MCU

Samir Mehta | May 21, 2022
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Scott Hardie | May 23, 2022
You're certainly not the first person to think so. People have been making this complaint since the MCU's "Phase One," but everybody has a different threshold for how much is too much.

Me, I'm fine with the amount that they're currently producing in terms of keeping pace with it, but not in terms of quality control. I became such an MCU fan over the last decade because they had such a long uninterrupted streak of great entertainment, but that streak has been broken by several disappointing and outright bad titles in the last three years. I'd much rather have quality than quantity. I now look forward to each new title a little bit less than the one before it.

Specifically regarding Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the only two essential titles that it builds upon are Doctor Strange and WandaVision, so it was probably wise to skip it for Heather's sake. It makes passing references to several other MCU titles but there's nothing critical to know.

Have you considered guides online for catching up on shows and movies that you missed? Disney+ has a series called Legends that recaps previous titles when a new one comes out; for instance, a few weeks ago they released little episodes about Stephen Strange, Wong, and Wanda Maximoff. Plus I'm sure there are recaps on YouTube and various websites. I realize that these contain many spoilers by their nature, but if you won't ever have time to catch up on the old content (especially at the rate that more is coming out), it might be the best route.

The MCU Spider-Man films are worth catching up on. You can stream each one on Amazon for a few dollars. (They're coming to Disney+ someday in the future, probably 2023-2024. The contracts between Sony and Disney are weird.)

And if you're looking for a fun multiverse movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once is much better.

Scott Hardie | July 10, 2022
I'm hijacking this discussion to mention that AV Club just published their list of the 100 best Marvel characters in film and television. They predictably focus mostly on the big three series (Sony's Spider-Man, Fox's X-Men, and Marvel's MCU), with little to no mention of outliers like the Fantastic Four films, the Ghost Rider films, the Punisher films, and so on, but it's still an entertaining list and I mostly agree. I will quibble with only two details, that Jessica Jones is the first female lead character in the MCU (Agent Carter would beg to differ), and that Nick Fury has made more appearances than anyone else in the MCU. That may be true of films alone, but if you count television, nobody has made more appearances than Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson. Like four of his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. cast mates, Gregg remained in the primary cast over all 136 episodes, but unlike them, he also showed up in five movies, two short films, and a couple of other TV episodes (in What If...?). The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Phil Coulson *IS* the MCU, and in more ways than just screen appearances: His temperament is of a man just trying to do good in the world despite restless opposition and rapid changes, he tries to keep a sense of humor, he appreciates classics even as he employs the newest flashy tech, and he's got a big soft spot for superheroes and their trading cards. Much has been written (including by me) about how the MCU was built upon a foundation of Robert Downey Jr.'s snarky wit, and that may have felt true of the early years, but by now I think it has come closer to a Coulsonian worldview. And Gregg invented the character! He was just a nameless S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with one line in the original Iron Man screenplay until Gregg kept improvising on set and serving up better ideas for the character, and the filmmakers kept giving him more to do in that and subsequent movies. This is all my long way of saying that Coulson would be #1 if I wrote such a list. :-P