The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had its ups and downs over the years, including some truly terrible sequels. With 2023 being a year notorious for would-be blockbusters flopping hard at the box office, all eyes are on The Marvels to see whether it can pull off the hat trick of taking a somewhat lukewarm origin film in 2019’s Captain Marvel and spin straw into gold for its follow-up. Will the Brie Larson vehicle sink or swim? Only time will tell when the movie eventually comes to theaters on November 11.
For now, let’s take a look at the worst Marvel sequels of all time, and rank them from least to most awful so we can clearly convey the message to Disney about what not to do.
3. Iron Man 2
If 2008’s Iron Man wasn’t a hit out the gate, we might not even have a Marvel Cinematic Universe at all. Luckily — due to Robert Downey Jr.’s considerable charisma, a Batman Begins-style origin story, and steady direction from Jon Favreau — the franchise continued to great success. However, there was a dark time in the early days of the MCU, with Iron Man 2 being a huge culprit for that.
While Tony Stark’s sophomore adventure isn’t totally devoid of entertainment value, it reeks of missed opportunities, especially when it comes to who we thought was supposed to be the main villain in the film. Based on the trailers and the poster for the movie, you would think Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko would be a persistent threat in the story. However, he’s relegated to a pretty cool confrontation at the beginning of the movie on a racetrack and then shoved into a corner for the majority of the runtime until the very end.
When the final confrontation does happen, it’s a CGI-filled mess visually, surrounded by robot drones, and Ivan’s once eye-popping costume where you could see his face is buried underneath yet another pale imitation of an Iron Man suit, just like the first film’s climax. We would’ve much preferred more of Ivan in place of the silly scenes with Don Cheadle’s Rhodey, in which he has a nonsensical fight with his friend, Tony, and Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, who seems about as threatening as a wet paper napkin.
2. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumnia
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania fails in almost everything it sets out to do. Despite giving Jonathan Majors’ Kang a great setup in the first season of Loki as He Who Remains, we get a completely different version of the character in this movie. Since he was defeated by the likes of the decidedly low-power Avenger in the Quantum Realm, he hardly came across as a threat to begin with. However, whatever threat the MCU could have built upon Kang has been lost as other variants will soon replace him, making him a much less memorable antagonist overall than Thanos.
Kang’s lack of menace is only scratching the surface of the film’s problems, though. Quantumania is a visual mess with some awful CGI and looks like a bunch of actors standing in front of a giant LED screen most of the time — because it is. The humor doesn’t land, there’s a convoluted and yet uninteresting plot, and it does the horrible disservice of not featuring one of the previous two movies’ best aspects, Michael Peña’s Luis.
Worst of all, taking the characters who can grow and shrink into a fantastical world completely renders the scale meaningless as we struggle to determine if Paul Rudd’s title hero is supposed to be giant, tiny, or normal in any given scene. Gone is the previous two movie’s most unique aspect: the visual irony and fantastical quality of imagining one’s self as the size of an ant in ordinary settings, like a bathtub or a spinning record.
Dishonorable mentions
Before we get to our number one pick, let’s quickly name some dishonorable mentions that didn’t quite make our list of the “worst” sequels but still disappointed nonetheless. That includes Iron Man 3 for being so close to a perfect Tony Stark adventure if it weren’t for the idiotic plot point of him giving out his address to terrorists and the pointless bait-and-switch of Ben Kingsley’s the Mandarin being an actor instead of the real villain.
Avengers: Age of Ultron‘s biggest sin may simply be that it isn’t as good as the first Avengers. However, the problem goes a bit deeper than that. An A.I. meant to protect the world, but has gone rogue, is a great premise on paper. However, in practice, there wasn’t enough of a motivator for James Spader’s Ultron to turn evil to begin with. It didn’t help that the abstract CGI scene where this happens, in his argument with Paul Bettany’s Jarvis, looked like a messy computer screensaver at best. What’s more, the quippy Joss Whedon dialogue was beginning to wear thin by this point as did the overloading of side characters, such as Vision and Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, as much as we would grow to love both of them down the line.
Thor: Love and Thunder also deserves to get knocked down a peg for not featuring Chris Hemsworth’s titular character teaming up with the Guardians of the Galaxy as what seemed to be promised in Avengers: Endgame, with the team instead being relegated to essentially a single sequence. The film also featured way too many screaming goats, some terrible CGI, an idiotic and goofy god of thunder, and way too much telling instead of showing. With that said, Love and Thunder does have the redeeming qualities of the fine supporting roles of Christian Bale’s Gorr and Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster. Speaking of Thor, it’s time for our number-one pick for the worst Marvel sequel ever.
1. Thor: The Dark World
Even though Thor: The Dark World somehow has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than both Love and Thunder and Quantumania, we easily place it as far and away the worst MCU sequel of all time. The biggest drawback to this film, compared to the others mentioned, is that it is completely unmemorable in every way. At least Quantumania had the unforgettable MODOK in Corey Stoll’s Darren Cross, even if it was cringey. When it comes to Love and Thunder, at least it had an imaginative climax in a shadow world and an excellent villain.
Who was the villain in The Dark World again? Oh, that’s right, it was, um, an abstract red cloud? Wait, that’s just the MacGuffin, isn’t it? Oh, I remember now it’s *checks notes* the Dark Elf Malekith, played by Christopher Eccleston. Oh, but he merges with the red cloud thingy, called the Aether, so maybe that’s also considered the villain too? It doesn’t matter. None of this matters.
The Dark World also suffers from a bland and muddy-looking aesthetic thanks to an over-use of some very ugly CGI that looks like the epitome of the worst PlayStation 3 shooters available. The “dark and gritty” tone of the movie, overall, does not improve the entertainment value of the movie, either.
The humor that just barely worked in the first movie thanks to its fish-out-of-water plot of an almost Shakespearean-type character in the modern world is also completely gone in The Dark World. Instead, most attempts at generating laughs are done through Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis, but they almost always fall flat, likely through no fault of the actress herself, who we adore.