The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 Has Been a Total Train Wreck
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.