I still enjoy the MCU, but I'm starting to agree that it is starting to get oversaturated. One night, I even began asking myself if Marvel Studios was beginning to become just as greedy as Disney is currently.

But most, but not all of the hatred for Phase 4 and 5 is just as toxic as the hatred for the Sequel Trilogy and other Star Wars content made by Disney.

"Marvel Studios was beginning to become just as greedy as Disney is currently."

My guy, Disney owns Marvel Studios.

Well, marvel was never making the mcu for the art of it. It was always an attempt to make an empire of profit

I cant understand this meme

I remember someone telling me awhile ago, the whole point of movies is to make money.

Well, there are more artistic studios focused on just making good art. But theyre smaller indie companies. Disney is a profiteering corporation

Well, when you make a theatrical release you want to cover your costs. Perlmutter's problem was he wanted to limit what was brought to the theatre.

The better the film is received the more it makes... So if people in the sci-fi and fantasy genre want to see certain things you loose money if you don't give it to them.

Take the unreleased "Inhumans" series we hear vague tales of, if they had released something good it would have raked in a butt-load of cash.

Well the thing is with titles like marvel and star wars, it doesnt really matter what they produce. The name on the label will get viewers in theaters almost as a guarantee.

The mcu is so big at this point that people will show up to movies even if they dont think its good.

For example, people said eternals was crap, but it was incredibly successful.

Slap a marvel label on it, people will go. I mean we hear a lot about how bad phase four was, people still went. Movies were still successful. Hell, successful in times of covid at that, when it generally wasnt easy to get people back to theaters.

So id have to disagree a bit. With big companies like disney, they dont have to worry too much about appeasing fans. Thats true of smaller productions maybe. But star wars for example can pretty much produce anything and people will flock. Even their worst movies were successful.

Marvel is pretty much the same now. People just enjoy going to mcu movies. Half the viewers arent even comics fans. Dont know a thing about the characters. Doesnt matter to them at all. They're just excited for another marvel movie.

The small minority of fans who care enough to greive the quality really dont make an impact, especially since even those fans are going to see the latest marvel movies.

I've been taking some time to think about this question, and I have some thoughts, but I don't know if they will make sense. I will try my best articulate them, though.

I actually rewatched the MCU a few months ago to see if it has actually gone downhill like people say, and it gave me some new insight that I will share in three points.

• The early phases were not the flawless masterpieces people make them out to be to dunk on phase four. Honestly, the MCU has always had a 50/50 success rate, and whenever enough bad movies came out in a row people say some of the same stuff they're saying now about how CBMs/the MCU is dying. I think it's a combination of recency and nostalgia. For example, if you think about the movies you saw in 2022, you're going to remember the bad ones more than you will if you think about the movies you saw in 2012, because the movies you liked you either rewatched more often or just had more of an impact on you, creating the illusion that this was a better time for movies. The truth is, any large enough sample size of entertainment media is going to be a mixed bag. When people think back to the early phases, they mainly focus on the movies they enjoyed, because they cared more about them. That's not to say that phase four is better, just that they are of comparable quality.

• The problems people have with phase four started in phase three. The heading kind of says it all, but I'll elaborate. Phases one and two feel very different from phases three and four. As a general rule, there's less of an over-reliance on CGI, the movies feel less fast-paced, and there's less jokes per movie, and a little more creative freedom for the filmmakers. The shift towards the things people don't like about phase four seemingly started with not letting Edgar Wright make Ant-Man at the earliest and Guardians Vol. 2 at the latest. (Even if I still think those are good movies in spite of that, I won't deny that the problems exist) But we don't remember that as well because, again, recency. The truth is, these problems started years ago, but they weren't as noticeable because we were in the middle of a story that audiences were already invested in.

• Some of the MCU's decline is an illusion. There are definitely some things that are just not working about the new projects, like the quantity over quality approach, the assembly-line style of production that offers little to no creative freedom, and the overworking of the VFX workers, which is only made worse with things like Quantumania reshooting its ending a month before release when the VFX team were already understaffed. But the major point I want to get into right now is the claim that the MCU has jumped the shark. I respectfully disagree. You see, the MCU began as a comparatively more grounded take on the Marvel universe. Whether that was because they didn't want to push the budget with some of the more comic book-y stuff or because they were afraid of being made fun of for them is honestly kind of open to interpretation at this point. The point being that the MCU started off relatively grounded, both in the ways that the powers of the characters were reduced, (not to go all power-scaler with this because a lot of that is arbitrary) and in the reduction of some of the more stylized elements of the comics like brighter, less tactical costumes and more unrealistic powers or applications of powers. (Look at how they made magic "a science we don't understand" and the repercussions that had on characters like Loki and Doctor Strange) In more recent years, they've moved away from some of that, giving us more comic-accurate costumes and committing to the fun of superpowers a little more, but it's coming at the same time as a production quality decline, which works with the grounded roots of the universe to create the illusion of jumping the shark.

In conclusion, all of this is to say that in my opinion, the MCU hasn't gone downhill, it's about the same level of success it was always at, just with new problems. Whether they be rushed production or the natural result of a franchise that has run long enough that people forget the mistakes of the past.

And another point I want to quickly make just to establish where I stand on the MCU in general, my position can be described as this: I genuinely do not care about the universe. I just want good movies. We're still getting good movies out of the MCU that we likely wouldn't have gotten otherwise, so I see no problem with it continuing at this stage, even if I have problems with some other movies.