I’m not a big marvel guy, but I really enjoyed the discussion of the state of the MCU in this recent crate and crowbar episode: https://pca.st/episode/3c2a02ab-8228-4bf8-976d-b7a964074bcf
I really enjoyed She-Hulk, but I think it works better if you expect it to be a comedy and not a superhero show (or a courtroom drama).
That said, you should at least watch episode 4. If that one doesn’t work for you, then yeah, you can probably stop there.
Films:
Black Widow (2021) - 6/10 - Dull story but was saved by the charisma of its 2 female leads
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) - 6.5/10 - Some great fight scenes (the bus!), 2nd half dragged a bit
Eternals (2021) - 4.5/10 - Forgettable but inoffensive
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - 5.5/10 - A bit overstuffed and I prefer Andrew Garfield as Spidey
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) - 7.5/10 - Best movie of phase 4, a lot of fun
Thor Love and Thunder (2022) - 5/10 - Disappointing and felt strangely rushed, especially some of the effects shots
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) NA - Not watched yet
TV Shows:
Wandavision (2021) - 3/10 - Bored me to tears
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (2021) - 4/10 - Only marginally better
Loki (2021) - 7/10 - Really enjoyed this but the last 20 mins felt a bit weak, almost like the ending was tacked on
What If… (2021) - NA - Not fully watched yet
Hawkeye (2021) - 8/10 - Best of Phase 4 for me. Hailee Steinfeld was a delight.
Moon Knight (2022) - 4/10 - Great first episode but went rapidly downhill
Ms Marvel (2022) - NA - Not watched
She-Hulk (2022) - NA - Not watched
Hawkeye ended the best part of MCU phase 4 for me, which a 2019 me would find totally crazy given how dismal the concept sounds. A full TV series of the most boring Avenger, wtf? But it felt like the only thing they did where they actually got both the concept, characters and execution right.
- Hawkeye
- Spider-Man: No Way Home
- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
- Loki
- Thor: Love and Thunder
- What If…?
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
- Black Widow
- Ms. Marvel
- Eternals
- She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
- Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
- WandaVision
Didn’t watch:
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
- Moon Knight
- Werewolf By Night
This is my issue. The movies were driving the shows initially but they shifted at some point. This strategy works better for Star Wars but that’s prolly because the movies kinda suck.
Spider-Man: No Way Home – I didn’t really expect this to top the list, but I guess it does; good plot, nice set pieces, excellent acting.
WandaVision – Olsen’s acting is awesome; Kat Dennings and Kathryn Hahn doing comic relief; a decent puzzle box; it was just good Marvel stuff.
Loki – Hiddleston elevates this, and it had a lot of fairly major stakes, which isn’t always great, but really worked here.
Hawkeye – Renner was good, and everything was fairly low stakes, which isn’t always great, but really worked here.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law – Liked the humor, loved the actors, liked the sitcom format. Plus my wife loved it, and I like watching TV with her.
Ms. Marvel – The plot wasn’t great in the middle, but otherwise it was a great ride. The occasional innovative directing helped a lot. And Vellani was just infectious.
Moon Knight – Despite me really liking it when it was on, and Oscar Isaac’s great acting, this hasn’t aged as well for me as some of the other shows. I still think it’s strong.
What If…? – Some episodes were great, some were kind of weak. More good than bad.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – I like Rami so I generally liked this, but I still don’t like how they kind of erased WandaVision’s character growth.
Werewolf By Night – Inoffensive and fine; a fun hour’s viewing.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings – Great martial arts scenes here and there, but the end was just a typical Marvel hairball of CGI.
Eternals – I wish they had done this as a D+ series so we could have gotten to know the characters.
Black Widow – A stupid plot that the otherwise great acting team couldn’t quite rescue.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – Haven’t seen it, but my wife didn’t care for it.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – Completely bounced off of this after a couple episodes; pity.
Thor: Love and Thunder – The more I think about this movie, the more angry I get.
Dug the episode, thanks. Their accents make for easy listening, too. I’ll be checking out their back catalog.
Who doesn’t love a tier list:
Tier 1 (All TV shows! I’m very impressed by how they’ve managed Disney+)
WandaVision
Hawkeye
Ms. Marvel
Tier 2 (more very good TV and some fun movies)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Moon Knight
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Loki
Tier 3 (some of these are just good - Werewolf, She-Hulk, Black Widow - and others are a mixed bag of great and middling - Doctor Strange, Falcon)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Falcon and the Winter Soldier
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Werewolf by Night
Black Widow
Tier 4 (I enjoyed these, but don’t see myself revisiting them)
What If…?
Thor: Love and Thunder
Eternals
Special shout-outs
Marvel Legends - just clip shows, but very well edited clip shows
Marvel Assembled - sure, it’s just bog-standard “making of” shows, but I enjoy them nonetheless
You just summarized phase 4 for me. I’m not a big fan of the MCU in general though - I’m interested enough to watch most of the movies/ TV shows (though it may take me a long time to get around to 'em), but I don’t have the comics background to appreciate all the ins and outs. I was a HUGE fan of a bunch of the older animated content way back when, though: X-Men: The Animated Series was a huge draw. Without knowing the comic books, I’m probably missing whole layers of allusions (mephisto?!?) that others have talked about in the relevant threads.
There are individual episodes of some of the shows that I have absolutely loved - a few of the Moon Knight episodes were quite good, some of Loki was really great, loved some of WandaVision (the middle episodes, oddly enough), some episodes of What If were great, loved the first 2 episodes of Ms Marvel. None of the shows was consistently great though, and most shows had some pretty meh episodes, so the average was “fine.”
There’s nothing like the Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy movies that I thought were really great.
I enjoyed all of Phase 4, but it was pretty much all worse than Phase 3.
The best:
What If?
The worst:
Dr. Strange
Now they will have time to finish rounding out that Ant-Man character. :)
A quick recap for context. I flip-flopped a few times before committing to how I would grade these and decided to go with trying to judge each phase holistically. Meaning if you gave each film a score from 1-10, the score for a phase would not be the sum of those scores, because even a phase with my favorite individual films is going to be judged harshly if it doesn’t come together (this sentence brought to you by phase two). But there’s not a right or wrong way to answer the question, and I’m sure I still don’t even perfectly follow my own standard.
Phase One (wikipedia):
A solid lineup of individual films capped off with The Avengers, which remains an amazing accomplishment. It pulled together everyone that had been introduced, though it was using the characters as building blocks moreso than any narrative setup in previous films. Iron Man 2 is the only real “sequel” here, and it’s the dud for me personally but I don’t think that was because it was a sequel, just personal preference. The point is nothing in this phase is building on anything else until The Avengers closes it with a bang.
Grade: A, even the generally poorly regarded Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2 can’t undermine that this all comes together in an amazing accomplishment that’s also one of the MCU’s best ensemble films.
Phase Two (wikipedia):
Another solid lineup, and we can see the formula start to change as we open with three direct sequels. But despite more direct sequels, the “connectedness” of the phase is still a lot like phase one: films that don’t affect each other, and then an Avengers movie that pulls in our familiar characters. With the benefit of hindsight, there’s more here that will eventually connect to Thanos and the Infinity Stones than in phase one, but within this phase it still doesn’t change much. It’s still not driving the narrative within the phase. Before we get to Age of Ultron, phase two also brought us Guardians of the Galaxy, which I think was rightly seen at the time as a big test: even Iron Man wasn’t really a household name before the MCU, but the Guardians were the first move outside of the now proven hits of phase one into even lesser known characters, and without the hook of any immediate connection to what came before. They nailed it, it was a highlight of phase two, and then Age of Ultron is just…average. At the time it was a disappointment, and even if I judge it more charitably now by giving it credit it doesn’t deserve just because it establishes new characters that go on to do cool things, it’s still a disappointment compared to any other film with “Avengers” in its name. Ant-Man is the last film of this phase, and it’s good, but if we’re holding to the phase structure strictly, it’s a footnote in significance regardless of quality.
Grade: B-, a phase with literally my favorite MCU films ends in disappointment.
Phase Three (wikipedia):
Absolutely the outlier in its structure. Phase three connects. Civil War opens with an Avengers film in everything but name, and it directly sets up Spider-Man: Homecoming and Black Panther. There’s more “cross-casting” here than anything we’ve seen so far with Stark playing a major role in Homecoming and Hulk being a big part of Ragnarok. Even the epilogue Far From Home is exploring the fallout of this phase, in contrast to the way phase two’s Ant-Man was just doing its own thing. And I don’t know what else to say about Infinity War and Endgame that hasn’t already been said; it’s Avengers all over again in the sense that it’s both an amazing accomplishment and an amazing result, but even moreso than before in both regard.
Grade: A+, I don’t expect the MCU will ever top the one-two punch of Infinity War and Endgame, and even the weaker films here are generally stronger than the misses elsewhere.
Phase Four (wikipedia):
All of that context above was important for me in thinking about phase four. The films (and television!) don’t connect to each other, but it’s more complicated than that. Phase one and two didn’t really connect internally either, they simply pulled together an ensemble at the end for a new adventure. So is it important that Shang-Chi doesn’t show up in Multiverse of Madness? Of course not. Does it even matter that Shang-Chi has no “multiversal” component? Nope!
But does it matter that there’s not at least a big ensemble event at the end? Yeah, that kinda hurts. These characters don’t need to be working alongside each other from film to film, every phase can’t be phase three, but there’s so much potential when you do get these team-ups and crossovers that it’s really obvious something’s missing when that doesn’t happen at all.
Meanwhile, the multiverse itself is a problem. Not just because it doesn’t tie the films together, but because it actually makes them feel even less connected when Loki, No Way Home, and Multiverse of Madness all seem to be playing by very different rules (to say nothing of reconciling them to the glossed over explanation in Endgame). It’s a little weird that the look of Thanos is still evolving in each of his first appearances as they improved his design and cast Josh Brolin, but it’s nothing like this. Maybe by the end of the Multiverse Saga (phases 4-6) we’ll look back and understand “Oh, Loki had it right, just try not to think about No Way Home” or something, I don’t know. But it’s a mess.
Television is a whole new angle in this phase. I like it. I think they might be trying to do too much too fast–I don’t think I would’ve been disappointed with one fewer shows each year–but I think it mostly works. I can imagine more and more of the new character introductions starting here, with sequels and crossovers moving to film. I’m convinced that would’ve improved Wakanda Forever specifically; I haven’t talked about that movie much in its own thread but Ironheart should’ve been cut entirely. I can pretty easily imagine an earlier draft of the script where Lake Bell’s military-sciencey character hit the same plot beats the movie needed (essentially: get kidnapped) without any of the other detours that dragged the movie down. Or maybe TV is just as connected and load-bearing for the overall state of the MCU later, who knows?
With all of that said, phase four undoubtedly has many of my least favorite MCU films, and as much as I’m treating these phases as a single work to be judged, when there’s no real connection there, the individual quality of the parts matters more.
Grade: C-, for two and a half good movies, some fun experimentation in television, and nothing to bring it all together or elevate the weaker pieces.
Because we like ranking things too, but because I can’t imagine trying to rank movies and shows together, films best to worst:
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
- the nebulous “good/bad” divide -
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Eternals
Thor: Love and Thunder
Black Widow
TV best to worst:
Loki
WandaVision
Hawkeye
What If…?
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Moon Knight
Ms. Marvel
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
- the nebulous “good/bad” divide, by which I mean all of the shows are basically good in some way -
100% agreed. I wrote the same thing in that movie’s thread.
I’ll third that statement.
I’m not sure how much the individual stories really need to be connected, given that Phases 1, 2, and 4 aren’t very connected. Phase Three makes a good argument about why connections work, but I really feel like the strength of the MCU is that you have good individual stories that make you care about the characters on their own. Then when you throw them together, it’s more satisfying.
I’ve always disagreed with this characterization, because I feel like Avengers movies should be about the heroes fighting against a common enemy. In Civil War, the only time Iron Man suits up is when he’s fighting the other team members. That doesn’t feel like an Avengers movie to me.
Just read the OP, still working on the rest of the thread. Guy in the second linked video ranks Phase 4 and starts off by saying “I know a lot of people are going to take exception to ranking She-Hulk at the bottom of this list…” Yeah, dude, no sale. Done with your video. No interest in anything you have to say ever. It’s not like She-Hulk was the best thing in Phase 4 but with all the stinkers in Phase 4 to single that out, well fuck you commenter guy.
If your contention is that Dan Murrell is some anti-feminist chud, you’re way off-base. He explains repeatedly that he didn’t like the show because that style of humor didn’t appeal to him.
Nope, my contention is that putting She Hulk at the bottom of the list when there are at least half a dozen more contenders for that slot is a sign that his ranking is way off base. That’s the danger with rankings - you get one really wrong and you turn off the viewers hard, which is what happened for me.
The next linked video after that, which I think was IGN, seemed to be much close to my own rankings.
Ah, okay. Fair enough. Your post just seemed like you were jumping to the conclusion that Murrell was one of the “M-SHE-U” hater idiots on YT.
There’s literally zero text in my post that says anything like that. I said “no sale” to his placing She Hulk on the bottom of the list. Please note, if I had something political to say I would have said it.