The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is a franchise of interconnected movies and TV shows utilizing characters from Marvel Comics. It has officially been running since the release of Iron Man (2008), though with the introduction of the multiverse they’ve retconned all Marvel films to be canon in the grand scheme of the MCU. The MCU is known for its interconnectivity, which for a while was its greatest strength, but has grown to be its biggest weakness. Back in “phase one,” the span of projects between the release of Iron Man (2008) and The Avengers (2012), having a bunch of isolated movies that would culminate in one big crossover film was revolutionary. But the key factor here is that the solo movies that led to the crossover film were good films on their own; they told a complete story from start to finish in their runtime.
Nowadays, things are very different. Ever since the success of Avengers: Endgame (2019), Marvel Studios has been trying to recapture the excitement that the box office smash hit achieved. It seems like a lot of the MCU projects released in the last five years were made not to tell a story, but simply to lead to the next step. This leaves us with unfinished stepping stones of movies in the sense that they don’t give you very much context, because they expect you to already know what’s going on from other projects and frequently exist solely to set us up for something later.
For example, let’s say you have never watched an MCU project before and wanted to cue up Disney+ and watch Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. You could, but it would mostly just be a bunch of fight scenes and special effects. They expect you to already know who the important characters are (Doctor Strange from the film of the same name and Scarlet Witch from plenty of movies in phases two and three) as well as the characters’ motivations for their actions (shown in WandaVision.) A film has three main parts: characters, setting, and plot. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness makes no effort to explain any of them to you.
That’s why it’s hard to start watching the MCU. A brand new fan can’t just go to the theater and watch the latest Marvel movie, because the reliance on interconnectivity has left them with 15 years of movies and shows that need to be seen in order to understand the world-building, character development, and purpose.
Additionally, the MCU started as a franchise that adapted the comics. The storylines from the earlier movies can be directly traced back to the comics. But as time went on, Marvel Studios realized they could start ignoring the source material while still capitalizing off of its iconography and success. This is how we end with projects like 2023’s Secret Invasion, in which the show’s director, Ali Selim, was explicitly told by his higher-ups not to read the source material as “It had nothing to do with what we’re trying to do here.” Why even make a show that was supposedly both named after and adapted a huge storyline from the comics if you never had an interest in adapting the story anyway?
As we get further and further into the MCU, it’s become abundantly clear that the projects are no longer adapting the comics, but rather telling their own stories with existing characters from a very profitable IP. And since modern comic writers tend to write things as to be congruent with the live-action MCU depictions, we stray further and further from who these characters are at their core. I’m all for original stories taking place in the Marvel universe, but we need to stop acting like the MCU is simply a live-action adaptation of the comics. It isn’t, and it hasn’t been for a while.
