All right, I admit it, "missed" is probably the wrong word in this context. Because I did actually watch all of them; I'm fully caught up on the movies (not the TV shows, and frankly I don't think I will ever bother to catch up on those again), I just didn't actually watch any of them in theaters. This is in part due to theaters just getting wildly expensive over the past severals of years, but it also can't be understated just how much I do not care about the MCU anymore.
Like, man, this crap used to be a huge cultural event, every single release, even when they were comparatively mediocre films. But the whole franchise has felt way too bloated and directionless since the end of the infinity saga to hold my attention. There have been some excellent releases, no doubt, but these days I only get excited for the movies on an individual basis, and nothing I saw in the lead-up to any of these films made me excited.
So I watched them all at home. I'm shoving all the reviews into this one post entirely so I can update the links on this ranking. If you wound up here looking for a specific review from that ranking, just scroll until you hit the relevant heading below.
Oh, also, uh... happy New Years I guess. 2026 has really been a gas, hasn't it? Just, good Lord... the fuel prices are finally coming back down, but now the entire west is on fire.
The Marvels
So. Hot take, I liked Captain Marvel, and I respected the Ms Marvel tv show. Less hot of a take, I loved Wandavision and I liked Monica Rambeau in it. So tossing out the concept of a movie that brings those three characters together in a cosmic Marvel adventure would be the sort of thing that would get my attention. A little bit like fishing for my views with a little bag of jelly beans; not exactly a mouth-watering premise, but certainly the sort of thing that would get me to sit up and take notice.
The best thing I can say about The Marvels is that it did make me laugh at least, like three times. Maybe even four.
Which is better than some of the Phase 4 and 5 MCU movies! And by some I mean one. And by one I mean Quantumania, just so we're clear on the territory we're playing in. The Marvels is bloated and confusing, with no clear character motives for the characters that ostensibly have motives and a shocking number of named characters that have no motives, but rather are just sorta farting around wherever the movie's central conflict happens to push them. Not believing for a second the villain's stated purpose for doing the things they're doing is bad; not feeling like two out of the three named Marvel's have any agency in their own movie is so much worse.
And my implying that Carol is the only one of the three Marvels that has a character arc is generous. I think it's more accurate to say that I think she's the only one who's supposed to have a character arc, but what that arc was intended to be is completely beyond me. The movie feels more like a series of disconnected vignettes than an actual movie, and the script makes it pretty clear to me that the writers felt pretty much the same way by the end. The dialogue pass of the script that was responsible for the majority of the action scenes after about the midpoint was absolutely diabolical. Because nothing really sucks me, as a viewer, into a cinema experience quite like the character on screen narrating the actions I can clearly see happening to another character off screen who can also see those very same actions without the aid of narration. It's every bit as engaging as a white-noise generator and definitely doesn't make me wish I were doing literally anything else with my time.
That was sarcasm, in case you were confused. Does it seem redundant that I’m calling that out? Now you know exactly what it feels like to watch this movie.
I will entertain the argument that some of that is down to studio demands that the film be made more "second screen appropriate" following initial screenings, because that is exactly the kind of idiocy we find in Hollywood these days, but I think there's a very strong counter argument to be made in favor of the writers using that dialogue to try and figure out where the heck the story was supposed to be going from one scene to the next, which is fine in a first draft, but horrifying in a finished film from a major production studio.
And so, with my entire viewing experience vacillating wildly between so bored I was falling asleep and so annoyed with the dialogue I was grinding my teeth (and a few brief detours into secondhand embarrassment so potent that I stood up and left the room for a minute or two), it's fair to say that I thought The Marvels was bad.
Which would make me sad if I could work up enough emotion around the MCU to care at this point.
Deadpool & Wolverine
It is wild to me that this movie, which in my overall rankings lands pretty close to the middle of the pack, is so much better and more memorable than most everything else Marvel has produced in the past few years. In terms of entertainment value it does pretty well, though there are certainly some quality issues and it relies very heavily on the nostalgia of the viewer to carry it. That makes it easily the worst Deadpool movie so far, but wow was it ever better than The Marvels!
I'm never going to be mad about this iteration of Wade Wilson. Some actors were born to play a roll, and Ryan Reynolds just does such a great job of playing Wade. I have always also been a huge fan of Jackman's Wolverine, though I consider his performance to be slightly less iconic and this movie treated us to a momentary glimpse of a Henry Cavill version of the character that was as excellent as it was funny.
Dude's too tall to play Logan, though. Even Jackman is a little tall for my 90's X-Men animated cartoon tastes. Did you hear the rumors of Daniel Radcliff being in the running to play Wolverine for Marvel? Because I would kill to see that casting in action.
So going in the movie was off to a good start. They're not trying to jump the banks on this river, either, the whole thing plays out pretty much just like the other Deadpool movies, though with a heightened reliance on viewer nostalgia, though I suppose that's understandable given that they knew from the beginning that this was going to be as close as the Fox X-Men movies ever got to a proper sendoff. Of course the vast majority of the movie's appeal relies on humor, this is to be expected from both modern MCU films and Deadpool as a character. It's good, then, that the vast majority of the jokes land pretty well! Lots of self-reference, lots of 4th-wall breaking, plenty of camera nods, and I laughed genuinely at most of it.
The other headwater of the Deadpool formula is, of course, action, which is frequently also played for comedy so maybe these are less separate tributaries than they are a couple of springs that're fed from the same aquifer.
Sorry, for some reason water's been on the brain a lot lately.
The action in this is... fine. Nothing really stands out for me aside from a couple of flawlessly choreographed walk-outs (always emphasizing the nostalgia, of course). But it's all serviceable, doesn't overstay its welcome for the most part, and generally speaking the only complaint I had about the action was that the CG does, often, feel pretty bad. Not that the rendering is poor, or the animation particularly egregious, or anything. More that there are a number of lengthy sequences that are clearly CG, that feel very animated, but are trying to pretend they're real instead of just owning the animation.
Super-real-feeling action is great. Super-stylized animated action is also great. This sits in the pit right between those two a lot of the time.
But that's my main complaint. Otherwise the movie is funny, pays a lot of respect to a lot of movies I enjoyed when I was younger, and delivered an experience I was genuinely very happy to sit and watch. It is a perfectly serviceable action-blockbuster to throw up on a big screen in a dark room with big speakers and eat a bucket of popcorn to. I had fun watching it.
I do not take that for granted in this day and age.
Captain America: Brave New World
Okay, look. I'm of two very different minds about this movie. With my personal background, having watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier and generally being a huge fan of the character work that's been done for Sam Wilson, there are a lot of moments in this movie that I liked. Quieter, personal moments, most of them. Or... well, pretty much all of them. But then there's the side of me that becomes absolutely incandescent with rage the instant I feel like the movie is trying to condescend to me. You want to lose me as a viewer almost instantly? Treat me like I'm brainless. A couple of good examples for you; Cocomelon, and the fight scenes in Brave New World.
Remember how I complained about characters in The Marvels narrating the scene as if it were a radio show during most of the action sequences? Yeah that, except, like, a thousand times more annoying. What makes it worse is that, like I said above, in The Marvels I can buy that they were doing that because the movie didn't make sense and they were trying to make it make sense. In Brave New World, there's nothing complicated going on here. There's no shocking twist we have to set up like The Winter Soldier. There's not even a red herring to set up like in Civil War. Brave New World is not complicated. It is, in fact, very simple to follow, and absolutely did not need Sam Wilson ASMR-ing the movements of a plane to me that I could 100% see and which 100% could have been followed by the radar techs of the ships on the ground.
This is a classic case of making a movie "second screen" ready, and if we could just have all the studios slap that phrase onto their marketing for their movies like it's a good thing going forward that'd be great. Two simple words to let me know I can just not waste my time.
Which is a shame, because like I said there were parts of this movie I liked. Harrison Ford is a good recasting of Thunderbolt Ross, I liked him. Sam's character had a good little arc. And I mean little, it was more like a character bump, but it was there, and given *gestures widely at entertainment as a whole* it was nice to see at least that. I like Torres as the new Falcon, it's fun to hold him up against where Sam was when he was introduced back in Winter Soldier versus where he is now as Cap.
Oh, and the Red Hulk CG was honestly pretty solid!
But yeah, I was also frequently bored with how transparent the plot was and angered by how the movie felt like it had to over-explain its transparent plot to me, so this still ranks very, very low for me.
Thunderbolts*
Okay, hang on... we're going to have to come back to this one.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Stylistically this movie is great. And as much as I hate to say it, that places it pretty much in a class of its own in the MCU anymore. Oh, I suppose there was a time when I would have said Iron Man, Thor, or Guardians of the Galaxy were super stylized, or at least very stylistically distinct, but what they introduced has since been diluted out into the rest of the MCU pretty uniformly, and from thence into the rest of Hollywood as a whole, which has rendered them... less, somehow, in hindsight.
But the retro-futurism 50's style of First Steps is excellent and feels like a huge breath of fresh air. It's like a cross between the Jetsons and that Tomorrowland movie that none of you watched, and I am 1000% here for it. There's something just so satisfying about movie characters interacting with technology using buttons, switches, and dials, and looking at actual screens that actually work as screens instead of waving their hands vaguely at a see-through projection of green or blue light that would, in practice, be the most frustrating user experience I can actually conceive of.
Because let's be honest, to some level we all wish we could go back to buttons and switches. It may not be practical, but it's so much more satisfying. Even if you account for practicality the most accurate version of future computers was Star Trek The Next Generation's LCARs system introduced back in 1987, and the ever-forward march of technology since then has done nothing but prove me right. Tony Stark's holographic projection you wave your hands at and all the nonsense that depiction has spawned is stupid.
I will die on this hill.
So massive kudos to the art direction of this film, as well as all the set and costume designers and builders that realized it. You did amazing work, it looks great on the screen, and it elevated this movie a whole ton.
So yes, I am also a little disappointed to follow that up by saying that the movie is... fine. And I mean that in a positive way, I swear. It's not bad! There are absolutely things to like! Yes, besides the art direction. The acting, for instance, is pretty good. Everyone showed up for work and put in a solid effort, and these are talented people, so that results in a solid result. The CG folks also did a great job with a lot of stuff, particularly the solid-body objects, they looked great. And shout-out to whoever it was that managed the scaling of Galactus, that was honestly a way better depiction of him on the big screen than I was expecting.
I also really enjoyed the underlying themes of family that run through the story, it's lovely to see someone write a story about family with so much positive messaging and then manage to avoid turning it into a meme.
Vin.
But, y'know... it's not perfect. There are some bits where the CG kinda falls apart. Weirdly it was the Thing that kinda fell short for me most often. The story isn't complicated, and in fact falls into the realms of being a basic fairy-tale more than a few times, which isn't necessarily bad, but, well, it can make the characters feel kinda stupid at times. Like, you had to have everyone be aware that Galactus was looking for the Richard's kid, in order to justify the incredibly sappy speech later on, but... they found that out from Reed? Who just said it? Out loud on a live broadcast? Speaking as a parent, that's stupid. Grade-A idiot behavior from supposedly the smartest man on the planet. That broadcast should have consisted of a single statement; "Yep, he wants to eat the planet, no, he wouldn't negotiate with us, no, there was nothing we could have done to stop him." Not actually a lie, because as established he would not have given up his kid like that, so therefore there wasn't anything they could have done.
Also, the pacing of the movie is weird. I don't mind a movie that is breathlessly paced, but First Steps doesn't feel like it's breathlessly paced. It just... jumps randomly every now and then, making you feel like you missed something, even if you absolutely did not. This felt like a purely editing-room issue, like they'd just cut some short scenes that had been determined to be unnecessary, but then didn't really handle the new transition very well. Which, like... the movie wasn't that long. I feel like some transitional scenes really would have been nice.
In the end the movie is good. I enjoyed watching it, because it was very nice to look at, but I'm not sure I'll watch it again anytime soon, because it takes way less time to just look at some pictures of the set.
*Thunderbolts
Okay, this one. This one here made me laugh a lot, had me at the edge of my seat multiple times, and then made me cry at the end. In terms of outright quality there are some shortcomings but as a package this is a top 5 MCU movie for me. Technically number 5 so its grip on that praise may be slightly tenuous, but this was so much better than I thought it would be and I enjoyed it so much more than I expected going in that I was genuinely sad, after the fact, that I didn't go support it in theaters.
First up, let’s address the humor. Because this is an MCU film all of the dialogue has that signature MCU wit, which is to say nobody can ever take anything seriously and the tension must be constantly broken by quips because for some reason every studio exec and screenwriter in the world took the wrong lesson away from the success of The Avengers. But here’s the actual rub; in Thunderbolts, that style of humor actually makes sense. Because your main characters are all broken people. Mentally just in tatters right from the drop. The movie’s central character arcs are all based around them finding some semblance of healing together, but that’s just progress. Anyone who’s been really depressed knows that doesn’t go away after one conversation and a good hug and cry. And if you’ve ever hung out with a group of chronically depressed people and had a serious conversation, you’ll probably recognize where the humor in Thunderbolts is coming from.
It’s a pretty dark place, I’ll grant you, and I can see where it would come of as being unserious about something that should be taken seriously, but at least from my couch it just made the characters feel more real.
The only character that comes into this story feeling like they’ve already made some progress on their mental health journey is Bucky, and that feels both so right and so satisfying given his past in the MCU that he almost steals the movie entirely, from a character perspective. That said, I watched this movie for Yelena and Red Guardian, who combined were the best part of Black Widow, and I was not disappointed. Yelena is such a strong character, has such an amazing arc, and is also so hilarious and fun to watch. It’s the full package, and everything about Red Guardian as her pseudo-estranged but so motivated-to-be-helpful father is just *chef’s kiss* perfect. I also really connected with the conflict John Walker was going through, and thought he did a good job of expressing it, though his resolution was a little more vague, and I absolutely loved the way they handled both the character of Bob, along with his central arc and resolution, and the Sentry, both in normal and void forms.
That ties nicely in with the rest of the production, which I thought was quite good. Nothing was particularly standout, for the most part it just played as a competent action film, but it was all high quality and nothing really threw me out of the experience. I will say that the way they presented and visualized the darkness of the void was inspired. Genuinely one of the most unsettling things in any Marvel movie, and while it maybe felt like a bit of a cop-out to not make the effects of it permanent I don’t bear them any ill will over it.
So as a whole the movie was just excellent. I loved it. I will be happily watching it again and again. I obviously came into the movie with a whole bunch of background that helped me connect with the characters right away, but honestly I think it stands on its own pretty well also. Which is rare in the MCU these days.
So there. I’m caught up now. Doomsday is going to come out sometime this winter, and I am not looking forward to it in any capacity. But if nothing else I am looking forward to it being in the past, because hopefully then Marvel will stop leaning on nostalgia for 2012 and actually try an innovate or something.
Probably a vain hope, but thanks to Thunderbolts I remain hopeful none the less.
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