My Hottest MCU Take

A Discord Rant

My Hottest MCU Take

Here's a rant I just went on, over on my Discord. Feel free to jump in if you want!

My hottest MCU take is that the good ones aren't as good as you remember, and the bad ones aren't as bad as you think. People talk about the MCU as though everything prior to Endgame was a 10/10 movie and everything since has been a 3 or 4.

Most Marvel movies are solid, formulaic, action movies. They have great actors turning in likable performances, they have top-notch visual effects and comforting stories. They aren't Shakespeare, but the floor for quality is pretty high. They're incredibly competent movies that feature popular actors playing beloved characters. On the other hand, they're still a corporate product, and people have to strain pretty hard against the system to make great art.

My opinion is, all those threes and fours are really closer to fives and sixes once you get a little distance and context. And most of those nines and tens are more like sevens and eights. There are periodic exceptions (more commonly with nines than with fours) but I really do think almost every MCU movies reverts to a mean six to twelve months after it's released. Go rewatch Captain Marvel and Age of Ultron, and tell me they aren't of VERY comparable quality.

I also think the reports of the MCU's death are greatly exaggerated -- largely by people who have been cheerleading for it for a long time. I think the last few Marvel movies have kind of proven James Gunn's point that there isn't superhero fatigue in the sense we typically think about it; there is mediocre superhero movie fatigue, and if you make an entertaining, appealing movie, you can overcome it.

Both Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 and Deadpool & Wolverine outpaced not only the prior installments of their own specific franchises and also the movies that immediately preceded them in the MCU. That's both in box office dollars and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (critics score, the second installments outpaced the third, but I think that's a whole other conversation, honestly).