T w e n t y S i d e d
Once upon a time I was elated with the MCU. There were consistently fun movies coming out multiple times per year to look forward to. They were funny, action packed powerhouses. Slowly over time, though, I grew exhausted with the formula.
I was never a HUGE super hero guy to begin with. I always loved Spiderman and Batman because of their shows. Batman the Animated Series is still elite television, by the way. However that’s basically where my interest began and ended. So when Iron Man came out and was an absolute banger I was pleasantly surprised. Then Thor and the Edward Norton Hulk were pretty great too. That made me a lot more interested in the Avengers Universe.
Honestly the build to Infinity War and then Endgame felt amazing to me. The series built up a big head of steam but the payoff felt a bit lackluster. And that was it for me. I had my fill, since I’d watched nothing MCU except the Spiderman movies.
I had officially become overwhelmed by the content. I can’t be expected to watch all the MCU content out there to keep up with story beats and character development. I’ve heard great things about several movies and shows, but I just don’t really care anymore.
I say all this because The Punisher brought me back in. Maybe it’s the edgy boy in me that wants my content more gritty and dark. Maybe the lack of a constant drive to have levity injected into scenes to keep the tone lighter. Whatever it was, I’m interested again. I like the somewhat grounded feel. I like the lack of superpowers bailing characters out. I’m enjoying the adult tone. I only wish it went all out on that tone instead of pulling all the punches and ending up with a PG-13ish tinge. That’s a conversation for another time, though.
But that leaves me curious. Have any of you guys fallen off the MCU bandwagon and hopped back on? I’m genuinely curious where that happened for people.
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I basically went through exactly what you did; Marvel tried to turn the MCU into an infinite money machine by just pumping out content after content, at a pace that audiences just could not sustain/connect with anymore. First, they started moving the stories into streaming so in order to know what’s going on/who are these people in Movie #3, you had to have watched Series #1 and Series #2. But not everybody has the time for that, so Movie #3 naturally does worse when you have a greater percentage of the audience who’s just sitting going “Who the heck is this guy?” Two particular flashpoints I can remember of this was Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where if you hadn’t watched Wandavision, you would be utterly confused and going “Wait, Scarlet Witch is a bad guy now? SINCE WHEN?!”, and The Marvels, where again if you hadn’t watched Ms Marvel you would be going “Who the heck is this Kamala person and what’s she got to do with Captain Marvel?”
Then you have the flip side of the coin where Marvel tried to do what they did with Guardians of the Galaxy and introduce whole new rosters like the Eternals. But that movie tried to give us SEVEN new characters within a single movie, which is hardly enough screentime to give the audience enough time to build up a rapport with them. The reason why Avengers worked is because each of the founding Avengers basically had their own movie within which to introduce them, build up their stakes and cement them within the world. Eternals tried to do too much in too short a time.
And finally, I think the deepest and trickiest problem of all is that the MCU now feels TOO big. The problems are so big and so grand that it’s become hard to really relate to Earth-616 anymore. At any moment, you could have some world-destroying alien/god descend on the planet; how on earth is the average human supposed to build a life and plan a future when reality could be snapped out of existence tomorrow? It all starts to feel too unreal.
And coincidentally, that’s actually why Hawkeye was one of my favourite of the new series. It moved the stakes much closer to the ground, making it feel more human, more grounded. The problems weren’t solved by some powerful artifact or a great superhero; it was done through ordinary humans with highly specialized training and the odd bit of helpful technology.
I’ll still give Avengers: Doomsday a chance when it comes out, of course, but I don’t think I’ve been EXCITED for a Marvel movie (outside of the Spider-Verse movies. Those are INCREDIBLE) for many years now.
Scarlet Witch reverting to villainy wasn’t a huge surprise. She was introduced as one after all, though *capable* of redemption since part of that was being lied to.
But yes, making a lot of the story happen on TV immediately lost the audience. At least the audience that actually followed the story. You may have noticed that the foreign box office hasn’t fallen off nearly as much as domestic. I think this is because the dubbing quality varies, so the audience in other countries skews towards the ones who like big explosions.
For that matter, I’m probably one of those.
My anime watching started out with watching tapes from someone who corresponded with someone in Japan. They would exchange stuff they’d taped and he would hold “watching parties”. Needless to say there wasn’t a whole lot of translation.
Later I saw subtitled ones. When I actually got to dubbed ones, I felt let down because the dialogue was so…banal. And the dubbers’ voices and acting rarely matched the originals, even if I could understand the former and not the latter.
The story in my head seemed rather better to me than the one revealed via dialogue also. I still watch anime with subtitles.
I suspect the MCI being “too big” is also a problem for some people at least. Since all the movies are connected, by now an Earth-destroying threat should be responded to by “Only one today. This is a slow Tuesday. Last week we had three by 10am.”
Of course perhaps Wanda’s new job is worldwide memory wipes to keep the trauma treatment bills down to less than world GDP.
To be fair to “Multiverse of Madness”, yes if you came in not having watched “WandaVision” you’d be confused, but only SLIGHTLY less confused than you’d be if you came in HAVING watched “WandaVision”, as you’d know what Westview was and who the twins were, but no idea where Wanda learned of America Chavez and why after having given up the twins she was now scouring the multiverse for them, and was completely evil to boot (and also why she didn’t seem to care about VISION in all of that). But for the most part, the confusion was self-inflicted, and not because they put the story into a TV series. They could have easily summed up the important points from the TV series in the movie itself, because it certainly was long enough. They even had the opportunity when Strange came to talk to her about protecting America Chavez and she assumes he’s come to talk about Westview. A brief “Yeah, I guess we should” and a few minutes of exposition about it would have been sufficient to get everyone on the same page and perhaps get people to check it out to see what happened. But they completely skipped it.
Then again, the big issue there was making her the main villain of the movie in an already overstuffed movie. If you came from Endgame, you remember her as grieving Vision, and if you came from WandaVision, you remember her as trying to understand herself and ultimately having decided to give up her ideal life because of what it was doing to other people. Neither of those support her becoming the villain she was in Multiverse of Madness, so EVERYONE is confused. If I had done it, I would have had her not decide to try to find her twins in the Multiverse until AFTER she had met America Chavez and realized she could do it, and had the Strange they fought at the end be the instigator. That allows us to see why she’s pushing for that and have that develop organically in the movie while giving us a villain to start things off that fits into the idea that Strange is a catalyst for disaster most of the time, contrasting those Stranges with the one we have in this universe.
I have a hard time with subtitled movies, because I read a lot and very quickly, and so I am drawn to reading the subtitles … repeatedly. All the time. Which means I tend to miss all the action.
I kinda bailed after “Endgame”, mostly because nothing that came out after that sounded interesting. I didn’t like “Doctor Strange” much, didn’t care for “Captain Marvel”, didn’t care for “Black Panther” and didn’t like the characters that were left after the main actor’s death, and was never all that thrilled with “Ant-Man”, although I found it interesting enough most of the time. If the reviews of the movies had been good, I might have watched them, but they were noted for not being particularly good and mostly bombed so that didn’t exactly encourage me to go watch them. So I went from someone who would buy the movies when they came out — I wasn’t on streaming then — to someone who just didn’t bother to watch them, only watching Deadpool & Wolverine because they are two of my favourite characters — and I liked the original Deadpool movies, although the first one is MUCH better than the second — and then WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness because while rewatching Infinity War and Endgame while making spaghetti sauce I was reminded of liking the romance between Wanda and Vision — both in the movies and in the comics — and decided to give it a try, and then deciding to watch Multiverse of Madness to kinda complete that … and the combination of the two did not exactly make me think that the new MCU was full of quality works …
Deadpool & Wolverine was great fun, but took this problem so far it’s basically a parody of itself. To understand everything that happens you’d have to watch every Marvel film since 1990, plus a few that don’t exist. That’s something like a hundred movies in total.
I hadn’t watched or remembered some of the things they referenced — like the “Fantastic Four” movie that Chris Evans was in — but they did a pretty good job explaining it and/or making the jokes such that they worked even if you had never seen the movies or remembered them. So for the most part if you got the references it was great, and if you didn’t it was still good and you weren’t overly confused.
Jumped off with both feet and kept running.
Every time the MCU made a movie about a couple of characters, I loved it. And every time they made an ensemble all-star collection of 5-minute adverts for the next movie connected tenuously by callbacks to movies I hadn’t seen, I wanted my money and those hours of my life back. Endgame was the epitome and apotheosis of exactly that; no story to speak of, just making sure all the actors got their 5 minutes of contracted screentime for two whole movies. I think connecting it all together in the MCU is the worst thing that ever happened to Marvel.
Some of the sidestory stuff since then has been fun enough; Loki was worth a giggle, and WandaVision was good just for the manner in which it was told, despite the kind of meh ending. Into the Spiderverse was awesome, but I would sooner gouge my eyes out than watch yet another reboot of the Spiderman story – what are we up to now? Six? They need to allow themselves some new characters and new stories that _aren’t_ desperately trying to be connected to every other thing Marvel has ever produced.
While it wasn’t my drop-out point, there was a big shift on how the MCU worked when Disney+/Streaming entered the picture.
Before then, movie canon had to be acknowledged by the shows, but not vice versa (see Coulson being alive in Agents of Shield but not any of the (non-timey wimey) movies after his death.
But once streaming entered the picture, that changed, and there is now much closer continuity between shows and movies going both ways. Not sure if drawing in subscribers was the main reason for that shift, but it likely was some factor in it.
As for my full-on drop-off point, I guess it was the Secret Wars show. Phoned-in, bad, boring, often time wasting, and some parts feel like written by AI in how non-sequitur they are. While I still do and may in the future watch some, I’ve not yet started caring about the ‘MCU’ as a whole again.
I fell off Marvel movies, with the exception of the Guardians movies, after the disappointment of Avengers 2; I’ve watched several of them afterward, but from streaming boredom, or someone else’s invitation. (Well, I bought the Captain America collection, which included 4, so I guess I paid for that one.) Didn’t even bother with Infinity War until after Endgame came out, and only watched Endgame because Guardians 3 references it.
…honestly, I think I like the two Blade movies better than the Marvel-verse. And I maintain the only good multiverse movie is Everything Everywhere All At Once, specifically because it is about how a multiverse reduces all stakes to nothing.
Everything Everywhere was the best! Now _that_ is what it looks like when you write a good self-contained story about original characters and then get great acting talent in to pull it off.
I suspect Disney has a sequel or a reboot in the works even as we speak.
I watched most of movies up through Endgame, which felt like a natural arc and conclusion to a grand, interconnected story. I’ve seen Spider Man: No Way Home and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness since then because I like the characters (and I might see the latest Spider Man), but if Marvel had stopped there I would’ve been satisfied. (Oh, and I saw Black Panther 2 somewhere, maybe on an airplane?) I didn’t grow up reading comic books so I had no particular knowledge of or attraction to the characters before seeing the movies other than pop-cultural osmosis (so I guess they did a good job on reaching out to non-hardcore fans). I guess the flip side is that I also don’t have any particular “Ooo, I can’t wait to see how they do that character!” kind of interest.
I did watch the first three seasons of Agents of Shield, which I discovered between the second and third seasons. I enjoyed it, but I think it taught me that episodic shows aren’t really my thing. If I get really into something, I want to be able to binge it (which I did catching up the first two seasons), not have my interest interrupted and wane by having to wait a week between episodes. After watching the third season episode-by-episode, I found I just wan’t particularly interested in coming back to it for the next season. (Though my interests do also wax and wane over a period of a few years, so that might’ve been it too.)
I do think it’s possible that at some point in the future I could find myself getting back into the MCU and catching up on the movies I’ve missed since End Game.
The first spoken line in Serenity:
That line resonated with me for some reason. So I had superhero fatigue from the getgo, except Tim Burton Batman, because Gotham itself – and the movies are a tiny bit older than Serenity. Nolans Dark Knights I dislike because he made Gotham boring NY lookalikes.
Blade 1 was good too.
MCU from Guardians 1 on had the problem that they almost always fought someone with “unlimited power” or an ancient old evil with unlimited power. The stone in Guardians 1, The Dude in Guardians 2, Dr. Stranges Old god, Thor 2 and Hel, … it was inflating and boring. Hint at Marvel Midnight Suns: Same! plus crinch dialogue and Win-in-gameplay-lose-in-cutscene. Firaxis low-effort-by-comparison gameplay could not save it.
I was watching the films whenever they dropped on Netflix, but then Disney launched and I wasn’t interested enough to pay for another streaming service. So I’m waaaay behind, and don’t really miss it.
It seemed like *yet another* franchise getting run into the ground once it got popular in 2018, and I haven’t seen any evidence that that isn’t true. It’s a classic problem with lots of media…
Occasionally something interesting and different-seeming comes up, like Wandavision, or Jessica Jones, or Deadpool…but it never seems to take long for the concept to get homogenised and dragged back into the multiverse. Or just become bad.
Speaking of different, I like the idea of a Punisher TV series. I think there’s a lot of potential there. But I remember the Netflix show of (brief google search) 2017-19, and I broadly agree with the review that Shamus put on this very site:
(Paraphrased) “Stop moping and shoot some bad guys!”
I don’t think Marvel or Disney are going to make an interesting Punisher story. It’s just too different from what they usually make.
Would be interested to see a review of this new one, though.
I am hoping for good things from the new movies — I didn’t see Fantastic Four in the theatre but I did go to The New Avengers with most of my family and a couple of friends and it was fun. The only disappointing thing to me so far was the Secret Invasion series. Kind of a mess. Oh and I guess Eternals wasn’t *great*, but not too bad. I wish we’d see the Black Knight and Starfox again though.
I fell off the MCU bandwagon relatively early in the post-Endgame rollout of limited series on Disney+. I watched and enjoyed WandaVision, Falcon & The Winter Soldier, She-Hulk, Miss Marvel, Loki, and What If…?. I also saw Moon Knight and Werewolf By Night. The Black Widow movie was okay, as was the 2nd Dr. Strange. Shang-Chi and Eternals weren’t bad. I did see both Spider-Man: Far From Home and No Way Home – the latter was, I think, my favorite live-action Spidey film to date.
I meant to see the sequel to Captain Marvel but just…never got around to it. Then stuff began piling up that I was at least somewhat interested in seeing, but I didn’t want to start skipping over earlier things I hadn’t seen, because I’d miss out on the meta-narrative. So I still haven’t seen much of anything that they’ve put out in the last few years.