What Went Wrong with the MCU? And how to fix it.

I have a degree of apathy towards Marvel these days. It is probably why I have not written much about it lately. But now feels like the right time, with Phase 5 wrapped up and Phase 6 underway, to take stock of where things stand.

If you want my full history with the MCU and my thoughts on everything up to Phase 5 starting, that is all covered in my What Now After Endgame piece from 2023. I also wrote separately about Secret Invasion if you want my thoughts on that particular disaster which was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. This post picks up from where those left off, everything since, and the bigger question of what has actually gone wrong.

When I wrote that 2023 piece, Phase 5 was just getting started. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had just come out and Guardians Vol. 3 was on the horizon. Briefly Ant-Man was bad but watchable, Guardians was a good sendoff. So let us pick things up from The Marvels onwards.

The Marvels (2023) is the lowest performing MCU movie to date, taking around $200 million against a budget of roughly the same, making it Marvel’s first genuine box office bomb. It came after a couple of films had already failed to reach the heights Marvel wanted, and it was impossible to ignore as a sign something had gone seriously wrong. The result was 2024 having only one MCU release more on that in a moment. I do not think The Marvels is a bad film, it has some charm, but it is very much middle of the road. It tries to set up the next part of the multiverse story and clearly wants to do what the earlier phases did build toward something bigger. The problem is it feels like the first time anybody has attempted that, rather than a confident step in an established direction. A superhero team up with three leading women that general audiences simply did not know well enough yet. I can barely remember what happened, and I watched it.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) was the only MCU release that year and found considerable success. In many ways it is a love letter to the Fox X-Men films, and it is not shy about poking fun at Disney and Marvel in the process. I wrote about it separately so you can find my fuller thoughts there. It worked largely because of the genuine charm of Ryan Reynolds and the team behind the Deadpool films writers who understood the source material and knew how to have fun with it. Reynolds finds a way to bring Jackman back and creates what is arguably the first multiverse story in the MCU that actually makes sense and feels fun rather than confusing. It takes elements from Loki that worked but does not require you to have seen that series to follow it. It also quietly demonstrates something important that TV and film can coexist in the same universe when the people making them actually know what they are doing and are working with each other rather than past each other.

Captain America: Brave New World (2025) I already wrote about separately and my verdict stands it was boring. It had the pieces of a couple of different and potentially interesting films crammed into one mess. Amazing really they made a flim that was watchable if not good. Anthony Mackie deserved better for his first solo outing as Captain America. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier already robbed him of a proper origin by telling a story that should have been this film. That Disney Plus show hangs over Brave New World and hurts it considerably.

Thunderbolts (2025)* is a team up film meant in part to fill the gap left by the Avengers. It is okay, not bad — a smaller set of B-tier characters coming together with a new addition thrown in, and it works better than it probably should. But it is missing something. A thread connecting it to what is coming. Even a small moment hinting that Doomsday is on the horizon would have gone a long way. Instead it ends with a new character and a vague hint, feeling more like a Phase 1 or 2 film than something building toward a climax. Outside of Deadpool, all three Phase 5 films share the same problem playing it safe, not really feeling like a reset, and not doing enough to connect the dots.

On the TV side Phase 5 was a mixed bag. Agatha All Along and Daredevil: Born Again were the clear standouts. Agatha is fun and adds a couple of characters to the wider MCU. Daredevil: Born Again is just good television, following on from the Netflix series and feeling relatively standalone. Echo was fine. Loki Season 2 was quite good I should probably write about that at some point. Ironheart I never got around to watching, and I suspect I am not alone in that. Burnout had set in by then, and frustration over the quality of what was being put out meant I had simply stopped keeping up with certain things. Marvel has never quite decided whether its TV output matters to the wider story or not, and worse still the lack of communication between TV and film writers caused some genuinely strange inconsistencies along the way.

One genuine bright spot is X-Men ’97, which launched on Disney Plus in March 2024 and was genuinely great a revival of the beloved 1990s animated series that captured what made the original work while feeling fresh. Season 2 is due Summer 2026. It is not without its own behind the scenes drama, but that is a story for another day. Across Phase 5 as a whole the quality was just too uneven. X-Men ’97 and Loki sitting alongside Secret Invasion is a strange place to be.

The Kang Problem

The bigger issue sitting underneath all of this is Kang. The entire Multiverse Saga was built around Kang the Conqueror as the next Thanos a threat growing in the background until the Avengers films brought everything together. But unlike Thanos, who was teased at the end of films and referenced across years before stepping into the light, Kang never got that treatment. Marvel simply announced he was the big bad and dropped him into Ant-Man 3 where a comedy character promptly beat him. No breadcrumbs, no creeping dread, no build. Just “here is the villain now.” Loki did genuinely good work trying to give Kang weight, which makes what happened on the big screen even more frustrating and raises the obvious question of why Loki was not a film setting Kang up properly from the start. The answer, of course, is that Disney needed content to push its streaming service. They quickly found out that TV was expensive to make and needed enormous volume to justify itself, which is a whole other problem.

Then Jonathan Majors had serious legal problems and was dropped from the role entirely. Marvel pivoted to Doctor Doom, bringing Robert Downey Jr. back as a Doom variant. I would have simply recast Kang. Have Majors shoot a scene where his variant dies, and a new actor steps out from the shadows giving audiences the feeling that someone is always pulling strings behind the scenes, that Kang cannot truly be stopped. That is the whole point of the character. It would be a great end-credit scene.

The result is a gaping hole in the middle of the saga. I have spoken to people who said they genuinely do not know what is going on in the MCU anymore, and honestly I am not far behind them. I follow this more closely than most casual viewers, and even I have lost the thread at points. If that is true for me, Marvel is in trouble. It feels like they wanted to rush to the finish line without doing the legwork, and now they are burning through Doctor Doom in a single film to paper over the cracks. Trying to reach endgame heights without understanding how it got so big.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) was genuinely good probably the most confident Marvel has felt in years. Its standalone setting removed the pressure of connecting everything to the current mess, but like Deadpool it had just enough subtle connection that you could see where things were heading. Quiet hints that made you think, right, the multiverse is real and it matters, without hitting you over the head with it. It gave me cautious hope. I plan on watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day since I like Tom Holland’s version of the character. Doomsday I am far less sure about. Secret Wars is such a massive comic event and the build up to it has felt far too rushed.

What I Would Have Done

With the benefit of hindsight, here is roughly how I would have approached things differently.

After Endgame I would have waited. There is however one giant elephant in the room Black Widow needed to come out. Disney had a contract with Scarlett Johansson and that is not something you can simply ignore. So rather than making it a standalone prequel, I would have reframed it. An aftermath film or limited TV series a loose story dealing with the loose ends from Endgame, showing what happened to everybody in the years that followed. Different heroes going their separate ways, each carrying the weight of what happened, with something quietly hinting at what might be coming. Not a team up, more of a world breathing out.

From there, I would lean into Black Widow’s death as something meaningful rather than final. A Black Widow and Thunderbolts film where two teams of B characters collide a Black Widow spy thriller with the Thunderbolts either helping her or tracking her down. The obvious twist being that she is actually still alive. The Natasha who died in Endgame was her, but this is a different version from another timeline. She wanted out and used it as her exit. Here is where it gets interesting the Skrulls have taken over the Black Widow programme, but not as villains. A splinter faction is working with Nick Fury against a takeover that is already quietly underway. Some Skrulls are loyalists working for Kang or Doom, infiltrating and replacing people as part of a long game. Others are working against it from the inside. Fury knows something is coming but never fully understands the scale of it, which is why his efforts keep misfiring. That gives you a genuine mystery, plants seeds for the multiverse, and reframes Secret Invasion as something that actually made sense rather than the mess it was.

After that comes Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 as the proper farewell to that team. Then Spider-Man, but I would not have made Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Instead Peter does not ask Strange to make everyone forget him — Nick Fury does it. Fury is already buried deep in something much bigger and cannot afford Peter being a loose end, so he wipes every record of him and tells him quietly that he may call on him someday if nobody else will, but he will respect his choice to step back. The problem is the wipe goes too far and Fury forgets him too. Peter is completely alone.

With no one guiding him he picks up the mantle of Spider-Man and drops Peter Parker entirely, protecting New York but slowly losing himself in the process. No Fury to call, no Avengers to fall back on. Things get worse — someone is trying to mutate him, turning him into something closer to a spider than a man, and he does not understand why or who. He blames himself. That is where Madame Web comes in. Rather than using the Skrulls again I would bring her in here as the person who sees what is happening across realities and pulls Peter out before it is too late. She takes him to another world where the X-Men help pull him back from the edge. Hopping between realities, catching glimpses of what is coming, he starts to understand the scale of what is building but nobody in his own world believes him.

That mutation thread does not go away. By the time Secret Wars arrives Peter is still fighting for control of it, a hero trying to hold himself together while the multiverse tears apart around him. He ends up on the front line against Doom, who has been using the Skrulls as pawns all along the loyalist faction we planted earlier, now revealed to have been threatening the Skrull homeworld to keep them in line. That gives the Skrull conspiracy a payoff and ties Peter’s personal arc into the biggest possible stakes without it feeling forced.

Deadpool and Wolverine I would largely keep as is. Fantastic Four the same. One film per year, produced leaner, with less reliance on green screen. Phase 5 as a rebuild and a reset, feeling closer to Phase 1 and 2 in pacing and tone. Yes COVID would have caused real world delays. I would have waited until 2022 or 2023 to release anything in this run, using the time to actually prepare. If you’re curious why this section is here it helps setup X-Men so it worth keeping the release order the same.

Then Spider-Man becomes the thread into Phase 6. Still mutating, still fighting for control of himself, he is forced into a leadership position he never wanted. Earth’s finest heroes from different worlds and realities rally around him familiar faces brought back through the multiverse in ways that feel earned rather than cheap. I would have cut a deal with Sony to bring in whatever characters this story needed to work properly. There is also another angle worth exploring here while all of this is building, someone is hunting him. Kraven or the Punisher on his trail throughout the chaos, a personal threat running alongside the cosmic one. Once Peter finally resolves who he is, both as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, he gets to step back on his own terms. A fitting ending for Tom Holland if he wants one. Someone else becomes the face of the next phase, the X-Men’s arrival is already being laid down in the background, and the door stays open for Spider-Man to return whenever the story calls for it.

On the TV side I would have kept Daredevil, Agatha, Loki, and a handful of others that genuinely added something. X-Men ’97 stays too, used as a slow build hint that the mutants are coming. The rest gets cut. Less content, more focus, a clear sense at every stage of where it is all heading.

That is the core of it. Space things out. Trust the audience to wait. And know where you are going before you start running.

The goodwill Endgame built has been spent faster than anyone should have allowed. Instead of taking their time and building properly toward a payoff, Marvel has been running at full speed without a clear destination. Phase 6 has a mountain to climb. I hope it manages it. I am just not yet convinced that Marvel has truly learned the lessons it needed to. Right now phase 4 and 5 have been a mess. Some highs and many lows. Plenty of stories they can tell and most people don’t know them.