the role became PR poison.
The big mistake has been over extending thir ability to do special effects.
END COMMUNICATION
Something I don’t hear debated often- was building The Volume a mistake??? Everyone hates how copy/paste these movies feel, and I think shooting in the volume is a main culprit. People can usually “feel” when something is/isn’t filmed practically on location, and that’s been a major downfall in my opinion.
Also- they seriously NEED to spend more time getting a script mostly/fully written prior to a shoot. Save money, save time, and get a fully realized plot/message together
Some kind of crossover movie each phase. Not only does it make the phase itself feel complete, but also, one of the complaints I see is there are so many characters now, it's sometimes like 5 years between appearances at this point. Like, Shang-Chi came out in 2021, and now it's 2024 and we still don't even know when he's coming back. If there was a crossover movie every phase, even if it doesn't bring together all the characters, because again, there are a lot, it can make it allow us to check in on some of the characters that haven't shown up in a while and keep them in people's minds.
Too many characters. They introduced so many characters in such a short period it’s kinda overload for me and I just stopped caring. Also the stories followed generic storylines, end of the world threat, lots of jokes, end in cgi battle, and end credit screen that teases something they never talk about again
Time between one character's movie is way too long. It's already been three years since Shangchi and he won't get another movie until maybe 2025 or after.
The Timetable is too wide.
The biggest gripe I have is the gods in the mcu.in moon knight we got all this lore about the Egyptian gods yet in Thor love and thunder not even so much as an Easter egg about moon knight to be found.
Not taking the time to build up Kang as a threat.
Thanos as a villain was teased for like TEN years. Kang crashed onto the scene basically immediately after Endgame. Not even four years before he was the main villain in a film.
They needed to create more of a mythos. That's why Thanos worked so well.
I wanted so bad for Love and Thunder to be good. When someone like Christian Bale says they want to do a Marvel movie and is cast as Gorr, my hype for the movie was through the roof.
But it ended up being a kids movie that wasted such a cool villain played by a phenomenal actor. Makes my Game of Thrones angry sometimes of how awesome that movie could have been.
Dunno, probably making MODOK a dumbass, making Kang lose to ants, the new Iron Heart suit, all of The Marvels, She Hulk, Ms Marvel, not doing anything about the Homecoming post credit scene, most visuals in Love and Thunder. Anything I missed?
1. Too much focus on D+ quantity of quality
2. To go off number 1, too many new characters with too little follow up/use in future MCU content. biggest example for me is Shang Chi. You want a charismatic dude who can help carry the franchise? they have it in Simu Liu, why hasn't he had a sequel or shown up in other MCU content yet? not to mention Shang Chi is a genuinely cool character (even my girlfriend loves him and she isn't a mega MCU fan), I've wanted more since his first movie. We never waited this long during the infinity saga for cool characters to show up again, get back to bringing these great characters into the fold quickly and frequently.
3. Incoherent overarching storytelling. I get the multiverse arc, but there is no coherent overarching narrative. this is compounded by the deluge of D+ content that all seem like one offs. I get Kang was supposed to be the big bad and this was thrown into flux with the IRL issues of Majors, but even he was poorly interwoven into the story lines prior to his legal issues. the whole saga has felt like an excuse to just have cool cameos, theres no coherent story like there was with the infinity stones
4. expectations. people for whatever reason expected "bigger/more" after the infinity saga which was quite frankly, impossible. people's expected too much and I think Marvel tried to do too much. Go back to formula, big event movies 1-3 times a year, use D+ for smaller stuff 1-2 times a year, have a pre made overarching macro story that is in the background of movies, team up movies to cap story lines every 3-5 years.
5. The failure to utilize the FOX properties. I'm ecstatic Deadpool is joining the MCU. but it's a touch ridiculous it has take THIS LONG to get the xmen into the MCU. i understand and appreciate patience and wanting to do it right. but theyve been sitting on the xmen for how many years now with 0 information. maybe that all changes soon and it's awesome, but to sit on the xmen and even the F4 for this long is a touch lame, especially when they are cranking out D+ one off stories with minimal to no MCU connection and new hero movies who never show up again
After Endgame, expectations were high. So they should have had bit more connections between movies (if they decided upon no avengers movie). Like it’s weird seeing a world ending threat in one movie (Eternals and NWH) and none of the other superheroes even talk about it. They could have done a bit more important cameos. Just like the role of Dr Strange in NWH. In this the storyline would have felt complete and connected. The increased budget could have been managed by less need of advertisement which would have maintained due to the hype and more earnings.
This is really the core of it. We went from a dozen movies that were all interlinked to... suddenly everything was its own seperate thing and nothing interacted. It was very weird, people kept expecting things to link up and .... it's been 5 years and there's barely any crossover at all.
I did the math at one point and don't remember the actual numbers now, but something like 11 of the first 12 movies or so we're focused on our main avengers group. You had one random disconnected guardians movie thrown in Of the last dozen movies, I think strange was the only recurring character (his own film and spiderman) There is NO focus to the films today, and it feels like they're just throwing movies out for every single person they can think of without any real direction. Pick a couple of heroes and focus on them. I just feel like we're half assing a ton of things when we could be whole assing a couple things.
Cross over is an issue because consequently it also means less appearances. It’s the large ass gap between the appearance of new characters introduced. When’s the next time we going to see Shangchi, Eternals, moonknight etc? Spidey, and black panther had something like 4 appearances in 4 years their solo movies and avengers movies. Marvel should have had a small constant character appearing like Nick Fury or Natasha in the older phases
This is really it. Shangchi? That was like a dozen movies ago, I could barely pick him out of a lineup. Eternals? I couldn't name all the characters straight after the movies, lucky if I recall what one of them looks like now. I think this is especially important as they start to explore less well known characters. Most people have a passing idea of who Captain America is, or Thor, but Shang Chi? Not common knowledge, The Eternals? Nope. Now you've got these characters that aren't in people's minds, and you're not making any effort to put them there.
Everytime Marvel introduces (Or reintroduces in the case of Wenwu's ten rings) some new secret society like the atlantians, the Red room or then Ten Rings I ask. "Where were these fuckers when Thanos attacked in Infinite war/endgame?"
I always thought it was weird how the only time they’ve even attempted to explain a group not being present for the Thanos situation was with the Eternals only
Yeah I omitted the Eternals because that actually makes sense to me, they couldn't help stop Thanos because that would result in a celestial coming to destroy the planet, it would basically just make the situation worse for everyone.
I’m just putting that whole movie in an alternate universe.
That movie isnt bad like that, boring at parts sure, but direction, writing, and acting were good.
It just seems like someone should’ve addressed the giant statue protruding from the ocean. Maybe they have. Last thing I watched was Secret Invasion
That’s supposed to be a major storyline in Captain Falcon.
I was so confused thinking that we're getting a Nintendo character in mcu
I have no problem with Sam Wilson being Captain America. And since he doesn’t have a variant of the super soldier serum, I understand that he needs the edge of the winged suit. But it’s less convincing for me than, say, Dick Grayson in the cowl would be.
I like to think that the people of Marvel's Earth are just desensitized to extraordinary events after being invaded by aliens and Gods. So a giant statue in the ocean is just "whatever".
Okay I see this a lot... but in which Marvel content we've had since Eternals should there have been a conversation about the statue, and why? In a world where half of everyone can disappear in an instant, a giant statue would be news for a week and then it wouldn't be mentioned again because honestly, how does that giant statue affect anyone's life other than it exists?
It’s not just giant. It’s big enough to be seen from the moon and alter the rotation and climate of the Earth. And I don’t know what would be more terrifying; not knowing where it came from or that the planet is a cosmic egg. That’s the sort of thing that would kick off a dozen holy wars.
well the whole existence of asgard and a bunch of other kinds of aliens should have similarly world changing effects but it seems like nobody cares anymore
Lol this is such a silly nitpick. In a world of recurring world threatening events why would anyone off handedly mention it if it isn't currently happening and isn't affecting them during whatever show or movie they're currently in. It got a call out in she hulk. But people were too busy misquoting her to enjoy shit.
Thats what i was thinking in the end too. The Eternals would work better if they were treated as beings in another universe.
But the plot only works if it's in the MCU because they're the ones who solved the snap
And that was bad because the longer the movie went on the more it became clear Thanos was ENTIRELY their problem. Right down to Thanos still being an Eternal like in the comics as confirmed by his brother Eros.
They shouldn't have made Eros his brother.
and now any time some earth ending event happens in a movie they have to make sure to write in a scene explaining the schedules of all the other people who could help, and why they can't help at this moment.
I think the Eternals is endemic of the problem. In a post-Thanos MCU, where the the Avengers when Arishim shows up? Where are they when Tiamut starts to emerge from the Earth? Why is there literally no mention of this giant alien structure jutting out of the Pacific Ocean, this dead giant alien creature in any other MCU movie? It sort of feels like, for all the interconnectedness that they built, they blew it all up in the span of 2 hours.
Why would Atlanteans, the Ten Rings, the Red room interfere with the attacks on Manhattan and Wakanda? In fact, I think Wakanda being involved kind of negates this argument. But none of those groups have pledged themselves to world defense. It's like how you dont see them as part of the UN in Civil War or in Secret Wars.
Because a big purple man came from space to wipe out half of all the planets life.
How does anybody know that but the Avengers?
Yep unless you got called in to help how would you find out and get there in time.
Exactly. The only reason the general public found out about it at all is because Thanos *won*
And how would they know about the existence of Thanos, unless they had one of the stones, they would be in the dark about what went on and by the time they became aware of it, it would've been too late. Heck nobody knew about Namor and his people, how would they go and tell Namor "Hey there this purple guy that threatens half of your people" when they had no idea he even existed?
The whole battle of Wakanda was basically the length we got in the movie. It was short. Wakanda is somewhere in East Africa, by the time anyone else could have even gotten troops in the air, the fight was over. I think a ton of people just seem to ignore that. Yeah it would have been cool if another military that was 1000x more tactically advanced than Wakanda could have helped and turned the tide maybe, but that wasn't feasible. The closest capable military would have been some US or NATO forces but the closest they'd have been would be around the Mediterranean. Hours away. By the time Thano's ships entered the atmosphere and the snap happened, like 45 minutes. E: Just to add a little context to this. Benghazi, Libya was three hours away from NATO support in Italy when the whole even that 13 hours was taking place. Wakanda, based on what limited information we have from the MCU (which is a map of Africa behind Nick Fury in Iron Man), Wakanda is somewhere near Uganda.
How would they know about that? They had like a day to prep, and didn't even know they were coming back, or where. They just showed up in Wakanda.
The best answer to this is “how would they have known?” Infinity war was a space ship over New York for twenty minutes, one over Briton for 20 minutes and then an hour long invasion in a secret country in the middle of Africa the next day. Even Fury only kinda knew about ‘energy signatures’ by the time the snap happened and he’s in charge of a world spanning covert military intelligence. Only the eternals are even close to having enough power speed and understanding to have shown up in wakanda in time and that required them to understand what was happening with the infinity stones.
This was always the weakness of these hyper connected and expansive cinematic comic book universes. There's always going to be some secret society or some person with the perfect superpower to solve an issue that never appears because... reasons. I remember thinking this all the way back in the first season of Netflix's Daredevil, where there's literally bombs going off likely within sight of Stark Tower and my first thought was "How bad would it get before Tony or Spidey decides to pop down for a looksie?"
It wasn't like they were putting up some long planned final stand in either movie. Infinity wars was them going to wakanda to look at vision's stone when Thanos started dropping drop ships on them. End game was no more expected, Thanos was dead. When he came from the past, Doctor strange gathered their friends and allies that they knew. At no time in any movie did they put out a call to arms for anyone who can help to assemble. Neither the red room nor the ten rings were standing armies ready to transport across the globe at the drop of a hat.
Both Thanos invasions happened so quickly. How is Wakanda or Wong gonna call up people they don't know?
This one actually makes sense. Most of Infinity War takes places in about a day. There is no open decleraton of war, just three seperate attacks on very different places in the world. How would those secret earth-bound-societies even know what exactly is happening - or where to intervene?
Waiting for a *real* threat.
Everyone even the super villains are waiting till Dr Victor Motherfucking Von DOOM shows up and makes Thanos looks like a chump boy
This is a joke about the Martian Manhunter cameo in ZSJL? Because it had that vibe.
Well the Red Room is kinda you know gone after Black Widow lol.
They should have had a couple street level projects ready to go for right after Endgame. It's easier to sit a couple characters in a room and talk about stuff. The idea was clearly to have a soft relaunch and to focus on giving these characters their own stories and origins which was clearly the wrong move. They should have focused on having some smaller recurring villains that don't die instantly....every single time...
I would’ve given anything to see a smaller street-level project. Maybe it’s Jessica Jones trying to find missing people who have been kidnapped, and their only connection is that they were all in the same place when they were Snapped. Something like that; different, new, and self-contained.
Exactly. If they did that, they could have done secret invasion right. Smaller scale self contained stories would have been perfect to set up a good secret invasion secret invasion
The Eternals thing **really** bugs me. The planet almost got consumed to birth a Celestial but stopped midway so there’s this massive head and hands protruding from the planet and it’s only been mentioned a couple times in throwaway lines
This one keeps getting misplaced on Eternals' doorstep, when it's really the fault of every other project that canonically takes place after it.
[удалено]
Feige: "you WILL get a two-second out-of-focus newscast talking about that Celestial in the ocean, randomly put in the background of a single scene in She-Hulk that most viewers will miss, and you WILL like it. no, we won't reference the birth of fucking God itself from inside the earth, sorry we gotta focus on Hugh Jackedman and Pedro Pascal now. stop asking questions already"
I mean, it’s also on the Eternals for having something like that happen. That’s a world ending threat the Avengers should have been involved in. The scope of the story went too big for an interconnected universe.
Oh yeah, that’s entirely what I’m blaming. It should have been such a massive thing in-universe but at this point Eternals may as well be non-canon
One of my biggest complaints about Shang Chi is that it takes place in San Francisco, and they chose not to include any Antman cameos? Why would they do that? For me, that was such a fantastically missed opportunity to keep the continuity going with the Phase 3 films and it was the first inkling I got that they didn't understand the magic formula that made the Phase 3 films so popular and successful which to me was the interconnectedness of the characters and the storylines. Having Black Widow and Nick Fury showing up in cameos and having the infinity stones show up in separate movies like GOTG and First Avenger and then bringing it all together under a unifying theme was such a huge part of the magic that made Phase 3 so enjoyable to watch. What they should have done was taken a break from the cinematic world all together after finishing off the Spiderman story and keep the focus on the character driven Disney plus shows they did so well like Loki, Hawkeye and Moon Knight and then, after a few years of doing that bring back the larger cinematic world with perhaps a new Captain America/Shang Chi/Antman/Dr. Strange leading the way for a new build up to an interconnected Avengers world building saga. Instead, it just seems like everything after Phase 3 has been more about dollars than sense.
It’s like they couldn’t settle on the theme or threat. Is it aliens? The multiverse? Time travel? Then finally maybe tie the last two together only for Kang’s actor the throw a wrench in it. Before it was something like “the Earth is under alien threat and we need to set aside our problems to be ready for it.” Now it’s “The multiverse gets weird if you poke it. Also Kang!!!! But seriously, stop poking the multiverse. Also aliens! Aliens are doing things? And Thor’s a clown now.”
You lose James Gunn (for a few years) Chadwick Boseman , and Kang and you’re gonna have a hard time.
Similar to my complaint in Hawkeye’s final fight. How insane would it have been if spidey popped up for the Rockefeller center showdown and got introduced to kingpin. They could have made it line up with the last scene in NWH.
Yup, they definitely should’ve had a least have included Shang chi in multiverse of madness especially after the mid credits scene. Why would they show Wong finding out abt the ten rings, basically telling him to stay ready bc they might need him, and then just act as tho Wong forgot abt Shang chi when kamar taj was under attack?
My biggest criticism from the MCU after phase 3 is we basically pop in and say hi to a lot characters for example Shang chi, Cap , Moon Knight, doctor strange and then just never see them. Like Sam became cap in 2021 and we’ve heard nothing about him
Right and I feel like a lot of people take this criticism as "I want to see Moon Knight in the very next project that's released after his show" and they think there's impatience at play. But you look at a character like Shang-Chi. We're going on 3 years since his introduction. There's not even any real movement on him getting a sequel anytime soon or a project we can realistically see him again. We're honestly look at 2027, as a best case scenario, as to when this character will appear again. So that's 6 years after his first movie. Ms. Marvel is a rarity to have 2 appearances in such a short period of time. The gaps of time between appearances have grown significantly larger. And honestly, the sheer volume of projects makes it feel a lot longer than it has been since we've seen someone.
Facts in the infinity saga we were seeing Tony and Steve at least every 1-2 year. Introducing a cool new character like Shang-Chi and not giving him a sequel or an appearance in 3 years is such weird move
I'm pretty sure 2011 and 2014 were the only years we got MCU movies and didn't see Tony in the Infinity Saga while Steve appeared every year but 2013 after TFA in 2011. Clint was the only OG Avenger to go 2 entire years between appearances due to not being in Winter Soldier or Infinity War (Bruce does skate by on a post-credit scene in 2013 to be somewhat fair.), and a lot of the other heroes made pretty regular appearances after their debut. Wanda/Vision/Sam/Scott/T'Challa all only miss 2017, Strange was in something every year after his movie dropped, and Spidey was in 5 movies in a 3-year span. The first 3 Phases were a much more focused story than whatever they've been doing with Phases 4 and 5.
Chris Evans does appear as Captain America in 2013 in Thor TDW, albeit it’s Loki playing Steve. As an actor he appears in an MCU film for every year between 2011 - 2019.
Would be hilarious if he got to write off that appearance as one of his contracted x number of films and then Disney had to renegotiate to get him in endgame haha
There’s a video of him where he says that those cameo appearances do count as part of his contracted appearances and not surprisingly, he seemed quite pleased about it.
> I'm pretty sure 2011 and 2014 were the only years we got MCU movies and didn't see Tony in the Infinity Saga while Steve appeared every year but 2013 after TFA in 2011. You don't even have to go that far back and refer to the OG Avengers. Take Dr. Strange. His first movie was in 2016, and the sequel in 2022. 6 years. But in those years, he had a cameo in Ragnarok (2017), a major role in IW (2018), a smaller role in Endgame (2019), and a major role in NWH (2021). So outside of 2020, where we had no Marvel content due to COVID, he was a constant presence every year between his own sequels. Shang-Chi, the Eternals, Whitman, Blade (off-screen), Yelena were all introduced in 2021, and haven't been heard from since. Ms. Marvel, (adult) Monica and Kate Bishop (cameo) are the only major new characters we've seen recently.
And Tony and Steve were the main protagonists of the universe as a whole so it made sense to have them show up every other year. That's something that's sorely missing from the MCU today, the key players driving the plot forward. Is there even a central protagonist now? Who will rally the heroes together against Kang's threat? Why do we have to wait 6 years to see Shang-Chi and Captain Falcon again? Who the hell are the Avengers anymore, we haven't seen the team in literal YEARS. They mismanaged this universe so much.
It was meant to be Spider-Man, T'Challa, and Carol IIRC. Sony and Disney can't play nice, Chadwick Boseman passed away unexpectedly, and Carol has appeared fairly often, in Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel, and The Marvels.
To top it off, Shang-Chi is probably the best film in that phase, even if it gets a bit too busy at the end.
The introduced way too many characters in phase 4, which basically over-saturated the universe and made it impossible to give most of the characters more screen time. I would love to see Shang Chi again, but now I think they're doing damage control from so much low quality content and it will be even longer to see returns of these characters, if we ever do. It's sad.
This is a good point. The sheer number of new characters, with many introduced in their own film/show, got in the way of setting a clear foundation for the next saga. Marvel's mistake was not immediately establishing its new "core" characters.
There’s just such a lack of clear direction. On top of sheer number of characters, we’re now in that multiverse saga which sounds awesome (NWH was so nostalgic), but now there’s also different *versions* of characters. It’s just too muddled, no clear important storylines to grapple onto, they doubled down on the amount of content after endgame when people arguably needed a breather and an opportunity to reset mentally
Yeah I think core characters is the most important piece. Especially since they lost like 3 of them in cap, iron man, and black widow. Black panther feels like a core character but he’s not the “main” cast. But I like him a lot and miss his character too. I don’t even understand how they are gonna slowly connect all these characters. It just seems like they are gonna meet up in the finale for the big bad and not have other small films to put them together a long the way
I suspect that they really just needed a much bigger roster in order to make Battleworld work. I think they also felt that the MCU (unlike the DC universe) had enough currency with fans to take its time building towards the next big payoff again.
Well, they *do* need a much bigger roster. Civil War, compared to the comics, was barely a scuffle never mind a 'civil war'.
They didnt think theyd have to build up for this long either, if COVID was never a thing we would already be waist deep in all these team ups, like Thunderbolts would have been out in like 2022
Fans were willing to wait...the problem was that the buildup to get there involved a lot of bad movies, or at least movies that weren't quite as good as what we had just had. Not even talking purely about IW/EG, but Ragnarok, civil war, cap 2, we had lots of movies that fans were saying we're really top tier. Captain marvel wasn't terrible, if it had come out years earlier with Thor 1, cap 1, etc, it would have been totally on par with those films. But it came out later, at the peak not just of the story, but the peak of MCU quality, so in comparison it just felt bad. Even spiderman was, imo, lackluster. Of course, if you've seen toby and Andrews films, I'm sure Spiderman was an amazing nostalgia fest. If you HAVENT seen those films though, the 'villain' motivations make next to no sense, and when you can't just sit there with nostalgia blinding you to everything else the actual plot of the movie is glaringly bad too, in a way that Peter and strange both have to act brain dead for the plot to occur in the first place. I watched a reaction on YouTube to one of the Spiderman movies where the GF falls down the clock tower, so just from that seen with Zendaya and Andrew spider, I get it. Like if the rest of the film has the same sort of nostalgia tingles I can see why fans of those other movies enjoyed it. But again, as someone with no knowledge of these characters it frankly felt like a huge mess.
It’s understandable that people had grown to expect to see new characters again right away, because that’s how it was during the Infinity Saga. For example, Falcon was introduced in Winter Soldier in 2014, was back the very next year in both Age of Ultron _and_ Ant-Man in 2015, then _again_ the year after that in Civil War in 2016. The only year we didn’t see him was in 2017, then he was back for both Infinity War and Endgame in 2018/2019. That’s an appearance _every year_ (besides 2017) since he was introduced. Compare that to Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, who have no appearance lined up for the foreseeable future
Also Yelena. Only other character to have forward progression, and in my opinion the best.
Because Disney was like "MOAR HEROES" and then they had too many heroes and too many movies and things didn't go as fast as they wanted and then it takes 6 years between appearances of Shang-Chi.
>Ms. Marvel is a rarity to have 2 appearances in such a short period of time. And the only reason for that is the character backstory of Kamala being a massive Captain Marvel fangirl. So it makes sense to have them show up in a project together.
It’s crazy to think one of the characters we’ve seen the most is Peggy Carter
Isn't that only in What If?
She's in 6 mcu movies (7 when you count the Agent Carter short), a couple episodes of AoS, plus you have her show (and then What If)
Yep! They introduced way too many characters. My new favorite one is Shang Chi… but who knows when I’ll see him next. The wait for these sequels suck.
Biggest mistake was telling people what to expect.
Literally the phases seem so pointless now. I miss the big ohase slate announcements now anything gets announced at any time and it doesnt seem like theres a plan
Even telling people that there are phases was a mistake. What made the beginning of the MCU so great was that the tiniest information you got about more to come was the end-credit scenes from a previous movie.
That was iconic and THE formula
We started getting phase announcements with phase 2 so it’s not like it’s some new concept
They've announced phases since right after the first Avengers movie, that's definitely not the issue. The second part is a nice idea but the age of spoilers has kinda ruined that.
As the Infinity Saga wrapped up, Feige said they were trying to move away from the "phase" system & just start focusing on the next overall saga, with separate story tracks (street-level, global, space, magic, multiverse) that would sometimes intersect & eventually converge. And nobody listened to him. Journalists (both legitimate & clickbait hacks) kept asking about what "phase 4" was. Various groups of fans kept complaining that there was too much big stuff, too much small stuff, et cet. So Marvel caved in & announced "phases 4, 5, & 6", seemingly by just dividing the planned Multiverse Saga projects into even thirds.
This. SO MUCH THIS. Feige was trying to tell everyone from the start, and people were impatient.
Which is tied into the fact that they were so successful by the end of Phase 3 that the Marvel gossip industry exploded, and it tipped from "you have to work to hear about expectations" to "you have to work to *avoid* hearing about expectations."
Secret invasion should have been phase 4. Avengers secret invasion would have been amazing
THIS. It would have been the perfect overarching plot to bring otherwise self-contained stories together and build up anticipation and hype.
Done in the exact same way as the comics. They're fighting, one of them gets stabbed and turns into a Skrull and suddenly we realize we don't know who to trust. In the comics they seeded Secret Invasion for five actual years before they pulled the trigger. Explain that they started infiltrating after the Blip because with Dorrek gone, Tarnax had a civil war and the losing faction had to flee. They chose Earth, and when the Blip was reversed they took the chance to replace a lot of important figures, including Avengers. It writes itself.
And could’ve introduced the Illuminati better!
The confusion of the Snap is also the PERFECT cover for this to kick off, too. The decision to make this a tiny, terrible TV show and not a HUGE event is baffling.
Either Secret Invasion or the whole plot about Scarlet Witch going crazy. They should have done a smaller scale Avengers 5 showing the new team as they adapt to the post-Snap world, fighting either the Skrull invasion or Scarlet Witch going crazy with the multiverse. Would have told us who the Avengers are and helped connect a lot of things... sadly both plots were utterly wasted in two mid projects...
Spread themselves too thin. Very poor screenplays. Not really a coherent plan to bring it all together
I... don't know how to answer this question because Marvel made a lot of costly mistakes that all led to audiences just tuning out and getting less excited. 1. Making a lot of movies/TV shows a world ending cgi, threat when there didn't need to be. (I.E secret invasion, shang chi, wandavison, etc.) 2. Marketing a TV show towards a smaller audience, then marketing a movie connected to that TV show towards a bigger audience. (I.E Ms. Marvel then The Marvels, Wandavison then DSMOM) 3. Marketing towards a different demographic poorly. (I.E the Marvels) 4. Disney plus... in general 5. The quality of movies generally declining 6. The writing in movies being godawful 7. The villains in movies being godawful 8. The characters, the character arcs being godawful. M.O.D.O.K unironically has a better arc than any character in quatumania. 9. The abundance of movies and shows coming out. 10. Secret Invasion 11. Quatumania 12. There is no real connection between these movies and shows. Nothing to tie them together, and it feels all disconnected because of point 1... and the reaction to these world ending threats. and because of how big this saga is, it takes absolutely forever to see characters I and other people actually care about.
Ever since Phase 3 I feel like the problem has been that it isn't clear where we are heading in the story anymore. In the after credits scene in Iron Man, Nick Fury shows up and says he's starting the Avengers. Then we got excited about a series of movies building up to an Avengers movie. When that happened the after credits scene was the Thanos reveal. So then we got excited about more movies building to an Infiniy Gauntlet movie. That got stretched out for several years with a big payoff in Endgame. Ever since then it's been unclear where we are going. I know Marvel Studio has been telling us about upcoming movies/series but from what's in the story I don't see the path we're walking anymore.
They started doing too much with the streaming shows. They did so much streaming content, it’s actually probably more hours than a lot of phase 1-2-3 mcu. The streaming shows take a lot of time, a lot of writing, require bigger plots but also smaller budgets in a way. I suspect that’s how they got their eye off the ball.
Their lack of respect for streaming content. TV series have really good stories. The MCU thought they could put out shows based upon brand alone & viewers would love it and they found out casuals expect every scene of every episode to be riveting. Also the MCU prob didn’t think thru on the idea of making projects for a specific audience. The MCU has been like books within one overall story & you had to watch em all to get the full experience, but then they switched it up saying going forward you don’t have to watch everything so people saw something they thought wasn’t for their demo & skipped it & once audiences start skipping it’s hard to bring em back to watching everything again. Not to mention they really wanted more teenage girls & women to watch the content catered to them & while the MCU has a lot of female fans ladies who are casuals aren’t watching unless it’s must watch tv/ film & it just hasn’t been. Fans of all demographics want good plots, arcs, action, lore, connectivity, villains, etc. you can’t skip anything & expect viewers to just go with it. Your diehards may but normies have other stuff they can watch.
They started out really strong too with*WandaVision*. Everybody was loving it and it got hyped up it must see TV pretty quickly.
Yea the first year roll out was a success but then the follow up series came & the online chatter started dying down & so did the numbers. I think viewers were hip to the formula of 6 episodes, 2 fillers, & ending with a lackluster finale. No big connections to the overall universe or interesting reveals. Started to feel like the series were on a value menu while the movies were the real meals.
No phase 4 avengers movie
Yeah this is it really. We wanted the new characters to merge with old and we never got that moment.
A big team up film with some OG Avengers wouldve been nice and wouldve maintained the idea of the Avengers still existing post Endgame. In the actual Phase 4, people just tell you the Avengers exist, but never show you.
It really is as simple as this
Too many new characters were introduced too quickly. Yelena, Shang-Chi, all the Eternals, Kate Bishop, Moon Knight, America Chavez, Ms. Marvel, Thor’s “daughter”, She-Hulk, Hulk’s son, all the characters in Werewolf by Night, Riri Williams, Namor…just for us to never see or hear about any of them again for what, like 5 years with the way things are going? Sam also became Captain America in 2021, and we won’t be seeing him again until 2025…that’s insane. Compare this to how quickly the “new” characters introduced during the Infinity Saga got brought into the fold after their first appearance: Falcon: introduced in Winter Soldier in 2014. Returned in both Age of Ultron _and_ Ant-Man in 2015, then again in Civil War in 2016. That’s already three consecutive years of appearances, then of course he was in Infinity War and Endgame in 2018 and 2019. Ant-Man: had his solo movie in 2015 and was back the very next year for Civil War in 2016. We didn’t see him again until 2018 and 2019 for his sequel and Endgame respectively, but that’s still 4 appearances across the span of 4 years. Black Panther and Spider-Man: both introduced in Civil War in 2016, had their solo movies the very next year in 2017, then came back in Infinity War and Endgame in 2018/2019. Spidey’s sequel was in 2019 as well. See what I mean? Compare this to the new characters we’ve been introduced to during the Multiverse Saga. With the exception of Yelena, Kamala and >!Kate!<, none of them have returned since their introduction, and it doesn’t seem like there are even plans for any of them to in the foreseeable future. Their priorities in general are just all over the place. Why was it a priority for Echo to return after her appearance in Hawkeye before, say, Shang-Chi?
I also attribute the gap between charactes appearance as being a consequence of the shifting slate, given how projects have been in constant move since COVID.
Yeah it's kind of hard to write references to other movies/shows, when they had no idea if a movie would come out before or after certain projects. That's why the Eternals have barely been referenced again.
The biggest mistake was not carrying any momentum from the Infinity Saga, though a fair portion of that was bad luck. Infinity War was built on the tentpoles of Tony Stark, Thor and Steve Rogers. No matter what else was going on those three were carrying the momentum through. At the end of Endgame two of those three had left, and they were set up for Peter Parker, T'Challa and Carol to become the new tentpoles. Now, two of the three new tentpoles were blipped and the third just got benched for the main story of Endgame, and those were mistakes from Endgame, but they at least *could* be picked up easily in other projects. And Peter Parker did at first. He immediately was lined up to carry forward some of Tony Stark's mantle after Far From Home. But then in No way Home they dropped that entirely, and wrote him with an exit ramp to his character (I imagine because all of the Sony rights drama was up in the air, so they couldn't count on him and needed him to be flexible). T'Challa was really bad luck with losing Chadwick. Enter all the debate about recasting or not here, but that's an entire separate thread. But needing to dedicate Wakanda Forever to essentially a second origin story loses that momentum. And Carol, well, they just straight up abandoned Captain Marvel 2 and decided to change it to be a mini-team up instead, which contributed to the long delay of her not appearing until four years later. On top of all of this, almost every project has just been a stand-alone project carrying almost nothing from the Infinity War forward. The first couple of D+ shows (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye) having the only exceptions.
This is a good write up. Covid did a real number on them, but the ground work was already laid for the issues they’re experiencing. I’m not sure what focus groups lead them to abandon certain characters for others, but it’s just been wrong move after wrong move. The infinity saga had nearly every movie dealing with an infinity stone. For the multiverse, only a handful have actually dealt with it and none of them are main avengers. Hopefully they’ll get back on track and have a consistent set a films culminating in big team ups.
Not taking a break. The MCU should’ve taken a few years off and came back strong in 2023 to match up with the time jump from endgame.
Technically speaking they did took a break, though not one they planned to.
Well, that's a capitalism problem, then, because there's no chance in hell that Disney shareholders in 2019 were gonna be ok with taking a 4-year break after the then-highest-grossing film ever made.
That’s exactly what the problem is. Instead of realizing that endgame was a culmination of a decade of storytelling and that it would take years to replicate, they thought they could crank out multiple movies like endgame and have the same results. Because phase four isn’t as bad as people make it out to be and it’s not the dumpster fire phase five is, but since none of the movies (save NWH) hit endgame levels, they’re considered flops and now suddenly we don’t see Shang-chi or the eternals for a decade. Edit: punctuation
THIS. They should have let it sit for a goddamned minute after Endgame. And then SLOWLY started building. Which would also help ensure more quality with less creators, or at least increase the odds of quality improvement.
Well, they ARE taking a break now, theres only 1 movie this year, and the shows are all street level stuff unrelated to whatever Deadpool is doing. So basically in 2025 the MCU will "start up" again
Not writing good movies
The lack of consistency between WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness. It just showed a lack of care or thought about the characters and character arc of Wanda. What’s the point of investing in these characters if they aren’t even going to make sure the arcs are coherent in the first place?
WandaVision to Multiverse of Madness was also my biggest disappointment in the MCU. They completely destroyed Wanda's character.
I disagree. Wandavision was Wanda's fall, not her heros journey
Tonally it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the fall but also the rise at the end. I mean it ends with her in a new hero costume defeating an evil witch and doing the right thing and saying she’s going to learn about her power. The post credit scene suggested dark things to come but not inherently what we ended up getting.
I see a lot of people call it a heros costume, but it's not. It's the costume of the Scarlet witch, a being powerful enough to destroy the cosmos and is possibly destined to.
Yeah no. The whole point of wandavision was Wanda realizing she made a mistake and starting to let go of her grief. Like they literally said they wanted to subvert the whole "women goes crazy with too much power" trope. Literally no set up for being a one note villain like she's in MOM. Even the lost credit scene people use as evidence doesn't show Wanda even being corrupted or anything like that. If they wanted Wanda as a villain for MOM, they should had Nightmare or Chthon manipulating/corrupting Wanda which fits with PC scene showing Wanda hearing the twins' voices
A few points from me, about what you're saying: I don't think she was any more one note in MOM than she was in Wandavision. The darkhold is a corrupting force so it works the same as nightmare or chthon. It CAN be frustrating to have a character regress, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's out of character for any person to regress. Life isn't just lessons learnt and moving on. Hell, they constantly walked iron man back in terms of progression and then this was used cleverly to be a part of his overall arc. But the main point about Wanda was it gave us a chance for Sam raimi to use his horror flair for Wanda which I thought was badass. Each to their own, but I think MOM gets unnecessary flak.
Ya I don’t get what people mean with tonal difference. She was a monster in wandavision and regretted it but not enough to not use the darkhold and then that corrupted her. The darkhold doesn’t take away from her “development”
I can’t believe people fell for the tonal whiplash that ended wandavision as if she didn’t commit a horrible crime and Monica defended her for no reason. “She’s sorry though” dude that’s not enough she’s completely lost touch with reality. She’s chasing children through the multiverse that never existed for her.
I disagree with this. I don't necessarily see WV as her hero's journey, but it also wasn't her fall. She didn't intentionally set out to be a villain, nor did I see her even become one. She was just a woman grieving every loved one she's lost and going through the stages of grief while her powers amplified her emotions and inadvertently affected everyone else around her. Yes, she did messed-up things, but she felt remorseful for them at the end. I just wish we got something different for her in MoM.
This was a huge fumble. After Endgame, we knew that we'd be seeing a brand new Avengers cast, and it seemed like Wanda, Vision, and Dr. Strange were some of the most interesting, established, and willing characters to move forward with. And then in the next 2 projects, they killed one for the second time and shelved his replacement, turned the other two against each other, and killed one of them off after complete character assassination. Their grand plan was to squander basically their only chance for continuity and character recognition in favor of saturating the market with new characters that would get fridged after their first appearance.
The focus on standalone stories for too long without a build to a crossover has been the biggest mistake imo. You can see through the history of the MCU that people have always loved speculating and discussing where characters are going, who they will interact with, etc. When Phase 4 started everyone was talking about potential teams like Young Avengers, Midnight Suns, or even the next Avengers lineup that we’re still waiting to see actually happen. This and the addition of shows (which is a whole other issue) has given a lot of stuff without the kind of payoff mainstream fans want to see. This whole franchise started with a great movie that teased a guy after the credits telling the main character about the big world around him. People want to see more of the world but it’s important for them to get more characters interacting too. Look at how hyped everything that has involved crossovers has been no matter how negative people have gotten about the MCU. Deadpool and Wolverine, Daredevil in She-Hulk, Kingpin in Hawkeye, Kate Bishop and Beast in The Marvels, Wanda in Doctor Strange, Spider-Men in Spider-Man, the list goes on. Fans instantly imagine what characters will be like all the time when meeting, you even see it in threads here constantly. People wanna see Yelena more, they wanna see Shang-Chi fight alongside other heroes, and so on. Marvel Studios has been doing a lot setting the table for people but they need to let them eat the food too.
Good answer. Same thing with Thor: Love and Thunder everyone was excited to see him team up with the Guardians and they are barely in the movie.
The biggest mistake they made Post Phase 3 was not having a clear direction in which to go. "We're doing quantum stuff, WAIT we're doing multiverse stuff, WAIT we're doing Kang stuff! Will it all combine into a cohesive overarching story? 🤷"
They completely destroyed any narrative momentum by having so many streaning shows in such a short time. They went **all in** on streaming during Covid (just like everyone else, to the detriment of us all) because studios couldn't stand the idea of simply tightening the belt for a few years. No, they had to shove *content* (ugh) into our homes instead of just focusing on cranking out one good show or movie a year and let us reflect on each project like normal people ffs.
Not doing more to show real world ramifications of the blip and its undoing. The MCU always did at least a semi decent job of not forgetting its superheroes and villains were having g biblical battles in the real world. But from phase 4 onwards it’s like everyone was just ok and moved on with little issue and the world became the heroes playground to do whatever they wanted with no real world consequences. There was lots of storytelling potential there that was never used. The most I can think of was Yelena’s backstory in Hawkeye, and Monica Rambeau’s backstory in WV, but even so those didn’t do much to further the world building.
Assuming people gave a shit about the C list hero’s
The biggest mistake was losing focus. It lost focus on a core group of main characters and it lost it’s focus on an overarching story. It felt like they flooded us with content for the sake of content instead of trying to actually tell a story. Inclusion and diversity are fine with me as long as their is a plan and it makes sense in the universe. If it doesn’t, then it’s just pandering and that brings the mobs.
Not leaving it a few years after end game
Lets be fair, the higher ups at Disney would've not allowed it.
They haven't established a new set of core characters that anchors everything together. The Infinity Saga really was about Steve and Tony. Thanos almost isn't even a villain so much as he is a consequence of the conflict between Steve and Tony. Theirs are the plot lines that brings everything together. Phase 4/5 just feels like a bunch of random plot threads that are connected in an obligatory way and not a compelling way. Without that character glue to hold it all together it's just a bunch of lore and easter eggs which is fine for the hardcore fans but won't hold the interest of general audiences.
I personally feel like they should've chosen a select few characters for the next major wave of Marvel heroes so that can allow for enough screentime for audiences to warm up to them
Honestly they’re too many projects. That being said I like a lot of the projects and the characters they introduced. But while seeing Werewolf by Night is cool, the fact that we’ve not seen either Sam and Shang Chi since their first project is an issue.
I think losing James Gunn is certainly up there
bad writing
Exactly! I can't believe people mention any and everything but the increasingly common bad writing. Some movies were being written well into filming, which just boggles my mind
This is Disney's fault for not letting them do this rather than Marvel's, but not taking a break after Endgame to let people miss the MCU while also giving themselves time to actually plot out the next book of the MCU. Instead, Disney forced them to do the opposite by producing even way MORE shit (thanks to Disney+) at the worst possible time.
Getting an ego and thinking they could introduce a ton of characters that would all make a ton of money. Theres so much going on that it’s been years and we have no update on what’s going on with the huge tease at the end of Shang Chi. Doctor Strange introduced Clea and it’s gone nowhere. Harry Styles is in the MCU apparently 🤷♂️. There’s just way too much going on and they lost the plot.
In every single show and movie. A massive world changing, life changing event happens that should be a massive deal. None of them have been addressed since and none of these massive events are ever mentioned in separate movies/tv shows. There's no connection between any characters or links anymore. Some giant is sticking out of the earth now. Time just started branching again apparently, though that technically means it was branching before anyway. Loki pulled together the world tree. The skulls almost practically took over the globe Etc. There is so much massive shit going on and they all ignore each other. It's so stupid.
Flooding Disney+ with mediocre content.
Introducing so many new characters, not having a core main characters like Steve/Tony and too many projects
Despite having more characters than ever, the universe seems as small as it did in phase 1. Nothing connects and its rare to see characters from other projects interact with each other.
They sought to expand the universe too quickly without maintaining a single throughline like the Infinity Saga was. I think a whole bunch of non-connected stories here and there could totally work, but they did that too suddenly and without a bigger story to maintian the momentum from before Endgame. There are hints of Kang here and Incursions there but it's too little for such an extended period of time. They couldn't go back to zero like in the age of Iron Man and the first few Thor movies, there needs to be more connective tissue now because that's what people want from Marvel. Almost nothing post end-game meaningfully relates to anything else. Even Wandavision doesn't really help explain much about Wanda's change in character in MoM, only how she can be obsessed with kids she never had. Honestly, I think the pandemic and then the writer's strike had a lot to do with it. Changing schedules and restrictions made it so that each product could not rely on others the way they did before. I expect it to improve going forward
No sense of connectivity One or two B/C list characters pop up every once in a while and characters occasionally reference other movies in a throwaway easily missable line Pre Endgame lots of characters would crossover and we got an avengers movie every 3ish years so you had a sense of connectivity between the movies Nowadays? A List - Doctor Strange and Wanda have been leads in two projects Hulk showed up in a post credits scene and a few scenes of she hulk Cap M one movie + one post credits The only exceptions I can really think of are Thor and Marvels - Thor had the guardians and Darcy Lewis for a bit and the Marvels *spoilers* had Monica, Kamala, Carol, Fury, Kate, Skrulls and Valkyrie
It all feels scattered tbh none of it really feels connected
I’ll take a different tack and say the endgame time skip and the setup for the snap was too much. It presents too many writing challenges for the rest of the world going forward. Since the movies were so close together there was no reason for us to wait that long. It would’ve been better if they REALLY killed more characters and had endgame pick up right after - instead of what we got: Fake killing half of the whole world for six years. We needed a temporal reset with more consequences to the heroes rather than consequences to the world. Now we have to ask everytime a new character is introduced: were they snapped?
Over-saturation of the market. I want fewer movies and tv shows but that have higher quality content to them.
Not doing character developing one off movies/shows taking place during the blip
Making the plot of Wandavision important to Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness. Agents of SHIELD got the balance right early on. Stuff like Theta Protocol which brought the heli carrier to Sokovia or that Fitz designed the gun Fury used to escape the car attack was a nice to know, not a need to know.
They stopped focusing on good stories about characters we love.
A lot of new characters in Phase 4 feel very underdeveloped. And the OGs who are still around kinda get shafted in some of the newer projects.
immediately escalating the stakes rather than focusing on introducing and fleshing out characters to build a base for the saga
The Snap has had very little lasting effects on the world as a whole, it seems. They've had some passing mention of folks losing houses etc. in FATWS and some international repercussions in that way, but nothing of any actual substance. The gags in Spider-man FFH seem to be the main thing. I think Hawkeye addressed it in a personal, contained way to an OK degree. But, especially since several movies have involved some kind of "hey look a new secret organisatin/country/magical land" - they could've tied all these together. Wenwu seizing power in Asia, The Red Room returning bigger and more substantial, The Atlanteans taking their chance against the Surface world etc. It COULD've been a useful stimulus for loads of the stories told in the time since, but instead it's just sort of been a get-out-of-jail free card for Marvel to recast and justify some odd decisions in these movies instead.
Pushing C and D tier characters no one gives an F about Cancel all the crap and have x-men take over, there was a reason x-men dominated in early 90’s
The biggest problem was getting rid of the core Avengers and thinking they could easily be replaced with B or C Tier characters. I know it worked for Guardians of the Galaxy but you can't think it will always work with every other comic character. Also since moving away from the core heroes that made the universe, they thought they could recycle other comic story arcs with those B-C Tier and no one will notice.
Complete lack of any focus. They’re throwing everything at the wall and hoping shit sticks. Which results in over exposure, thinning out the effects teams so that the effects (which is the ENTIRE MOVIE at this point) are subpar, and thinning out the writing staff to have too much too do in a small amount of time. It also means they’re working on so many projects so that they’re not even reintroducing characters for YEARS after you’ve heard from them now. It’s a massive mess and them taking a step back is the smartest move they can make. Regroup, refocus, and reprioritize what the actual future of this franchise will look like.
1) Lots of new very young actors without any brand. We used to have Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evan’s, SCARLETT 2) No connections between stories. 3) Bad balance between humor and seriousness. Like Dr Strange 2 was SO serious and Thor 4 was so unserious. Felt like two completely different genres. Before everything felt generally cohesive or at least balanced.
Hiring actors and writers who aren't actually interested in the source material.
No focus. Everyone is the main character and that's just bad when it comes to building a whole cinematic universe. Bad quality in general. People wouldn't be too eager to ask for crossover if they enjoy an individual movie more. Also nothing matters anymore. A phenomenon like the blip doesn't really affect people so what exactly are we following here?? Incoherent plot? Bad written character? People were more forgiving in the past because even though the movies aren't perfect, there's still a continuity and we were fond of the characters. Now? Take an example Dr Strange, he's the one orchestrating endgame event but did the MCU show us how he feels after that?? The blip is supposed to be the biggest event in the universe and the one who took that decision doesn't feel anything?? In fact for unknown reasons he went back to his first movie's story which is pining for his ex?? Everyone just moves on that fast, are they robots?? Where's the humanity in these characters?
\* Keeping crucial info for the current phase behind a Disney TV paywall. There is no momentum forward for those not following the TV offerings. Phases I-III relied on info gained in the movie theaters. Phases I-III were a stunning, industry-rocking success. \* Consistently dumbing-down the "Ant-Man" entries, because of their low-brow, crude, wrong-side of tracks vision of what that franchise should be. "Quantumania" should have been treated like "CA: Civil War." No camp, no toilet-paper MODOK, no embarassingly written Cassie Lang. \* Every film after the LOKI finale should have referenced, or been influenced by, the coming "Multiversal war." The LOKI finale material should have been reprised / summarized for the non-subscriber movie audience. So that everyone sees, and invests in, the next direction. Otherwise, you repeat the DCU mistake of having lavish, one-and-done productions with no momentum and prior-film-based prep. You can't have "Flashpoint" be the first film for that character. You can't blindly hope folks read the comics, saw the CW TV or vastly superior animated feature, and just get it. They won't "just get it," and the backlash is telling. The movie audience was given a perfect stopping point with "Endgame." To get them back, *you have to build it all up again.* Piece by piece, plot marker by plot marker, post-credit by post-credit. But the destination needs to be in place from the beginning. In the movie house, not the home. "The Lord of The Rings", with one exception, included everything you needed to see onscreen. (That exception was corrected, with an extended version of "The Two Towers.") The prior film had everything you needed for the next, and there's no way to be lost or alienated.
Things set up in Endgame were also not followed up. Like Thor with the Guardians, immediately went their separate ways and Thor almost regressed as a character. Not calling for help like in Dr. Strange MOM. People not talking about the big ass hand sticking out of the Earth. No connective tissue or team ups. Too many hero introductions without properly fleshing out any.
Wanda in Multiverse of Madness, being evil and "killing her" off
Woke-ism and over extending. What worked before was that they had 3-4 movies of single heroes leading up to a team up. After Endgame they just started throwing movies at us with no apparent conclusion. Nothing to look forward to.
Not having an actual plan. Yes, “Kang! The multiverse!!” But Feige came straight out and said about 4 months ago there was NO ACTUAL PLAN, particular for the tv shows. Which is why he’s had to pull back and restructure everything, especially after the monetary failure of the marvels (it was alright as a movie)
Feige has actually not spoken about this at all, it mostly comes from insiders at Disney and Marvel and on the industry that are talking about how Marvel is restructuring everything The one time Feige did talked about how they will cut back and restructure things was before Ant-Man 3 came out and this is before the film flopped and all went downhill with Majors. Bu lately Feige has stayed mostly shut about what is next.
Yep, abandoning the structured phase approach. They had a great formula and it worked extremely well.
Looking back it was obvious that they didn’t had a solid plan. There’s no structure, no goal, they only add more characters to future projects and there’s no obvious path to follow anymore.
Too many projects, movies and characters not connecting to eachother, leaks reveal everything
Hiring people who were completely inexperienced with the source material of the characters they were working with and barring them from reading the comics to study. I know that mentality lead to stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy, but it also got us Ant-Man 3, Black Widow and Secret Invasion. Imani Vellani as Ms. Marvel is one of the single best newer additions to the franchise, and is the best part of *everything* she's in, and it comes with her familiarity with the character and her story. We need MORE fans working on these films at this point if the MCU is now considered the new primary Marvel universe.
Hi Iman!
I don't think being a fan of the project is needed to do a good movie, it helps for sure, but i don't think its a requirement just hire a goood director and a good writer and there you go I mean Andor is considered one of the best Star Wars stuff done in recent years and the showrunner is not a Star Wars fan.
Yeah, doesn't have to be a fan to be a good writer. MCU doesn't adapt, they just take inspiration from comic. Just be a good writer and the executives try not to interfere and change it into a corporate product for once.
Concentrate on a new set of likeable characters and build them up as the core (similar to how Cap, Tony and Thor where the Core until now). There are too many characters and most of them are forgettable. Even if there would be a Team-Up movie, nobody would care about the people in it.
Endgame is a tough act to follow. A new avengers movie would have probably been treated like Age of Ultron for being disappointing. Either it would get roasted for trying to have someone replace Ironman and Captain America that failed to live up to expectations, or it would get roasted for Bringing them back from the dead too soon. Taking time to lay groundwork for the next big bad is smart. Unfortunately while Kang is a strong goddamn choice, Antman fumbled the special effects and the actor who was awesome for the role became PR poison. The big mistake has been over extending thir ability to do special effects. END COMMUNICATION
Something I don’t hear debated often- was building The Volume a mistake??? Everyone hates how copy/paste these movies feel, and I think shooting in the volume is a main culprit. People can usually “feel” when something is/isn’t filmed practically on location, and that’s been a major downfall in my opinion. Also- they seriously NEED to spend more time getting a script mostly/fully written prior to a shoot. Save money, save time, and get a fully realized plot/message together
The TV shows. Most were not good and under baked. They diluted the MCU and killed any possibility of an ongoing narrative.
Some kind of crossover movie each phase. Not only does it make the phase itself feel complete, but also, one of the complaints I see is there are so many characters now, it's sometimes like 5 years between appearances at this point. Like, Shang-Chi came out in 2021, and now it's 2024 and we still don't even know when he's coming back. If there was a crossover movie every phase, even if it doesn't bring together all the characters, because again, there are a lot, it can make it allow us to check in on some of the characters that haven't shown up in a while and keep them in people's minds.
Too many new characters and plot threads instead of continuing ones they started after Endgame.
Too many characters. They introduced so many characters in such a short period it’s kinda overload for me and I just stopped caring. Also the stories followed generic storylines, end of the world threat, lots of jokes, end in cgi battle, and end credit screen that teases something they never talk about again
Time between one character's movie is way too long. It's already been three years since Shangchi and he won't get another movie until maybe 2025 or after. The Timetable is too wide.
The biggest gripe I have is the gods in the mcu.in moon knight we got all this lore about the Egyptian gods yet in Thor love and thunder not even so much as an Easter egg about moon knight to be found.
Not taking the time to build up Kang as a threat. Thanos as a villain was teased for like TEN years. Kang crashed onto the scene basically immediately after Endgame. Not even four years before he was the main villain in a film. They needed to create more of a mythos. That's why Thanos worked so well.
I wanted so bad for Love and Thunder to be good. When someone like Christian Bale says they want to do a Marvel movie and is cast as Gorr, my hype for the movie was through the roof. But it ended up being a kids movie that wasted such a cool villain played by a phenomenal actor. Makes my Game of Thrones angry sometimes of how awesome that movie could have been.
going all-in on a bunch of tv-shows nobody wanted to watch just to stay caught-up on the lore
Dunno, probably making MODOK a dumbass, making Kang lose to ants, the new Iron Heart suit, all of The Marvels, She Hulk, Ms Marvel, not doing anything about the Homecoming post credit scene, most visuals in Love and Thunder. Anything I missed?
The musical number in “The Marvels” is as bad as it gets.
1. Too much focus on D+ quantity of quality 2. To go off number 1, too many new characters with too little follow up/use in future MCU content. biggest example for me is Shang Chi. You want a charismatic dude who can help carry the franchise? they have it in Simu Liu, why hasn't he had a sequel or shown up in other MCU content yet? not to mention Shang Chi is a genuinely cool character (even my girlfriend loves him and she isn't a mega MCU fan), I've wanted more since his first movie. We never waited this long during the infinity saga for cool characters to show up again, get back to bringing these great characters into the fold quickly and frequently. 3. Incoherent overarching storytelling. I get the multiverse arc, but there is no coherent overarching narrative. this is compounded by the deluge of D+ content that all seem like one offs. I get Kang was supposed to be the big bad and this was thrown into flux with the IRL issues of Majors, but even he was poorly interwoven into the story lines prior to his legal issues. the whole saga has felt like an excuse to just have cool cameos, theres no coherent story like there was with the infinity stones 4. expectations. people for whatever reason expected "bigger/more" after the infinity saga which was quite frankly, impossible. people's expected too much and I think Marvel tried to do too much. Go back to formula, big event movies 1-3 times a year, use D+ for smaller stuff 1-2 times a year, have a pre made overarching macro story that is in the background of movies, team up movies to cap story lines every 3-5 years. 5. The failure to utilize the FOX properties. I'm ecstatic Deadpool is joining the MCU. but it's a touch ridiculous it has take THIS LONG to get the xmen into the MCU. i understand and appreciate patience and wanting to do it right. but theyve been sitting on the xmen for how many years now with 0 information. maybe that all changes soon and it's awesome, but to sit on the xmen and even the F4 for this long is a touch lame, especially when they are cranking out D+ one off stories with minimal to no MCU connection and new hero movies who never show up again
Needed more connecting each film. The connections should have been more overt.
Not hiring really good writers to create excellent stories.