The Marvel Cinematic Universe movies have been a phenomenon in pop culture over the last decade, fascinating millions of people around the world. The MCU is known for its incredible movie saga that has been divided into phases. Three years ago, one of the last movies of Marvel’s phase three, Avengers: Endgame, was released, closing off an iconic era. The MCU has moved onto phase four, expanding on its horizons, introducing new characters, TV series, and plots. Unfortunately, this new phase has not been well received by the audience, hearing endless criticism on their content. So what exactly happened to Marvel’s production?
Superhero Fatigue
When the first movie of the MCU was released, Iron Man, back in 2008, it was unlike anything that the film industry had seen before. Throughout the past decade, Marvel has been conquering the Superhero genre in films, but other productions had started to catch on. Warner Bros. started releasing movies and TV series based on the DC Comics, Netflix released The Umbrella Academy, and Amazon’s The Boys, both back in 2019. These are just a few examples of the long list of superhero movies and series we have seen for the past decade. Simply put, people are tired and just not as interested in these releases as they once were.
Quantity over Quality
Between 2008 to 2019, the most content that the MCU has given us in one year was three movies, those years being 2017, 2018, and 2019. In 2021 alone, Marvel released four movies and five TV series. It is no coincidence that it was at around the same time that Marvel was focusing on pushing out content that their content quality had decreased. It seems that Marvel is desperately trying to give their audience something to fill the void since Avengers: Endgame, but their attempt has been far off from the goal.
Lazy Script Writing
Phases one to three were a slow burn, which is one of the reasons that it had such a large fan base. It started off with a few high-quality films and over time they began to connect with one another. This is what left the audience hooked. Each movie was a chapter in its own book. Since the foundation of MCU, which was the Avengers, is now gone, Marvel has no foundation. Instead of focusing on slowly building on a new foundation and then developing it from the root up, they are taking whatever branches they could hold onto from the past and throwing it to their viewers along with new branches that had nothing to do with the old. Even movies that had to do with the Avengers, like the newest Black Widow lacked a certain essence to it. While the movie was fun, it could have easily been developed into a spy thriller and an emotional goodbye to the character, but it simply wasn’t.
