Spider-Man: Homecoming could easily be called the Star Wars: The Force Awakens phase of Spider-Man’s long movie history. Like Star Wars, Spider-Man’s big screen legacy began with two classics and a less acclaimed third chapter, before a second version of the franchise nearly tanked its good name. And with Star Wars, a Disney owned company gave Spider-Man a third movie series in an expanded cinematic universe, a more youthful direction to start over with, and a new lead slowly but…
When Avengers: Endgame came out, it marked the end of Marvel’s current 22-film long saga, which is the average length of a network television season. Given how episodic the MCU can be, this is an ideal comparison for better and sometimes worse.
Before the Avengers two-part 'season finale' the last time most of the Avengers were seen was their big breakup in Captain America: Civil War, which was the 13’th film of the MCU and a fairly fitting midseason finale…
It seems to be MCU tradition that after a gigantic Avengers movie, Marvel brings in Ant-Man to shrink things back to manageable size. The original Ant-Man followed Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015, overcoming an early change in leadership to become bigger than expected. But with no such production troubles for Ant-Man and the Wasp, and with the MCU just two months removed from killing half the universe in Avengers: Infinity War, the bullseye and the hope for a palate…
Captain Marvel may have been the first of its kind in a few ways in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it followed a now time-honored pattern. For the third year in a row, a movie d as a ground breaking, glass ceiling shattering milestone in the modern superhero era was released, months before its historic title hero ed up with all the other heroes nearby in a big team-up.
Given that the previous two examples were Wonder Woman and Black…
No one except Kevin Feige and maybe Stan Lee envisioned what would begin with Iron Man in 2008, so certainly no one had any idea that it needed an ending. Of course, 21 movies, billions of dollars and appearances by half of Hollywood’s A-list have ensured that the Marvel Cinematic Universe can never truly end. However, 2019 was all about providing an Endgame anyway.
Yet one year before, the end already seemed to come for almost everyone inspired by those…
The world wasn't the same immediately after Avengers Endgame, as Hollywood was painfully aware of after two post-Endgame months of blockbuster underachievers and critical bombs. Yet even the MCU can’t stay the same anymore, as the so-called ending of Endgame must give way to the start of a new era.
Fortunately, the safest bet to anchor an epilogue to the old era and lay the first foundations of the new one is Spider-Man, despite having to go pretty Far From…
After its unscheduled year off in 2020, the Marvel universe’s 2021 return had its biggest fireworks on television until Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Yet between early suspicions that Disney was setting up the MCU’s first Asian-led movie to fail in theaters, and backlash over Disney’s CEO labeling the movie an “experiment” – to the point where Shang-Chi himself Simu Liu objected as well – there weren't a lot of PR favors done for this one...until the…
In a way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Pixar have something in common besides being owned by Disney. When Pixar launched, it had an unbroken string of masterpieces from 1995 to 2011, until Cars 2 became the first poorly reviewed Pixar film. A decade later, the MCU also had an unbroken string of positively reviewed films – though only a few were dubbed anything close to masterpieces – until the Eternals.
Now countless critics are surely jumping at the bit,…