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.
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.