Does MARVEL Suck or Are We Just Getting Old?

By Elizabeth Chan (she/her)

It was Friday last week when I went to the cinema, feeling unexcited yet hopeful, to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

I was never a huge Ant-Man fan because my favourite MARVEL superhero has always been Spider-Man. Heck, I was just there to watch a good movie for once, MARVEL always has something amazing in store. Yet, when I left that unusually empty cinema, I was left disappointed, mixed with an overwhelmingly neutral feeling. The kind that makes you go, “meh,” when someone asks how the movie was.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s brooding over that movie. All my friends and relatives thought that it was “only okay.” If they were to rate the movie out of 5 stars, they would rate it with a meagre 3.5 out of 5, which is pretty disappointing for a MARVEL movie. I would always reply, “MARVEL has been getting worse ever since Disney took over.”

But is it?

Or are we just getting old?

When MARVEL feels MEDIOCRE

I remember Avengers (2012) being the first ever MARVEL movie I watched that brought me into the MARVEL Cinematic Universe as a fangirl, which is why I feel like 2010s MARVEL was the only time MARVEL felt MARVEL-ous. There was more thought put into the plot, writers actually knew how to arouse emotion whenever a character died. It felt surreal. My mind would even play the scenes of the movie all over again whenever I came back from the cinema as a tween. Compared to that golden era, MARVEL movies these days just feel lacking.

And it isn’t just the recent Ant-Man movie I’m talking about. I mean major movies that did not have the pizzazz but were overhyped in the media, tricking you into believing that the movie was the greatest of its series when it was not. Then when you give your opinion on the film, you steal some gasps of disbelief and the occasional judgemental stare (because I just don’t like any of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man movies).

But is MARVEL really deteriorating since Disney took over or are we just not enjoying anything anymore because we have gotten older?

We Have Aged

There is that terrible possibility, isn’t it? That we just can’t enjoy things the way we used to because we have become older. We all have witnessed this, whenever our parents or grandparents rant over how things were better in their time. Film, music, life itself.

“Horror” is how I would describe the realisation of this horrible truth: we have aged… just like the now-wrinkly stars in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But have we? Surely there must be a childlike spirit in us where we never grow older. Where we stay as kids blown away by superheroes and supervillains from the blockbuster action movies.

Not All is Lost

There are some recent MARVEL movies my friends and I enjoyed, like Avengers: Endgame and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

A very miserable handful, I must say. In fact, it’s not a handful, there were only 2 movies we actually enjoyed!

Though, there were other MARVEL creations I enjoyed, like ‘Hawkeye’, ‘Loki’, and ‘Wanda Vision’, to name a few. What all these shows have in common is the fact that they are TV series, not movies.

This means that, with Disney taking over, different kinds of MARVEL content feel more enjoyable, as opposed to their movies.

MARVEL isn’t that blockbuster action central we fell in love with because it feels like Disney excels in animation and TV series, rather than movies. That leads us to question, was MARVEL better on its own?

Of course, we would say, “yes”.

But with how huge Disney has gotten, not to mention the amount of money Disney poured into creating a certain growing behemoth of a streaming service drying up some of our paychecks, we’d just shrug.

Then we would dodge the question and continue with our everyday lives.

Although, some of my friends believe that Disney’s takeover isn’t the real issue.

The Challenges of Ushering in the New Phase

Many people were impressed by Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

I remember the day I was watching Avengers: Endgame and took out my phone just to check the time. I never text or take calls when watching a movie, I only use it to check the time because those were the bygone days before Fitbit and Huawei watches, in which the time could light up. But the guy next to me grunted and gave me the scariest death stare to the point I thought he was going to take my phone and toss it away… just for checking the time!

All that just for checking the time while watching the movie proves that people were extremely hyped for the Avengers series, to the point they were ready to throw hands if someone took out their phone, or even dared to make a sound while breathing.

Compared to the hype MARVEL built up with the older phase of the MCU, as my friend highlighted, the newer ones just could not beat the love it garnered from loyal fans. With that said, will I continue to support MARVEL, waste tens of hours of my life on future MARVEL movies that I will end up grumbling about like a bitter prune to my friends at the end of the day?

Yes, because that’s what it means to be a MARVEL fan.