Some of the recent Marvel news that has been filtering out of Hollywood has made me feel like this is a film series I just don’t want to follow anymore. Combine that with how much I didn’t enjoy the two-part Infinity War and Endgame story, and I was losing interest by the second. I was confident that every single film that went by was getting lower and lower scores from me and that it was all going to hell in a handbasket.

Ready to prove my point, I started to produce a graph showing the downward trend of recent Marvel viewings, but actually it turns out there’s a lot of good in the MCU, it’s just when they gather everyone together that I start to hate it.

Of the recent watches, there was a run of four movies that I scored five out of five, ending with Black Panther. Captain Marvel also was a top score, whilst the Ant-Man sequel was only one off the maximum. However, Avengers: Infinity War scored a 1 / 5 from me, and the big climax of it all, Endgame was only one better with 2 / 5.

So whilst I had been prepared to write a hugely ranting post about how I didn’t want to watch this stupid universe anymore, actually it turns out, I don’t want to watch the Avengers anymore. But the superheroes off on their own? That’s a different matter.

That’s not to say there aren’t still things that are concerning me. Here are a few of them:

Spidey nonsense

I’ve read lots of whys and wherefores and who is to blame and stuff regarding the Disney and Sony split. But it feels like the Marvel universe must be lucrative enough for this to be a deal Disney can make, whilst Sony don’t have quite so many of the cards. So sort it out, Disney people, because Spidey is the best thing to have happened to the MCU in a long time.

What’s after Shield?

The one Marvel property that has really grabbed me and kept my attention throughout is Agents of Shield. Series 5 was exceptional, but I wasn’t surprised that it’s been confirmed the series is to end. It’s the kind of show where they have been upping the stakes each time and eventually you have to draw a line under it – especially as the last series quite literally featured the earth exploded apart.

So I’m okay with it ending, but I’m wondering if there’s going to be any other Marvel TV shows that I can replace it with. I feel like the stories within Endgame would have made an excellent TV show. Going after each stone individually, really revisiting the history and the tension and the stakes, digging into the details. There was a lot of story to tell in that final movie that maybe even three hours wasn’t enough to do it justice.

Just a phase

Now that we’ve broken through the EndGame barrier, I’ve been looking ahead to what the next phase of Marvel movies has in store. Am I crazy or are the upcoming films just not that inspiring? I know I shouldn’t judge too soon because Guardians of the Galaxy sounded crazy and ended up awesome. And Captain Marvel was a delight despite the fact I’d never heard of her before. But what are these others? Already I’m nervous about how many people are in that Eternals film.

X marks the spot

Oh god, are the X-Men really going to join in the fun and games? I can barely cope with these two franchises separately, sprawling and complex and time-travelling as they are. Combining the two is going to be… interesting.

I’m definitely in a bit of a tricky position with the MCU at the moment. They made such a big deal of Endgame being, well, the end of the game, putting a nice full stop after all the films that came before. And I didn’t like it, so it feels like a really natural place to call it a day and move on. But in this day and age, is it even possible to extricate yourself from watching everything that goes on in this universe?

We’ll see!

(Or we won’t see and I’ll just keep watching it all because FOMO.)