Thunderbolts: Not bad
Marvel
It has not been a great year for Marvel, with three films ranging from “not great” to “pretty decent” at the box office in the space of Thunderbolts, Captain America: Brave New World and now Fantastic Four. Add onto that a couple shows that were lobbed out without much fanfare (Ironheart, Eyes of Wakanda) and a supposed fan-favorite that was underwatched (Daredevil: Born Again), and 2025 was not ideal.
But of course, the general sense is that post-Endgame, the MCU has been lost at sea to some extent, and has not and likely will not reach the peak of Endgame and everything that came before. Why? You can say the ever-cited “superhero fatigue” or the fact that movie tickets cost too much, but in the context of Marvel, it’s more than that. In my view, there are three main pillars of the MCU that have had cracks shooting through them for years now.
Too Many Releases, And Too Many Disconnected Releases
Even Marvel realized eventually that dumping out something like three shows and three movies a year was overkill, and will allegedly tone that down from here, but it took more than a half decade to figure it out. It was overwhelming and many fans would just throw up their hands and be content to miss one film or another.
Marvel has previously said that their movies felt too much like “homework,” where’d you have to watch X other movie or show to know what’s happening in the next movie. While that was true to some extent, The Marvels had three characters that required viewing of a first film, and two separate TV shows to know all the leads, that didn’t happen all that often.
Rather, it was that the stories were mostly disconnected, not leading toward any sort of ultimate goal that made any amount of sense. There was this vague idea for a minute that Kang would be the new Big Bad, first introduced in Loki, of all places, and then he showed up in the third Ant-Man movie, of all places, and was beaten by…ants. You can see the problem.
Elsewhere, what did we have? Black Widow, a prequel film that should have been made years earlier for it to make sense. The Eternals, a moonshot full of people no one had ever heard of. Now more recently Thunderbolts, an assembled cast of C-listers from over the past 6-8 years or so. While they are throwing many of these characters together for the new Avengers movies, this has not been a coherent, connected plan.
Abandoned Heroes
This has two meanings, namely that post-Endgame, characters were simply lost. Iron Man was famously killed. Captain America time traveled, aged and has never been seen again. Hulk showed up in co-star and cameo roles at best, and was never the full focus of a film. Thor had one great movie and one so bad it killed hype for his character.
There has not been an ability to build up a core cast like this again. Recently, Sam Wilson’s new Captain America (mantle passing, in that case, was also a big problem) was tasked with assembling a new Avengers. Which would be…who, exactly? After all these years, it feels like we don’t have a re-formed cast that makes any sense.
Also by “abandoned heroes,” we have one-and-done offerings. That would be the aforementioned Eternals, but also Shang-Chi, who was built up to be a hugely important character and then never got any sequel. None of these new-era heroes have gotten more than one movie focused on them specifically, something that was not the case with Iron Man, Captain America and Thor especially in the run-up to the various Avengers movies.
The Nostalgia Trap Card
One point here is that well, there are still huge-earning movies in this era, two of the highest being Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool and Wolverine. These movies were entertaining, sure, but they both relied heavily on audience connections not with the story, but with the mere appearance of characters they used to love. In Spider-Man, of course, that was two previously Spider-Man in the form of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. In Deadpool and Wolverine, it’s easy to even lose count, from Chris Evans taking up the mantle of Johnny Storm, Ben Affleck-era Jennifer Garner Elektra, Blade. They threw everything at the wall.
You are eventually going to run out of nostalgia to pull from here. Even now, what’s the big focus of the upcoming Avengers Doomsday? The return of a slew of FOX-era X-Men past the Deadpool and Wolverine ones, and then the return of Robert Downey Jr. himself, which I would consider a different form of nostalgia, in this case for a better era of the MCU itself, even if he’s playing a different role. The story is that the MCU’s biggest star is somehow back.
Those are my takeaways from what’s going on. There’s more past that, but it’s been rough, and I’m not sure when it’s going to get better from here.
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