Marvel Phase 4 has wrapped and I think it’s time to look back and discuss the impact, quality, favorites, hated bits, and anything else we want. Also, let’s get those rankings!
This discussion is going to be chock full of spoilers, so don’t read on unless you’re all caught up.
I’ll kick it off by saying that The Eternals was the biggest miss for me, while WandaVision was the highlight. Chloe Zhao’s movie was gorgeous but the story would’ve worked better as a Disney+ show. WandaVision was delightful and only got better on a re-watch to me.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness gets a special mention because of how it tickled me to watch Raimi blow a ton of Marvel money to make an Evil Dead movie. I’m not sure it was a good movie on its own, and I’ll never not be bitter about how Wanda’s character regressed so hard from WandaVision, but man was it fun.
Keep in mind that despite Marvel’s early announcements, Ironheart, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, and Secret Invasion did not make it into Phase 4. They were moved to Phase 5.
Wow. I find the pace of these movies exhausting and I knew I had fallen behind but I haven’t seen the last 5 (!) Marvel movies yet. I suppose I shouldn’t count Black Panther WF as ‘haven’t seen’ since it just came out but I doubt I’ll see it in the theater.
Are there a lot more folks like me who have grown weary of it all? Or is the box office still holding strong for Marvel?
I’d give both Black Widow and Shang-Chi a B-.
I tried a Marvel streaming show this year for the first time and made it halfway through She-Hulk. It’s… fine.
Woah. You picked the worst one. Seriously, give Loki a try. I found it really charming, especially as it gets farther in. And Hawkeye is also really cute and amusing and just heartwarming.
I haven’t tried Ms Marvel yet. The biggest problem with them is that they start strong and then have poor endings that make them feel like a waste of time. That’s how I felt about Wandavision, Falcon & the Winter Soldier, Moon Knight.
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Loki season 1
Hawkeye
Thor: Love and Thunder
Moon Knight
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Ms Marvel
Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Werewolf by Night
What If…?
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
Black Widow
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Eternals
WandaVision
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Worst
Wow I guess I liked the shows more than the movies. I liked most of the movies, but I didn’t love any of them, except maybe Spider-Man. The shows were mostly pretty fun, especially Loki, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Hawkeye. The whole “recapitulation of the history of sit-coms” thing in WandaVision didn’t work for me.
I expect “Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special” will probably be #1 once I’ve seen it. I’m old enough to have seen the Star Wars Holiday Special on broadcast TV when it first came out, and I expect this to make merciless fun of it.
From a strategic media perspective, I thought it was a disaster and probably a factor in the Disney executive drama. Audiences do not feel like they’re pulling the bigger story towards anything in particular, and they are also not getting enough of the super awesome standalone spectacles they want. Phase Five will have to do heavy lifting with Ant-Man, etc. It did help get D+ off the ground but I would give more credit to The Mandalorian than all of the Marvel shows combined.
I did enjoy many of the individual movies/shows though. The movies were better than the shows, overall, but the shows felt fresher. It was fun to see Shang-Chi, Eternals and Spider-Man all in one year and it felt promising. But 2022 felt tired to me with the three relatively by-the-book sequels to Doctor Strange, Thor and Black Panther, even though each one of them did try to push Marvel films further in some direction.
I think I picked She-Hulk because the episodes were shorter. Aren’t all those other shows around an hour long? I’m sorta curious but I think we’re about to drop Disney+ due to the price hike.
It definitely did, at least, we have pretty strong indications that the contractual kerfuffle between Disney and Scarlett Johansson kicked off some really uncomfortable discussions within the leadership cells that drove early chatter about getting Chapek out. Disney’s fortune’s are firmly tied to their creative partnerships and once you endanger that link, things become dicey.
Here’s my ranking list with best on top, worst on the bottom:
WandaVision
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Loki season 1
Moon Knight
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Hawkeye
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Ms Marvel
Werewolf by Night
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Black Widow
Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Thor: Love and Thunder
What If…?
Eternals
If I’m honest, everything from Hawkeye to Shang-Chi is largely interchangeable in ranking to me. Phase 4 for me was mostly just kind of okay and inoffensive.
I’d say the characteristic quality of Phase 4, relative to previous phases, has been aimlessness.
There have been a number of good movies and shows–I would put Shang-Chi and She-Hulk at the top of those lists, with nods to Loki and Moon Knight–but little sense of where it’s all heading narratively, and some incoherency in the world-building of overarching concepts like the multiverse. It makes it hard to anticipate some big Avengers-like team-up or Thanos-like cosmic struggle in the future, although clearly they’re heading toward something (or several somethings?) like that.
I think Marvel has also clearly let Disney’s Disney+ strategy drive what they’re doing creatively, and that predictably hasn’t been all good. Several of the shows would have been better as movies, I think, and with stronger hands on the creative reins. COVID clearly had a quality impact as well (see the end of the otherwise great WandaVision), which of course is not their fault.
Very little from Phase 4 compels me to rewatch it, which I think says a lot. I’ve returned to Avengers and Iron Man 3 and Dr Strange 1 several times. The tv shows are too uneven in quality to be worth the time and the films too insubstantial.
If I were to rank stuff, it’d be:
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Moon Knight
Loki
WandaVision
Hawkeye
Thor: Love and Thunder
Eternals
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Black Widow
Ms Marvel
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Didn’t see all of:
What If…?
Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Haven’t seen at all:
Werewolf by Night
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
I’m not really big on rankings, but if I had to divide the Phase 4 movies and shows into tiers:
Tier 1 movies:
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Tier 2 Movies:
Black Widow
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Tier 3 Movies:
Eternals (sorry Tom!)
Thor: Love and Thunder
Tier 1 Shows:
WandaVision
Loki
What If…?
Hawkeye
Ms. Marvel
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Tier 2 Shows:
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Moon Knight
Werewolf By Night
I really enjoyed all the shows. There aren’t any I would put into Tier 3.
I’m definitely not the first to say this, but back when Marvel was building up to Infinity War and Endgame, a big complaint was, “Why does everything have to be part of this big overarching story?? Marvel should get back to telling individual stories that don’t have to all tie together!” And then in Phase 4 they went back to telling self-contained individual stories (Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel, Eternals, Moon Knight, She-Hulk), and the big complaint is that there’s no clear indication of what the big team-up will be. I’m not saying either take is right or wrong, but the shift is interesting to me.
Maybe you’re right. I think the stuff that is more standalone is more successful, and maybe that’s not a coincidence. At the same time, in pretty much every one of the P4 shows I can’t not see the attempts at putting puzzle pieces in place for… something. That was happening in the Avengers saga too, but somehow it was exciting and not off-putting.
Maybe the end-credit scenes are partly to blame in P4. They are almost all of the “sudden arrival of a character you don’t know saying or doing something mysterious!” flavor, and it’s frustratingly meaningless. Compare with early Avengers, where most of them were “Nick Fury shows up and says ‘Avenger Initiative’” or, later, “Indications that Thanos is pulling all the strings.”
I’m learning from this thread that She-Hulk was good for some here? Maybe I should watch past the third episode after all? I gave up because it seemed like a comedy that wasn’t actually funny.
It’s basically good because Tatiana Maslany is in it. If you didn’t like the first 3 episodes, there’s no reason to continue.
Also, regarding post-credits scenes: in the past, I’ve pushed back on the idea that they’re all “hey, look at this new character you’ve never heard of”. But… yeah, now they kind of are. Plus the end scenes of Wakanda Forever and She-Hulk are exactly the same which really cheesed me off.
