I’m a big fan of Thor: Ragnarok, despite this I chose not to bother watching Love and Thunder at the cinema. There are numerous reasons for this. Yes, some of them are related to a change in my cinema attitude but some are definitely related to the MCU itself.
Current Cinema Attitude
It’s definitely the case my attitude to cinema visits has changed since the pandemic. I have an overall depressed level of interest in things I go to the cinema to see. While this has been the trend line for a while, it seems I’ve now doubled down on it.
I only go to the cinema for something I can’t bring myself to wait for or it offers some sort of spectacle that might not be the same on my TV. The last two films I watched demonstrate this perfectly. I watched Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness because I felt I couldn’t wait and Top Gun: Maverick because of the spectacle.
Only one of those was the right choice and it wasn’t the MCU film.
My Comics Attitude
My MCU challenge goes right back to my experience with comics.
Trade hardbacks. I’ve not read many comics, hardly any. I did read some Iron Man and Spider-Man comics that were available via a major UK newsagent back in the day but I’ve never been a comic book guy. I did read some Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spider-Man hardbacks, but even then I purchased them from Islands of Adventure in Florida and never kept current with them.
Non-comic osmosis. My knowledge is mostly picked up from Marvel merchandise. I’ve read a lot of comics merchandise, be it numerous role-playing games or those roster books that used to give power breakdowns and histories of characters. This is how I know the main bullet points of esoteric things like how some characters have shared histories or villain rosters but it’s hardly the encyclopedic knowledge of a true comic book fan.
This tends to result in two things. I’m not particularly invested in how things were done in the comics just how well they deliver good TV shows and films. I’m also not enamoured with comics as a whole. Comics as a whole are a chaos of continuity and stories that are almost impossible to keep on top off. I even remember comics going ‘follow this story in this completely different line’ they were shameless about it. Comics aren’t contained they are sprawling.
There was a reason I read Ultimates for a while as it offered a focused re-start.
The MCU Challenge
My MCU challenge can be summarized by the fact it’s becoming more like comics than focused trade paperbacks.
Bringing It All
I like my superhero stories well scoped and with limited focus. When I say limited focus I don’t mean they have to be small scale, they just can’t be everything all at once. Marvel comics are everything all at once, while the MCU felt like a contained universe, with a small set of superheroes and limited origins
The challenge is pre-Endgame the MCU felt like a series of freshly booted, limited scope, loosely connected trade hardbacks, but post-Endgame it feels like they’re just going all the comics all the time.
The challenge post-Endgame is they are just throwing everything in. This gives the MCU the sprawling feel of comics. Some people are going to like this as they get ‘more of the comics’, but I’d rather the cycle be a rolling series of more focused trade hardbacks that rise to a conclusion, then start anew.
Shift to being director lead
Despite the fact the MCU was a series of films, it was actually delivered more on a TV show model. This meant the producer was more important than the director. It could even be said, in some ways, that the key acting talent was more important than the director.
While they’ve not had as many creative clashes as Star Wars, the MCU has had its director fallouts over this, and really started to hit a home run with a particular director set – the central one being the Russo Brothers. The Russo Brothers often don’t get enough credit for the post-Winter Soldier MCU approach.
It’s specifically switched to being director-led in phase four, both as a creative decision and out of necessity. As the MCU becomes ‘comics at large’ in terms of its approach to content the directorial independence replaces the fact the once singular producer of importance is spread too thin.
This has been a mixed bag for me so far. I enjoyed The Eternals but in a strange sort of dry, academic sort of way. The Multiverse of Madness I’ve come to see as borderline straight to VHS trash with a bigger budget. I chose not to rush into Love and Thunder, but I have a sense I’ll conclude it has taken the wrong things from the very balanced Ragnarok and double down on the humour. We’ll see when it hits Disney+.
No central characters
No matter what happened in the MCU we always had Tony and Cap. The central through line of the MCU. At the moment they just seem to be throwing characters at the wall. I get that they need to rebuild the ‘character stock’ post-Endgame, phase four was always going to be a re-start, but they haven’t gone in without locking in immediate central figures and are spreading things thin. We just keep getting serially introduced to new characters via a sort of protagonist-loaded pump action shotgun.
The only character who sort of acts as a throughline is Wong, being the replacement for the still around and doing something important but never actually appears Nick Fury.
Multiple through threads
I remain convinced everyone looking for the singular thread that weaves all of Phase 4+ together are not going to find one. What we’re going to get us multiple threads. X-Men, Thunderbolts, I assume at some point The Avengers again, etc. I don’t think there is going to be one through line. Just like there are now lots of characters all at once they’re going to condense them into multiple threads not a single one.
This might work once they start taking shape and people can see those multiple threads working towards something but at the moment we just have ephemeral promises or vague potential before the MCU hastily moves on.
A Celestial? *Shoulder Shrug*
The result of all this is superheroes no longer feel special and the world moves into acceptance, shoulder shrugging and on the edge of stepping into self-referential humour. Let’s face it, it’s probably going to step right into that with She-Hulk, which I think is a sell of the series but it’s definitely, in MCU terms, a big step.
This is a natural consequence of the MCU not being contained like it was before. Now it’s open season you can’t write the TV shows and films as if the cast of it don’t know they live in a world where an alien eternal can birth out of your home planet and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and moves on.
And, Finally…
Despite all this, I’m still watching the MCU. I’m not going to delude myself into saying it’s going to epically fail in the near future like some people are. There is also still good stuff to find (WandaVision, Ms Marvel, Hawkeye, Loki, Shang-Chi) and I am really looking forward to She-Hulk, Wakanda Forever, Quantumania and Fantastic Four.
It’s just a bit more random as the volume increases and less purposeful in direction.
Marvel has been a production studio for some time, but its output felt different to a general studio like Warner Brothers or Universal. It was that TV show as films focus. Now Marvel just feels like a general film studio it’s just they have a sort of meta-genre they conform to. This makes sense, streaming is a hungry beast and for that reason alone they have to churn out the content.
This is okay, but it is decidedly less special.
I do have a feeling the entry of The X-Men could create the MCU’s ‘The Last Jedi’ moment, something it’s avoided so far, but I guess we’ll see whether that’s true down the line. I’m also conscious that, literally as this goes live , we have Comic-Con and a Marvel panel, maybe that will bring some focus?