The knives have been out for the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the beginning of the Infinity Saga, and they’re only going to keep getting sharper if the franchise continues churning out its weakest content as seems to have been the case recently.
All of the superhero sandbox’s worst-reviewed film and television titles have premiered after Avengers: Endgame, with Secret Invasion one of the lowest-rated entries in the history of the entire comic book genre on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating that something really needs to change in order to stem the tide of apathy.
On the plus side, the cast and crew are still having a great time making them, with Anthony Mackie comparing his decade-long tenure as Sam Wilson as being akin to a summer camp in an interview with The Wrap, when he gathers with all of his familiar MCU faces both in front of and behind the camera.
“These Marvel movies have kind of turned into summer camp. You go to set and there’s people that you’ve known for 10, 12 years now that you’ve worked with and got to know and people have kids and people get divorced and people buy homes. So it’s like going back to see your old friends. So it was really easy,” he explained. “At no point in time did I feel like it was a different experience from any of the other Marvel movies I’ve done. It was just a great experience, you can only go down from here.”
From an audience perspective, the difference is that summer camp is supposed to be fun, and there hasn’t been a lot of that throughout Phase Five so far. Maybe it’ll change as the next stage of storytelling moves forward, but if it doesn’t then there’s going to be even more unhappy customers who won’t exactly be comparing the MCU to their fond childhood memories.