SuperBored

“THE MCU IS BACK” everybody says as an another marvel movie with a score above 80% comes out.

The problem with post-endgame Marvel is not that it’s too woke. It’s not that none of the movies are good. It’s not even because of the multiverse.

It’s inconsistency in story telling, and disorganization, coupled with bad writing.

Marvel’s problem isn’t that they are too woke. You can’t critique a piece of media solely on their political opinions. You can disagree, but it is not a good criticism, and doesn’t hold up where it matters. Marvel’s problem isn’t that they are always bad now. Wandavision, Loki, TFATWS, No Way Home, GOTG 3, Wakanda Forever, Shang-Chi, etc. Their stories are not completely without errors, but even their “bad” projects people seem to still enjoy. They are just not consistently good, and often leave stories and characters unvisited. And their issue is NOT the multiverse. I’m tired of people acting like this wasn’t an inevitable thing that was going to happen, and honestly, we have gotten such interesting stories because of it (like some of the ones I mentioned above). Some projects handle it better than others, but in the end, the theater was screaming when Andrew and Tobey showed up in No Way Home.

I think the reason pre-Endgame marvel was so good, was because it was very grounded in a specific comic-book movie niche, and was, for the most part pre-planned with a narrative that haunted the entire story until the crescendo that was End Game. The truth is— this entire story was just about the age of Iron Man and Tony Stark. From the birth of his superhero to the death of his ego. It was Tony’s story in the end. When it ended, it seems that the execs didn’t even know this, and didn’t have a new character to follow/didn’t know about the one they had yet (Doom).

That is why I think recent marvel movies such as The Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four are getting better. For the first time in a while, we are having consecutively good MCU movies. Why? Because, once again, there is somebody haunting the narrative. Maybe not in the films just yet, but we viewers are just waiting for the slightest peek of a green cloak and steel mask. How ironic that this character is also played by RDJ. That was marvel’s charm really, it followed the hero and villain in a story that was accompanied with a plethora of characters. It followed Tony and Thanos. Now it follows…Doom and Franklin? Maybe idk. And yes, even though the writing is objectively better in these movies, and they weren’t heavily political, and the multiverse wasn’t as prevalent, I think that this clear target has really helped the writers.