The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is boring. The idea of connecting all superhero movies and having them join together is a great idea to think about and up until Avengers Assemble (which was the first one where they properly joined together) it was. As the films continued to come out I missed one or two and had no idea what was going on in the later ones. I’ve seen Age Of Ultron and Doctor Strange but I got superhero film fatigue and couldn’t be bothered with them anymore.

With DC not having a really great film since The Dark Knight (I haven’t seen Joker yet) and the X-Men films decreasing in quality for a while there isn’t much to make superheroes interesting again.

I look back at the Tobey Maguire Spiderman as an example of how a film series should work for superheroes. One film where he gets his powers and his first villain where it establishes characters and has a deep message such as the memorable “With great power comes great responsibility”, motivations are established and there are enough ideas to make sequels with. A second film where later life starts to bring its own troubles but the hero ends up seeing more of a happy ending. Then a final film to settle other plotlines like Harry’s hatred of Spiderman or proving that the hero isn’t strong enough alone, although the third film in that series isn’t as good, it still brings a message without needing loads of films like Iron Man got for his mental health as a friend of mine has tried to explain.

It just seems that slightly older superhero films were better and it may not be the fault of the MCU. The first three X-Men films, the Fantastic Four that didn’t use teens or children, Tobey’s Spiderman, the first Iron Man film, all Batman films before The Dark Knight Rises and I’m certain plenty more no matter how bad they really were hold more appeal to me as something to watch than the soon to be infinite number of interconnected films and TV shows in both DC and Marvel. It does amaze me how successful the MCU has been.

The MCU is built on a business model that catches its fans and squeezes a much as it can out of them by making sure that they have to watch every film to understand the overarching plot, this ensures that people keep going to see the films and even those that don’t do well on release will still have the dedicated few and as impressive as it is, I don’t think it’s built on plot as much as greed which is why DC have tried the same thing but have proved less successful, their standalone Joker was a success. I’d like to see standalone movies come back.