With the release of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” right around the corner and “Avengers: Doomsday” slated for this winter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) appears to be gearing up for an exciting and successful year at the box office. However, the quality of the movies following “Avengers: Endgame” has left me unenthusiastic about these new releases.
It’s no secret that the MCU stands as one of Disney’s most successful franchises, making over $30 billion at the worldwide box office as of 2024. Despite its box office success, I feel like Marvel has lost the charm it used to have. Sure, I’ll occasionally find myself enjoying post-Endgame films like “Shang-Chi,” “Wakanda Forever” or “Deadpool & Wolverine.” But most of the time, I leave a Marvel movie wondering why I even bothered spending $15 on another forgettable superhero movie.
I narrowed down my issues with the post-Endgame era of Marvel to three points: cheap-looking special effects and CGI, convoluted interconnected stories and inconsistent writing.
While an average Marvel movie costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make, the final product is still riddled with bizarre and cheesy visual effects. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” stands as one of the most expensive Marvel movies, costing over $400 million, according to Forbes. And it shows. The movie is full of impressive feats of special effects, taking the audience on a journey through countless dimensions.
However, the only thing I can remember is the awful CGI third eye Benedict Cumberbatch grows at the end of the movie. The same goes for the floating head in “Thor: Love and Thunder.”
Over the last couple of years, Marvel’s visual effects (VFX) employees have shed some light on why today’s special effects occasionally look worse than those of the older movies. A VFX artist told The Vulture that Marvel projects tend to be understaffed in the VFX department. On top of that, Marvel makes a lot of last-minute changes to their visual effects.
“Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act,” the artist said.
I can typically look past the less-than-stellar special effects, especially given the duress VFX artists are put under in a Marvel movie. One of the things I can’t look past is that Marvel movies need to make everything connected rather than making a compelling stand-alone movie.
Marvel’s biggest appeal is the interconnectedness of its cinematic universe. Every movie matters because every movie connects to one another. While this is a brilliant business move for Disney—encouraging fans to spend money on movies they may not care about in hopes that it might connect to the larger story — I am not particularly keen on doing homework before I even step into the theater.
I can technically watch “Thunderbolts*” without watching “Black Widow,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp” and “Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” but if I want to get the most out of the story and understand why I should care about these characters, I have to.
Marvel movies expect you to watch a dozen movies and TV shows before you settle down to watch one of their new movies, but often, it punishes you for the very same thing.
Returning to “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” again: The movie’s main antagonist, the Scarlet Witch, goes on a quest to bring back her dead children because she cannot cope with losing them. However, the TV show WandaVision, which came out a year before, concluded with Wanda accepting the loss of her husband and her children. The inconsistency is startling.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Elizabeth Olsen, the actress who plays the Scarlet Witch, revealed that the Doctor Strange screenwriters did not watch WandaVision before finishing the script for Multiverse of Madness. The clear lack of communication amongst Marvel’s producers and showrunners punishes fans who got invested in the Scarlet Witch’s storyline.
All of these things make it hard for me to feel excited about Marvel’s future. This is frustrating to me because I miss the magic of going to the theater and getting caught up in the excitement of a Marvel movie.
The movies continue to disappoint me, but Marvel’s Disney+ limited series like “WandaVision,” “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and “Loki” have brought back a bit of the excitement I’ve been missing from the movies.
These stories are relatively self-contained, so I don’t feel pressured to watch a dozen movies and TV shows to understand what is going on. Their stories are engaging and innovative in ways that the movies aren’t. The visual effects are still hit or miss, but it doesn’t bother me quite as much when paired with a good story.
Even “Agatha All Along,” a series I initially wrote off as nothing more than a cash grab trying to capitalize off the success of “WandaVision,” turned out to be an emotional and well-written self-contained story with a surprising amount of practical effects in comparison to the movies.
While the movies might not spark my interest right now, the existence of these shows makes me hopeful for Marvel’s future.
