The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the biggest and most successful franchise in existence, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Since it first began in 2008 with Iron Man, the MCU has grown exponentially, consistently adding new heroes and exploring their stories, while always tying things back to larger-scale team-up movies involving bigger threats. This formula has helped the franchise achieve massive global success, with the movies of the MCU some of the highest-earning and most talked-about titles of any given year’s release slate. However, recent years have seen Marvel make a few missteps with the franchise, for which the MCU has somewhat suffered.
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The recent mistakes of the MCU might seem to be limited to solely the Multiverse Saga, but that simply isn’t true. Even before the epic events of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel had begun to make occasional errors that laid a shaky foundation for the MCU’s Multiverse Saga. Though the past 10 years have seen some of the MCU’s most successful movies, they have also seen the franchise make some glaring mistakes, too.
10) Ignoring The Sokovia Accords
There are a few things that still don’t make sense about Captain America: Civil War, and the Sokovia Accords are one of them. While in name, the film was the final entry into Steve Rogers’ Captain America trilogy in the MCU, in reality, it was more of an Avengers movie. It saw a schism form within the superhero team after Tony Stark endorsed the Sokovia Accords, a document which forced superheroes to register as goverment assets with the aim of minimizing collateral damage. Some heroes disagreed, leading to the titular conflict.
Refusing to adhere to the Sokovia Accords made many MCU heroes fugitives, but the story was never really followed up on. Nine years after Civil War, mentions of the Accords have been few and far between, and nobody has made an earnest attempt to enforce them since. This is something that makes the otherwise emotional conflict of Civil War feel cheap and pointless, and effectively makes an important MCU plot point fairly redundant.
9) Eternals Being The First Post-Endgame Team-Up Movie
2021 saw the release of Eternals, which introduced the eponymous team of heroes into the MCU. The ten-person team of god-like beings promised to considerably change the landscape of the MCU, introducing multiple incredibly powerful characters into its ranks at once as a team powerful enough to oppose the Avengers. Additionally, Eternals was the first hero team-up movie since the release of Avengers: Endgame.
Making Eternals the MCU’s next movie featuring a superhero team was not a good choice in hindsight. It subtly implied that the Eternals might play a large role in the MCU moving forward, especially as the Avengers had effectively disbanded and their return had not been addressed. However, exploring the story of the Eternals now seems to be an MCU storyline Marvel has forgotten about, making their once-apparent important place within the franchise seem especially strange.
8) Everything About The Release Of Black Widow
Although Black Widow has made many MCU appearances, her last came in 2021 with the release of Black Widow. The movie came two years after the release of Avengers: Endgame, in which Natasha Romanoff gave her life to give her fellow Avengers a chance to stop Thanos. Black Widow‘s status as a prequel that further explored Natasha’s story and introduced her successor in the form of her sister, Yelena, seemed to justify the character’s return after her death.
However, it now seems that everything about Black Widow‘s release was a mistake. Not only was it pretty nonsensical to give the character her only solo movie after she had been killed off, but it considerably lowered the movie’s stakes. Additionally, the movie’s release was hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which considerably hurt its chances for success. All in all, Black Widow was a movie that came too late, and all it served to do was remind us that its hero was a Marvel character we probably won’t see in the MCU again.
7) Too Many TV Projects
Since the beginning of the MCU’s Multiverse Saga, there have been a number of changes within the franchise. Many are purely narrative, but there are a handful that are decidedly more conceptual. One is the addition of MCU TV shows into the franchise’s main timeline, which throughout the Infinity Saga had been effectively just movies, other than a few failed attempts to expand the franchise that were later distanced from the MCU.
Considering early attempts at MCU TV shows — including Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, and Inhumans — all fell flat, the release of multiple TV shows post-Endgame was a strange choice. Though some of the MCU series have been excellent, the problem with them is the frequency with which they’ve been released. With the franchise growing in both movie and TV spheres, it has become harder to keep up with the MCU’s story, and at times the MCU TV shows have begun to feel like they’re about quantity as much as quality.
6) Killing The Scarlet Witch
As well as being the first introduced into the franchise, Wanda Maximoff is the most powerful magic user in the MCU. Since making her full debut in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Wanda went from villain to hero and back again, with her power level seeming to increase all the time. It wasn’t until Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022 that audiences finally got to see her embrace the mantle of the Scarlet Witch, unleashing her magical power on the Multiverse in a grief-stricken frenzy.
One of Marvel’s biggest MCU mistakes in the past decade was killing Wanda Maximoff to end her villain turn. There is a multitude of reasons why it was a poor choice, with perhaps the biggest being that many of the character’s best story arcs have yet to be adapted into the MCU. Considering she’s one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, seeing her potential already wasted only a decade after her first MCU appearance is incredibly frustrating.
5) Multiverse Of Madness’ Illuminati
There were many good things about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with the movie’s Multiversal cameos widely considered one of its strong points. The sequel finally opened the MCU up to wider Multiverse stories and characters, which was pretty important for the Multiverse Saga as a whole. However, its most prominent alternate Earth characters, Earth-838’s Illuminati, actually proved to be a major Marvel mistake.
The cameo appearances, including Anson Mount’s Black Bolt from Inhumans, Hayley Attwell’s live-action Peggy Carter, Lashana Lynch’s Captain Marvel, and John Krasinksi’s Reed Richards, paid off fan campaigns to see the characters join the MCU proper. However, the swift and brutal deaths of the characters at the hands of the Scarlet Witch were both shocking and frustrating, as it seemed to communicate a disregard for some of fans’ biggest MCU wishes. Considering the Illuminati have not appeared in the MCU since, everything about their introduction in 2022 is starting to seem like a huge mistake.
4) Not Giving Hulk Another Story
Since the character was introduced into the franchise in 2008, the MCU has had big problems with the Hulk. Some behind-the-scenes issues have contributed to the frustrating nature of his story, and much of that was unavoidable on Marvel’s part. However, considering his only solo movie in the franchise to date came all the way back in 2008, Marvel’s handling of the Hulk leaves much to be desired.
Making Hulk a founding member of the Avengers made him an integral part of the fabric of the MCU. His role since then has been a supporting one at best, and it seems to have wasted the MCU’s best chance to do the character justice. As well as occasionally making Hulk look weak in the MCU, Marvel has consistently neglected to explore the character as much as he deserves, and it’s one of the studio’s biggest mistakes over the past decade.
3) The Big Kang Mix-Up
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Multiverse Saga has been Marvel’s handling of the narrative arc’s villain. After Thanos served as an incredible main villain in the Infinity Saga, the bar was high, and the reveal that Kang the Conqueror would be the main antagonist of the Multiverse Saga felt both exciting and fitting. However, after off-screen issues resulted in the dismissal of Kang actor Jonathan Majors, Marvel pivoted to instead focus a different villain, with Doctor Doom now acting as the main antagonist of the Multiverse Saga’s final Avengers movies.
Instead of simply recasting Kang in the MCU and continuing with the story as planned, Marvel instead risked fumbling two great villains. In addition to snubbing its own teases about Kang being a major threat to the Multiverse, the franchise began setting up his villain replacement far too late, with no real seeds having been sown for Doom’s appearance. Swapping out the main antagonist for a completely different character mid-Multiverse Saga was an odd choice, and one that seems to be a major mistake on Marvel’s part.
2) Wasting Some Of Its Most Promising New Heroes
There have been many powerful MCU heroes introduced since Avengers: Endgame, though some have proven more popular than others. The criticism that Marvel has flooded the market with too many releases, which in turn has resulted in the phenomenon known as superhero fatigue, had another side effect: the franchise introduced too many new characters. With so many fledgling figures in the franchise, the MCU’s best and most promising new heroes haven’t been given the attention they deserve.
The likes of Shang-Chi, Moon Knight, and She-Hulk have all been pretty much wasted in the past few years. Instead of borrowing from the Infinity Saga’s template, and introducing just a handful of great characters, Marvel went for quantity, hurting the quality of some stories and sabotaging their own ability to bring back the most popular new heroes. Since Endgame, many of the franchise’s most exciting new characters have been roundly wasted, and it’s hugely frustrating for fans wanting to see more of the MCU’s exciting new heroes.
1) Not Firmly Establishing A New Avengers Lineup
Part of what made the Infinity Saga so successful early on was its clearly defined framework for hero stories. Phase 1 introduced the MCU’s founding Avengers, and Phase 2 introduced new recruits, all leading to an epic conclusion in which the members of the team had all been fleshed out ahead of time. That’s a big part of what made Avengers: Endgame so successful, as the heroes of the movie were all well-known to the audience after already making multiple appearances.
Since Endgame, the Avengers have been largely absent from the MCU. Working out the MCU’s new Avengers team has been a case of speculation, as many of the most likely members have made only a single appearance to date. By not establishing the new lineup of the team in the Multiverse Saga, Marvel has effectively sidelined its own headline act, hurting both the Avengers’ ability to appeal to audiences, and the potential efficacy of the Multiverse Saga’s two-part finale all as a result of one massive mistake.
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