MCU Post Mortem (Part 1)

For me, the MCU kinda wrapped up with Spider-Man: Far From Home. While it is its own movie, it felt more like the resolution to a franchise where Endgame was the climax. Partly this is because they had planned on doing more series on Disney+ and didn't have movies in the pipeline coming out every three months (and the whole COVID Plandemic exacerbated this), and partly because it just feels like a natural stopping point. I agree with a lot of reviews which say that Endgame had some problems, like that time travel is kind of a cop-out for writing one's self into a corner. But it hit the right emotional notes - it felt right and had the appropriate callbacks even if it wasn't as tight of a plot as the previous movie. In particular, I felt like Hulk and Thor got treated a little poorly and didn't get the kind of character arc resolution that the other four original Avengers team members got. 

I have deeply and sincerely enjoyed this ride, and I'm really glad to have been able to see it all unfold, especially since I never thought such a thing would happen. I've said before that I just assumed all movie versions of stuff I liked would have a high likelihood of turning out terribly, and that there's no way general audiences would go for something like the Infinity Quest storyline, let alone comic book characters like the Avengers. But they did it, and did they ever make a lot of money along the way. Credit should go to Kevin Feige for pulling this off, along with all of the other directors and producers. [Edit from 2023 - I'm hearing that it was more because of James Gunn's plan and not so much because of Feige, and from how Phases 4 & 5 have turned out, I tend to believe it]

The MCU pioneered something that a lot of studios have tried to copy since then, albeit unsuccessfully. And that is the concept of the shared universe. One-off crossovers on TV shows  happen all the time, like when Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 was being driven around by Jessica from The New Girl, and then later she and Nick were in B99's precinct. It was a little more common in shows that did have a loose shared universe, like when detectives from SVU would show up on vanilla Law & Order, or when Buffy and Angel would crossover. But it really wasn't done in movies at all, other than for a joke or quick easter egg (such as Bruce Wayne name-dropping Metropolis in Batman Forever). 

The thing that the MCU did right was treat each movie as a separate movie capable of standing on its own, while also essentially being one episode of a much larger story involving other movies. This is exactly what Stan Lee did back when he launched the modern Marvel comics universe in the early 60's. He set all of the heroes in New York and they bumped into each other all the time. Hell, the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man had Peter trying to get a job with the Fantastic Four before he found out they don't get paid [the origin story with his powers and Uncle Ben's death was in Amazing Fantasy #15 and his own series wouldn't get the greenlight until a year or so later]. This was very different from the DC heroes keeping to themselves in their own respective fictional cities (Metropolis, Gotham, etc.) and only crossing over in the Justice Society/League comics. 

For the most part, I think Kevin Feige [and/or James Gunn] is a genius who helmed this ship into unknown territory, and he gave us fans pretty much what we had been wanting for all these years. Now having said all of that, I want to list how I would have done things differently. Granted, I have the benefit of hindsight of seeing how everything turned out (both in the movies and the real world) and all that, but most of these thoughts were the same ones I had at the time the movies premiered. 



1. Iron Man 3 should have been better. 

I felt like Shane Black was more about doing his own thing and putting his own stamp on the character of Iron Man than trying to make a movie that fit within the framework that Kevin Feige was building. Lest we forget, this was the first post-Avengers movie, and most people still didn't have a good grasp on the big, overall picture and structure of the MCU. I also think (and I have no proof of this, just suspicions) that Feige was trying to find the right balance of letting directors/writers do their own thing and mandating certain plot points as setup for future movies. In Iron Man 3, he didn't exert enough control, while in Age of Ultron he was a bit too controlling, but he found the right balance after that it seems. 

In a post-Avengers movie, the question main everyone keeps asking is why didn't any of his new superfriends show up and help other than Rhodey. Ant-Man did this perfectly, and then gave a really good reason why that wouldn't work, but Iron Man 3 just kinda avoided the topic entirely. 

But besides not including enough elements from other MCU properties, the movie is more like a popcorn / fun-and-dumb movie when compared to the rest. There were some pretty major plot holes (like why so much effort was focused on fixing the Mark42 suit when JARVIS could just fly him any of the others in a couple of hours) and the whole Trevor Slattery/Mandarin fake-out was kinda stupid. It seemed that by taking two popular stories from the comics (The Mandarin and the Extremis stories) and mixing them, they had fallen into the same trap as X3 and Spider-Man 3. Some of the plots would need to re-worked to fix these issues, but one that would be super easy to fix is just inserting some dialogue noting the difference between the various versions of the armor - some are waterproof, some can lift heavier but are slower or have fewer weapons, some go on/off easily, etc. 

I will say that I did like the PTSD elements as well as the psychological delineation between "the Mechanic" and the suit, having to think on his feet without his tech, and the little interactions with Harley. But overall it felt like Shane Black went a little off the rails and some of the ramifications would have to be fixed in future movies (like the romantic plot between Tony and Pepper, for example) while others were just ignored (blowing up all his suits but making more by the time Age of Ultron was out). 

There are other movies like Thor: The Dark World, The Incredible Hulk, or Guardians Vol. 2 that aren't as highly regarded and could have been a little better, but Iron Man 3 was the biggest and most obvious one in need of fixing. This post from ScreenRant says a lot of the same things, though I don't agree with everything in it. 



2. Captain Marvel should have been Black Widow

This was the perfect opportunity to do what Joss Whedon did in Age of Ultron, when we fully expected Hawkeye to die and then got the Quicksilver fake-out (we didn't see it coming). We could have gotten the backstory on how Natasha was trained and defected, and that would have been a good way of having Hawkeye play a supporting role. While the movie focuses on Black Widow's past so they get to release a "solo female movie," having Clint play his bit would strengthen their onscreen friendship that would have made her sacrifice in Endgame all that much more meaningful and tragic. It would have also been good timing for actress Scarlett Johansson to dip out at the same time as the rest of the actors whose contracts were up. 

For full disclosure, I DO have problems with the character Captain Marvel as presently constituted in Marvel Comics (Carol Danvers Carl Manvers), but that is irrelevant to the issues the movie dumps onto the MCU continuity. If she were (pre-Rogue) Ms. Marvel and not cosmic-level powerful, mantle-stealing Captain Marvel, I would be more enthusiastic and probably a bit more forgiving of its shortcomings. But I digress . . .

Releasing Captain Marvel just before the climax of the MCU just felt odd and out of place. Plus the problems of having a 90's flashback movie broke a lot of continuity things (I realize most of these aren't huge issues, but still). For instance, her callsign being "Avenger" makes it seem like she's sorta been a shadow influencer to Fury all along and it's an example of prequels attempting to explain things that don't need an origin story (see Solo's depiction on the origins of Han's blaster and Chewbacca's bandolier for more examples). Another thing is that we learned that Fury apparently had the ability to call her during the NY attack by Loki and chose not to do so. Additionally, the story behind his lost eye was given a really bad explanation. And having Monica look up to Carol was kinda bass-ackwards. 

I also really didn't like that the explanation of her powers were that she just got them from the Tesseract in an accident. In my mind, neither Wanda and Captain Marvel shouldn't have greater power than the Infinity Stone that granted said power to them in the first place (I felt like someone/something should have needed to give Wanda a power boost in order to destroy the Mind Stone). By the time Carl reaches her full strength (in a plot twist on par with the Ruby Slippers having always had the power to return Dorothy to Kansas if she had just known), she's way too overpowered and it makes the battle in Endgame feel like it would have been over in  seconds had she just been there sooner. A fully powered Thanos with all 6 Infinity Stone couldn't even hurt her with a headbutt, FFS. 

But besides all the generic plot and lackluster script, it seemed more like this movie was released at that particular time for political reasons outside of the MCU universe. In my opinion, they chose an actress who is politically active in Social Justice to headline the first female-led MCU movie to be released in between the two biggest Avengers movies to guarantee people would see it or suffer from FOMO. And instead of giving that honor to Scarlett (who had six MCU movies under her belt by that point) it went to someone new who hadn't "earned" her spot, so to speak. There were several subtle and not-so-subtle "woke" plot points in the movie as well, and there really hadn't been any in the previous movies, so it felt a little out of place. To be fair, most of Hollywood has been captured by the woke cult, but are less conspicuous about it.

However, if I were forced to make a Ms. Marvel movie, I would have picked Yvonne Strahovski (who knows how to smile) to play her instead of the cardboard cutout that is Brie Larson. 

In fairness, one continuity issue I see brought up often is that they were calling the organization SHIELD and not the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division in the 90's and then reverted to the longer name for Pepper's sake in the first Iron Man movie. I don't see this as a big deal, as I can easily explain in my head canon that nobody knew who SHIELD were before they started getting more involved with Stark. If I went back to the 1930's and used the letters, "FBI," I probably would have gotten stares and blank looks. It took a while before the Federal Bureau of Investigation was well known enough to where everyone just started calling it "the FBI," while people in and around the institution would have used the shortened version years before normies. Besides, Howard Stark used the name SHIELD in the Peggy Carter one-shot years beforehand. 

Anyway, point 2 leads directly into point 3, which is . . . 

3. Captain Marvel's role in Endgame could have been easily distributed among other characters.

If you think about it, Carl Manvers had 3 major roles in Endgame - A) Rescue Nebula/Tony from space, B) Break Thanos' ship, and C) attempt to fly the gauntlet to the ugly brown van and stop Thanos from snapping again. Let me 'splain. 

A) Rocket was on Earth and could have cobbled together a space-worthy quinjet out of stuff lying around Avengers Headquarters and retrofitted it to be able to "jump" in order to give Tony and Nebula a lift. Alternatively, he could have got some help from Wong in making a portal or Thor using Stormbreaker's Bifrost emulating abilities. The explanation for how Rocket would know where to find them could be that he put a tracker in Nebula's head/body during the events of Guardians Vol. 2 because he didn't trust her to not escape again. 

B) Instead of Captain Marvel coming out of nowhere just in time to stop Thanos' ship from "raining fire," it could have been a combination of Ant-Man, Scarlet Witch, and Hulk. See, Bruce gets the brilliant idea of having Wanda do the same mind-magic she pulled on him in Age of Ultron, so he'll become the savage, rampaging Hulk of yore (I fully admit I'm borrowing this idea from the conclusion of the X-Men Onslaught crossover event from the late 90's). Then Giant-Man throws Hulk (the fastball special usually performed by Colossus/Wolverine) and he tears the ship apart, and that keeps him occupied until the end of the movie when he calms back down to Professor Hulk.

This serves to not only eliminate the need for rescue from Carl, but it would expand the roles that Scott, Wanda, and Bruce play in the final battle, plus it would give Hulk some proper revenge for the beatdown he received in the opening scene of Infinity War. 

C) Near the end of the battle, as they're trying to get the gauntlet to Luis' van, Spider-Man ends up with it and gives it to Captain Marvel. Then she apparently needs help from all the other women, even though she could have flown above all of the enemies in her way (other than the leviathans). This is stupid and contrived and total cringe.

It would have made a lot more sense to have the gauntlet get knocked out of Spider-Man's hands and have Mantis catch it somewhat by chance. She's by far the weakest of all the heroes there, and so it would make the plot of everyone else (note: not just the women) needing to clear the way for her more impactful (also, Mantis can't fly and would need the road to be plowed, so to speak). As it is, the one person who can apparently take on Thanos solo shouldn't need the help. 

Once the van is destroyed and the gauntlet is out in the open, Iron Man, Thor, and Cap (in that order) attempt to prevent Thanos from getting the gauntlet and fail. Rather than having Carl fight solo after the big 3, it could have been 7 or 8 others who didn't get the chance in Infinity War to do so (like a combo of Valkyrie, Pepper, Rhodey, Rocket, Groot, Black Panther, Okoye, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, etc.) in a scene similar to the one on Titan from Infinity War. This group is still unable to stop him from doing the Power Stone Punch thing, and then Iron Man swoops in to have his nanotech suit steal the stones. Simple. No Carl necessary.

The only other smaller thing she did was scout Thanos' planet before the remaining Avengers, and that could have been handled by someone else (Rhodey or even a lifeform scan from the ship Rocket was piloting).

4. There should have been a 5-year hiatus. 

I remember people bringing up "superhero fatigue" as a reason to why Batman vs. Superman and Justice League didn't succeed, but I really don't think that's the reason - it's because they were too long/convoluted and just weren't good movies. 

However, by the time Endgame came around, I think most people (and I include myself in this category) were ready to move on. We've seen various forms of movie fatigue in the past (westerns, 80's action films, Epics, etc.) but because the plot of the overall MCU was ramping up to a big conclusion, I think most people's interest in the franchise stayed unusually high. 

Had I been the one in charge, I would have stopped Marvel Studios for a while, so as to not visit the well once too often. I realize that would have gone against the wishes of greedy CEOs and shareholders at Disney, but it's what would have kept the fans happy, counterintuitively. Basically what I'm wishing to avoid is what happened with Star Wars. When the prequels (and later Indiana Jones 4) were announced, I was worried that Lucas' streak of 6 really good movies would be tarnished with lesser quality sequels. I can say that the 3 prequels were iffy, but the Disney Star Wars movies and Indiana Jones 4 were terrible and made me not want to watch the earlier movies as much. I would hate for the same thing to happen to the MCU, but history has shown that producers will usually run something into the ground with sequels and spinoffs until they've extracted every cent they can from a franchise. One of the few exceptions is the Back to the Future trilogy, where the director (Zemeckis) has control over whether any more can be made and has stated that there will be none as long he is alive. 

So, my plan would have been to end after Spider-Man: Far From Home and shut everything down for at least 5 years. The COVID plandemic occurring where it did would have made this plan seem like the person in charge was almost clairvoyant. After some time has passed and the superhero fatigue was wearing off, I would try jumpstarting it with a couple of the later additions to the MCU (like Spider-Man and the Asguardians of the Galaxy), introducing a whole new group of characters (Ms. Marvel, Shang Chi, Eternals, etc.), and maybe the Disney+ series for some of the older characters (Loki, Falcon/WS, etc.) to cash in on some nostalgia. The only problem with this plan is that almost all of the good characters have been used already, so restarting with C-tier doesn't sound super promising. However, Disney recently re-took control over the Fantastic Four and X-Men, so those could be the big tentpole movies while some of the other lesser known/liked characters can ride on the coattails.

MCU Post Mortem (Part 2)