Marvel’s problem wasn’t that the films got bad. They’re actually all decent films. It’s that they got greedy. Before they thought about linking all the films, they needed to make it so all the films were great standalone films. That just made it feel like we had to commit to everything and that’s just daunting. In all honesty, films like Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and Captain America: Brave New World are decent. Though the fighting scenes were subpar in the latter. They really lack fluidity. But they suffer from the now you have to see… In short they jumped the gun and it cost them.
Also Kang was a good villain. Shame they didn’t bleed him into the universe properly. Kang versus Doom would’ve been delicious.
Yeah when I went in to Doctor Strange multiverse of madness, and there was no, you really do need to see Scarlet witch first, I just wondered what the fuck is going on. Since then there has been so much released on Disney plus it feels like I have to do research before just going into a movie for some mindless fun. So I checked out. Sorry Marvel but you should have made your series non compulsory to the movies. Basically tried forcing your streaming service on us, now I won’t touch it or your Disney IP with a 10 meter pole
And even if you watched WandaVision, the setup for MoM doesn’t make sense since it reverts Wandas character development! Which makes sense if you know that the two got swapped, but it doesn’t help the story a bit.
For me the big issue with whatever happened between WandaVision and MoM is that she was just left to keep doing her own thing and grow in power after WandaVision. Apparently the Avengers will just forgive and forget about someone enslaving and torturing an entire town for 3 years, as long as that person was / is also an Avenger. Sure, her story was sad but also she’s kind of a monster.
They obviously knew exactly where she was the whole time, considering that Dr. Strange just strolled up to have a chat with her. So basically they just let this unhinged and immensely powerful individual just walk away from that and live her life in peace in her apple meadow.
It’s not like there was anyone even around for that beside Strange. And they do talk about exactly that in the movie when he goes to see her. It’s handwaved away with one or two lines, sure, but they do say it, and make it clear that Strange didn’t see through the illusion until the movie and he thought she was healing and getting better and he let her in peace. It’s only in the movie that he realizes things went the complete opposite, he didn’t know the Darkhold was wrecking her up. Obviously he should have been better at that job much earlier, but they do bring it up. Strange simply doesn’t seem that good at watching over what happens on Earth (or in this dimension at all, we had that exact same joke with Thanos already). The takeaway is that Strange doesn’t check up on strong magic users around him and there’s no one other than him. Who they gonna send, Ant-Man?
That’s actually a great point about magic users. We saw what she did with the Illuminati, she probably would’ve just made mince meat out of any non magic user Avengers too. In fact, even Dr. Strange was barely a match for her. So there probably wasn’t anyone that could’ve realistically taken her on anyway.
There’s a reason Dan Harmon bitched about serialisation for about a decade, it’s a crutch for weak writing. Episodic is just a far better format in general, and basically all streaming is going far in the opposite direction because they’ve let their own half-baked binge metrics dictate what kinds of shows they make.
It’s become a bit of a hobby for me to point out how media changes based on the incentives. All art is beholden to its support structures, and most of these streaming platforms have put algorithms in control because we keep on failing to learn the lessons of the past century or so.