Encores aren’t easy, as Marvel is learning the hard way during its post-Avengers: Endgame Phase 4. Sure, the box office receipts continue to be strong: this past weekend, Thor: Love and Thunder netted $143 million at the domestic box office (and $302 million globally), good for the third-best debut of the year behind Jurassic World Dominion and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Yet the reactions are less encouraging; though CinemaScore grades are reliably unreliable, the fact that three of the four most poorly rated MCU films have premiered in the past 12 months isn’t a coincidence. The quality has noticeably dipped, and when coupled with a general sense of aimlessness, it’s time to begin wondering if there’s a coherent plan guiding the MCU into its future—and if all of its fans will stick around long enough to see it finally materialize.
Since reaping billions with Endgame, Marvel has delivered exactly one memorable superhero spectacular—Spider-Man: No Way Home—and that was a co-production with Sony that hinged on nostalgia for pre-MCU movies. The rest have all been different shades of mid: Black Widow was undone by pointless blandness more than by the pandemic; Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was a formulaic shrug; Eternals was a dreary dud that barely felt like it existed in the same world as its franchise-mates; and Doctor Strange 2 was a Frankensteinian monster whose few flourishes were drowned out by cacophonous faux-horror and fan service-y cameos. Thor: Love and Thunder is a similar washout, an insistently jokey beast that can’t get out of its own smug way. Almost all of these still turned out to be financial winners, but that says less about their quality than about the studio’s success at convincing audiences that each new MCU installment is a must-see if they want to stay abreast of the series’ ongoing serialized narrative.
Except, what serialized narrative? Endgame capped a decade in which Marvel’s stand-alone films built, in intertwined fashion, toward an epic finale. Phase 4, however, has yet to reveal a larger structure, except that it’s all about the multiverse—a concept that grows more tedious with each passing day, given that it mainly registers as a device for resurrecting past favorites and indulging in do-overs. By not even hinting at an overarching direction or goal, the entire affair feels like a rudderless collection of tonally divergent one-offs. Just as problematic is the franchise’s lack of a charismatic A-list axis around which to rotate; whereas Robert Downey Jr. (and Chris Evans and the late Chadwick Boseman) were the formidable lynchpins for the MCU’s heyday, there’s no star—or Marvel character—of their stature currently holding things together. Hemsworth’s God of Thunder aside, it’s all second-tier now.
Factor in that there’s also no supervillain in sight, and—creatively speaking—Phase 4 has already hit the skids. Jonathan Majors’ multiversal baddie Kang the Conqueror may eventually fit that bill, but the fact that he’s only been briefly introduced in one of the MCU’s small-screen ventures—last year’s Loki—speaks to another franchise problem: a surfeit of material.
The studio’s Disney+ efforts have, on the whole, been a small step up from their big-screen brethren, with WandaVision, Loki and Hawkeye proving particularly engaging entries. Alas, these TV series’ habit of starting strong and fading fast (a symptom of distension; many would have fared better as features), as well as their low-stakes tales, have rendered them superfluous. Simply put, watching them hasn’t been a requirement for having a firm grasp on what’s going on in the MCU. At the same time, however, there have been so many and with numerous more to come—like She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Secret Invasion, Ironheart, and Armor Wars—that their individual impacts have been diluted. It hasn’t helped that not a single one has been terrific, and a couple (I’m looking at you, Falcon and the Winter Soldier) have been significantly worse than that.
The MCU’s paradigm-shifting achievement was interconnectivity, which is why Phase 4’s diffuseness is such a letdown. While the franchise has exhibited a greater willingness to hire distinctive directors to lend their films/shows some idiosyncrasy (be it Sam Raimi with Doctor Strange 2, or Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead with Moon Knight), the results have been mostly uneven and unsatisfying, begetting works that are hopelessly trapped between individuality and obedience (to house style and mythology dictates). The Endgame saga taught moviegoers to embrace each Marvel movie as a piece of a grander puzzle. With no big picture apparent at the moment, though, what appears to be driving the studio’s box office fortunes isn’t excitement but, rather, obligation—a scenario that’s untenable in the long run, and suggests that, regardless of Thor’s mighty receipts, a course correction is needed before the entire ship runs aground.
