Media Essays: The MCU: The Fallen Titan

Written by The Wandering Fox

Teddy and Freddy were outside in the graveyard dressed in black, looking grim in the murky autumn air as they stood by an open hole in the ground. The headstone beside them read “Here lays the MCU. From glory to bollocks”. The hole itself was filled with just about everything from the MCU in DVD form. Then out came the Wandering Fox, all in black as well, with the Cynical Crown on his head.

Teddy: Eh, it was too good to last.

Freddy: Yeah, I thought Ed, Edd n Eddy would’ve cheered him up enough to not find that.

Teddy: We can only hope he finds something to be cheerful about.

Hey, I can hear you both y’know? I only got this back on because I felt it was worth talking about. If I’m in a better mood about something I’ll talk about it.

Teddy: Well if you say so.

Freddy: Hate to sound like a right bit but don’t you thrive on negativity? And isn’t this beating a dead horse? Everybody knows the MCU is in trouble.

I know. It looks like I do thrive on negativity and I don’t like it, it’s why I’m trying to find something nice to talk about. Now why don’t we get this done with so I can find something nice to talk of?

Freddy: Ooooooookaaaaaaay….

Teddy: Let’s begin then?

Yes. I for one saw this coming as far back as 2015 and here we are now, everybody is bitter about the MCU save for a few ultra diehards.

The MCU was for a long time the big thing in Hollywood. Beginning in 2008 with Iron Man, the whole MCU grew out to become a giant of the film industry and entertainment, bringing Marvel characters to life that hadn’t had much of a chance on the big screen. We had Blade, the Raimi Spider Man movies, the X-Men, Fantastic 4 and Hulk movies prior to this, but this was where Marvel began its empire with these characters and its impact on film. It resurrected Robert Downey Jr’s career, propelled Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Olsen, Hayley Atwell, and many actors into super stardom, and saw several old famous faces make a few appearances like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Campbell, Sir Patrick Stewart, Toby Jones. Then there’s the rising stars that came out of it. Even Jenna Ortega was in the MCU in Iron Man 3 at a younger age.

Jenna Ortega in the third Iron Man movie.

The MCU set the standard of telling big complex stories woven across movies following in Star Wars footsteps, going all in with the big treat of seeing these characters come to life and face to face that, unless you were Freddy and Jason, was nigh unheard of. It eventually spanned spin-offs like the Marvel Netflix shows, Disney+ shows and later tied in the Sony Spider Man and Fox X-Men movies. And it certainly saw others trying to compete with it with the uncertain and eventually dead and buried DCEU, Cobra Kai reigniting the Karate Kid franchise with more wins, the Monsters Universe of Kong and Godzilla that isn’t stopping at all, the Dark Universe which died as soon as it started, Sonic the Hedgehog’s movie universe which is still going, and The Dragon Prince….and look where that got them.

However, ever since Avengers: Endgame hints have not been going well for the MCU, their only win being Deadpool and Wolverine which brought them a billion dollars at the box office, Spider-Man’s billion dollar success sees Sony take home 75% of the profit and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, though successful didn’t make a billion. The rest have either underperformed or flopped badly like The Marvels and The Eternals, this year has seen them lose more money on Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts and Fantastic 4: First Steps isn’t looking that good either. Combine this with more negative feedbacks towards the MCU since Endgame for its lack of vision going forward, a jumbled mess of tone, over reliance on humour, and controversies arising from within Marvel Studios, it’s led to many believe Marvel is now dying.

Teddy: But what about Avengers: Doomsday?

Freddy: That’s gotta make lots of money surely?

(Looks at the amount of actors in the film.)

Hmm, I think a lot of the budget is going in the actor’s wallets, Robert Downey Jr has been paid a huge amount of money to play Doctor Doom, then you have Hemsworth, Stewart, McKellen, Pascal, and maybe even Chris Evans, there’s up to twenty seven actors in this film returning to play characters they’ve not had a go at in almost twenty years. Even if it did reach a billion, how much of it is gonna be a win? Would they need two billion? I’ll come back to Doomsday later because I’m still stunned by what they’re doing with it.

But do I think Marvel Studios is dying? I don’t think it’s "dying", but it’s nowhere near as strong as it used to be. They are most likely looking at what is going wrong if they want to survive. It could get a renaissance if they were to map out a proper vision and start being a bit bolder in making things a bit more mature and not telling jokes every second or having likeable characters again. That and they should cut back their content and focus on the movies again and not thinking everybody is watching the shows. But I, the Wandering Fox, is here to talk about the MCU’s fall.

Where Do I Think Its Downfall Began?

To me, I think the MCU started to go wrong as far back as Age of Ultron. I remembered watching it and thinking of it afterward and thought “That was not really good. It was being too comedic in certain areas, hardly referenced Bucky, Ultron himself was a weak villain, Quicksilver was dealt with early, and we didn’t see Tony questioning himself at the end of the movie of the fact he costed lots of lives again with his obsession with the Infinity Stones”. Combine that with the sudden romance of Bruce Banner and Black Widow, focussing more of setting up Black Panther, Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarök, Ultron being killed after Vision made a comedic comment. Oh and what was the Age of Ultron? The whole thing with him lasted for a few days, the only impacts he had on the MCU was Quicksilver’s death, Vision’s creation and the Hulk leaving for space. He was way better in What If?. The humour was what really irked me. Humour is good to have but you shouldn’t have it on your works every second. Though Age of Ultron has probably aged better compared to the bull that’s come out recently.

Seriously this is the Ultron we should have gotten.

I think it was here as well that I was noticing Marvel’s ego and greed beginning to rise. Disney themselves were invested in Marvel and were eager to keep the throne of the film kingdom, hence they swept aside whatever plans they had for Captain America: Serpent Society and changed it to Captain America: Civil War to compete with Batman v Superman, as well as getting the rights to Spider Man and throwing him in the Infinity Saga, they were really making it clear they thought they could do no wrong, which brought them only trouble going forward. I like Tom as Spider-Man, I just didn’t like how he was Iron Man’s b**ch in these movies to the point they even tied his villains to Iron Man! You had Vulture and Mysterio ultra butthurt over Iron Man, then Peter relies on Iron Man tech to help Doc Ock. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’s then having to have Nick Fury, Doctor Strange, Punisher and Hulk to be in a movie with him. Is this a deal Marvel made with Sony? Why not just have the other heroes appear in the background?

Thor Ragnarök abandoned the idea of being a dark film that explores the end of Asgard and turned into a comedy fest by Taika Wattiti that was just annoying and spent a big chunk of it wasting Planet Hulk and repeating the whole “Thor must find himself” story, it was clearer that the MCU was starting to rely way too much on what Gunn gave us with the Guardians movies: big epic fights, quippy dialogue and humour with generic villains spouting shit. They still had some films I liked after Age of Ultron including Doctor Strange, Black Panther and Ant-Man and Avengers: Infinity War, as at least Ant-Man had a reason to be funny, and Black Panther and Doctor Strange balanced its humour out with good character acting. Then there was Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the latter of which the first season was good, I liked those. Though sadly it was here where I gave up with the MCU and it didn’t help when a real narcissist who hates men came along to play a character who is now by far among the most unlikeable characters in comics and scolded Scarlet Witch for wanting to retire and have a family:

Brie “is that a personal attack” Larson as Carol “Magneto promotes Godwin’s Law” Danvers.

Yeah Carol, you’re such a good person saying that to a Holocaust Survivor.

With such a nasty person who has a huge chip on her shoulder playing a nasty piece of work that’s acting as a hero, no, I was not going to continue with the MCU. And that’s when things got really ugly and I chose to keep out of it, but thanks to a critic letting slip on a podcast that they HAVE to say something nice about a bad film, Captain Marvel being used as an example in the podcast, so they can get a free invite to the next big film event, I knew then I couldn’t really trust a film critic at that point or trust Marvel or any Hollywood company at that point in bribing film critics to like their films. But with Captain Marvel they made a joke of Nick Fury’s backstory of how he lost his eye, they portrayed Carol as a stone faced woman, retconned Mar-Vell, and went ultra feminist to the point it was hateful towards men, an intense topic that came up and is still talked about this day. They also lied in that Carol was going to be a important character in Endgame but aside from saving Tony, flying around the galaxy and being punched by Thanos, they didn’t do much with her.

Captain Marvel vs Thanos // Thanos Almost Snaps | Avengers: Endgame [Blu-Ray HD] - YouTube

Endgame came and was just tonally terrible with Thor turned into a fat gamer joke, Valkyrie was made the ruler of Asgard despite luring people to their deaths and “Thor has to find himself again”, Star Lord’s emotional reunion with Gamorra is cut short to have him kicked in the balls, weirdly placed humour with Hulk’s “TIME TRAVEL!”, Black Widow not getting a tribute to her like Tony, the fact Ant-Man was saved by a RAT was silly and the incredibly strange moment all the women characters suddenly shift around Spiderman on the battle when they were far from each other?

I did come back to the MCU for Spider Man: No Way Home and Deadpool and Wolverine, the latter of which I think is the last superhero film I’ll see in the cinemas for a while as I’m kind of tired of the superhero films these days. No Way Home does have a lot of problems though I still liked it. Deadpool and Wolverine was fun and had a nice surprise for me with Blade appearing as I hadn’t known he was in it and since I watched the Blade films when I was younger, I saw it as a massive reward for me as well as seeing Wesley playing him again.

But I haven’t checked in the MCU for years. I have however kept my eye on certain things like Daredevil Born Again and that was horrific with how they handled the entire case with White Tiger, Matt being lectured to was not nice, thinking the series needed to be fixed by throwing in violent scenes which…no, that’s not what made the Netflix series great, it was the fact Matt and the characters seemed more grounded compared to the Avengers and had more humane interactions than being jokesters or angry teachers. She-Hulk continued this strange phase Marvel and films in general had in making really angry rude girl bosses who were either snarky or uptight towards others around them, She-Hulk scolding Bruce who was trying to help her control her anger but she said, paraphrasing, “You don’t know how hard it is being a woman, being cat called, ogled at and seen as a object and not as a human!” Ouch, it’s not like Bruce was ABUSED BY HIS FATHER AS A KID, CAUGHT UP IN A LAB EXPERIMENT THAT TURNED HIM INTO A MONSTER, IS A FUGITIVE AND HAS BEEN HUNTED BY THE LAW, SPENT YEARS TRAPPED IN THE MONSTER AND LOST HIS LOVER! It’s not like he’s trying to be empathetic towards her. But She-Hulk’s scolding is contradictive as later she’s seen twerking with a close up of her backside and brags about being a monster in bed. She-Hulk’s show also removes a lot of stakes as in the last episode she literally tears her way out of Disney+, confronts the writers and then Kevin himself. So basically if they want to defeat Doctor Doom, She-Hulk just has to go to the writers and rewrite the entire thing.

Taika Wattiti went overboard than he already did with Thor: Love and Thunder which was that bad people were desperate for Marvel to stop hiring Taika. He’s buggered off to do Judge Dredd so sorry guys :/ Can you imagine him doing a bloody Hellraiser movie?

The other thing as well is that Marvel spent these last phases trying to make a lot of characters work as replacements for the heroes when they were fine as themselves. Sam Wilson is a good character, but he was better as his own hero. Falcon was his own, and I think having Sam trying to work in a universe post Endgame could have been interesting as he stands on his own without Captain America. Same with Bucky, I can’t help but think a lot of his friendship with Steve was set aside in Endgame when his relationship with Steve is one of the biggest in the MCU. Unless somebody watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier can help me, I think Bucky did get wasted after Endgame. The same goes for Bruce Banner with how he managed to find peace with the Hulk in the gap years between Infinity War and Endgame, we didn’t see that development and everybody is craving for the Hulk to return.

That and I think Marvel just gotten way too cocky and greedy by then and they haven’t learnt their lesson. They thought they were the kings of Hollywood and all of entertainment, with them banking on Disney+ to help them span out the MCU and assumed everybody would be watching them. But that didn’t work. Those who never watched WandaVision will be confused as to why Scarlet Witch is evil in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness. Those who didn’t watch Ms Marvel won’t know who Kamala Khan is in The Marvels. They’ve had that at least get to them I think if we’re to believe they’ve lost complete faith in Brie Larson. If the sequel to a billion dollar grossing movie she starred in flopped at the box office, then she's clearly not worth keeping around. We haven’t had an Eternals sequel made. They’ve obviously met a wall of steel when it comes to Blade as they announced that movie in 2019 and it’s not been made yet, with many pitches, directors and writers coming and going. Kevin Feige’s image as “the genius” has been shattered with the creatives who helped build the MCU getting kicked out ages ago and without them, he’s just a dumb man who smiles awkwardly at the camera in his baseball hat thinking he’s in his twenties. He even said he and the studio think Blade isn’t interesting in a leather coat fighting vampires. Oh Kevin come on, you’re an idiot but you can’t be that much of an idiot?

There is only one Blade | Deadpool & Wolverine

Marvel are in desperation mode now. They’ve had lots of flops lately, The Marvels is their lowest grossing movie thus far, this year they've lost money on Brave New World and Thunderbolts, the Fantastic 4 First Steps has underperformed which is just horrid for Marvel as everybody was hoping they’d make the “best” version of them and they were banking on this movie getting them out of the rut. On Disney+ their Ironheart series was basically torn to chunks, Secret Invasion was a laughingstock. Then there’s how thanks to Jonathan Majors’ big incident in real life, they’ve now made a big change of direction. This desperation has led to them making Avengers Doomsday, which is by far the biggest movie that’s going to be made in history with Robert Downey Jr now playing Doctor Doom, Chris Hemsworth returning as Thor, Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, only now this movie is reaching back into the Fox universe with Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Alan Cumming, and lots of others all returning as their characters, and insiders say Chris Evans, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are back as Steve, Deadpool and Wolverine, Marvel themselves have confirmed they are still writing the movie as they’re filming it. That’s a lot of characters to juggle in one movie and I think this is going to be a big “Let’s throw these toys together” kind of movie. I think it will make a billion, but is that going to be enough to cover the cost of these actors and the set pieces they’ve spent over millions on?

They won’t be getting my money on that billion, but I’m glad I bowed out on Deadpool and Wolverine.

While that’s my thoughts, I will look at the bigger picture.

Looking in on what others have been saying, the MCU is not the same since Endgame. They miss the actual storytelling that led them to Endgame and have pointed out it’s been lacking a vision that they want to commit to and seem to be behaving in a way like Warner did with their franchise. First its female focused, that doesn’t do them well. Then they go back to nostalgia to help them, it works but it doesn’t help the entire MCU. They try to introduce obscure characters to recapture that Guardians of the Galaxy feel but is met with bad results, The Eternals is an example. The characters themselves who stayed on after Endgame have been met with annoyance like Scarlet Witch being let go by Monica out of sympathy despite Wanda imprisoning a whole town and is a grief stricken women with mental health issues that should have been taken in to be given help. Daredevil is now a quipping hero like everybody else and Matt is hardly a strong character as he was in the Netflix series. She-Hulk is hated for being incredibly rude. Doctor Strange took a level in idiocy in No Way Home. The Disney+ shows are seen as another reason why the MCU is failing as they introduced Kang in the Loki series to set him up as the big baddie which passed over to Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, leaving audiences confused to who he is, Monica and Kamala began in the spin offs and everybody doesn’t know who they are, they’re doing huge plot stuff in the spin offs that not everybody was watching.

The behind-the-scenes drama has now become more noticeable. The last time there was lots of drama like that was Joss Whedon being disgruntled with Marvel on Age of Ultron and James Gunn being sacked, then rehired, the latter of which wrecked their cosmic stories as Gunn was overseeing that. Then there’s Ike Perlmutter and other creatives who were instrumental to Marvel’s big successes being sacked as Ike wanted Feige and Robert Downey Jr sacked. The former I could see why. The latter? No. But come these years later, executive producer Victoria Alonso was sacked, which was a big shocker as she was pretty much up there with Feige. Victoria was sacked for breaching contract by working on a film outside of Marvel, but others say Victoria was sacked for being toxic towards VFX Artists and she made the environment at Marvel Studious toxic. Victoria however said she was sacked for opposing LGBTQ+ erasure at the studio. Then you have the drama around Blade’s movie with them unsure of how to make it, with a pitch suggesting they set it in the 1920s, another was that Blade was said to not be in the film much and it’d be about his daughter. Then there’s Beau DeMayo and the drama revolving around him and Marvel is still going to this day. Then there’s how creatives have been arguing with critics on the web, which is sure to work out well. Just ask Russell T. Davies!

Russell, you’re in your sixties, start acting like it.

Chadwick Boseman’s death is also a point of intense debate among fans with some thinking Marvel made a mistake in not recasting him despite Boseman apparently wanting his character to be recast, which has caused fans to feel Marvel was making money off of his death. Others thought that recasting him would be disrespectful to his legacy. This is something I’m personally not sure about.

I will say as well as I’ve noticed, but I don’t want to comment on it that much as I hate the whole political arguments about it, but Marvel has made their latest works a bit too political. Yes, there’s always been political undertones to the movies as there is with just about every movie, but in recent years, with other films as well, Marvel has really gone out with the political side of things whether to the extreme in tackling Toxic Masculinity, Feminism, Racism, Crime, but they’ve gone so far that its boiled down to:

“Bad man villain, kick him in the balls, cos men bad”.

“Gotta have more female characters, let’s make them angry, Stone faced and smug and condescending to men. Even the female villains have to be sympathetic despite them murdering lots of people cos women are inherently good”.

“Sexualising female characters is bad but we’ll sexualise men”

“Cops are corrupt, let’s have the Punisher kill them”.

“We like to do crime drama but it’s okay if our lead character steals a iron suit from a MIT lab”

It’s gotten to the point where even those they’re trying to appeal to are unnerved by it. Oh and before anybody says I’m far right or anything, I’m not, cos if I was then how come there’s lots of gay characters I love? How come there’s a lot of black celebrities I love? How come I love LuzxAmity, BatwomanxRenee, AmayaxJanai, TanglexWhisper. How come I love Jessica Cruz? Or Cyborg, or Luz, or Callum (he’s half Asian), Miles, or the many other characters of colour? How come I love Idris Elba, Samuel L Jackson, Rosario Dawson, Regina Hall. I can list so many that I love.

How am I far right when I call out the atrocities still being committed to gay people in countries like Nigeria where there it’s a crime to be gay? You didn’t see RTD doing anything about that and he’s gay and happily had a Doctor Who episode set in Nigeria. That’s what I don’t like about these people. They’re hypocrites.

With every day there is now a big thing going on at Marvel for the wrong reasons. What had once been a titan in the film industry is now a person hunched over on their knees after being kicked in the crotch one too many times trying not to pass out and finding out they’re sterile. Do I think the MCU is going to finish soon? No. Not yet at least. They have said they want to focus their future on the X-Men which has a lot there for them to tell, it depends on how they tell it. Will they tell their stories maturely and focus on bringing the characters to life in a respectful manner? Or will they fall back on poor form and do the usual but with the X-Men?

In my opinion, the MCU should have done an epilogue phase with Spider Man: Far From Home, No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, do a whole other Thor film where he is the king of Asgard, Deadpool and Wolverine, and Guardians Three. You tie up all the loose ends, have Scarlet Witch not as the villain of Doctor Strange, but a friend. Don’t do any Disney+ spin-offs, No Way Home, and Deadpool and Wolverine set up the multiverse elements of the next era, albeit change a bit of Multiverse’s plot to leave out the Illuminati.

Don’t change Far From Home.

Make Doctor Strange smarter in No Way Home.

Don’t have the Doctor Strange sequel be a full multiverse movie, instead just have Wanda trying to resurrect Vision and it goes wrong leading to a bit of a demonic fight with Stephen and Wanda battling the dead, end it with Wanda finding a universe where Vision lived but she died, hence she chooses to be with him. WandaVision doesn’t happen here.

Deadpool and Wolverine and Guardians Three are mostly the same, the latter doesn’t include Adam Warlock.

Then do a few films that let’s us see the MCU post Endgame, see how the heroes and the people are taking to the fact we don’t have Iron Man, Captain America and Black Widow anymore. Doctor Doom can easily be set up thanks to the Snap in Endgame with him taking over Latervia, you could even tease him in the Doctor Strange sequel by hinting Mephisto has an apprentice who will rise to be the strongest opponent Doctor Strange would face. The Fantastic 4 are in the MCU but come about after the Avengers, with them fighting the Mole Man, you focus on the dynamic of the characters to have us grow close to them, then do your post credits of the surviving Avengers meeting them. You build to Doctor Doom and you can have him appear here and there in the films after this, have him played by a actor who is willing to commit two decades of his life playing him. He can appear first as an anti-hero who is lulling everybody in thinking he’s a good guy then reveal he’s a villain. Towards the end of the Doom era you start setting up the X-Men with Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and Wolverine making appearances and devoting a movie to certain X-Men characters.

But before I finish I think I’ll just have this little thing to throw in.

I’m kinda done with superhero films.

What I mean is that I’m not really feeling the desire to go watch them in the cinema anymore. I’ll buy them on DVD if I have a bit of interest. But I’m just done with them. It’s just easy to predict now. The movie opens with an action scene, have some personal life arc, big baddie does their thing, fight scene, talk about their struggles, final fight with big CGI, mid credits and after credits. I do appreciate The Batman being different in terms of not relying on CGI as much and it’s more complex compared to the many super movies we get today, I might watch it’s sequel but I can’t get excited for Doomsday nor DC related movies. I’m just done with them. I’ll check out animations but for the superhero movies, I’ve just thought I’ve had enough.

That’s my thoughts.

Teddy: Um, you said you don’t think the MCU is dying. Why the funeral theme?

Well, I’m burying the crappy MCU stuff, the good stuff are still out of the ground.

Teddy: Oh I see!

Freddy: Well, it’d be nice if they could figure things out. If not, oh well.

Teddy: Well let’s bury it then, we can get that Cynical Crown off his head then.

Freddy: That I agree!

Thanks guys, I hope to find something nice to talk of again. What do you guys think? Do you think the MCU has had its day or do you think there’s still life left?

I’m the Wandering Fox and I’ll try to find something nice to chat about “tosses the Cynical Crown”.