What I didn't like about the MCU was that too much of each movie depended on seeing many of the prior movies in the series. Then comes if I did see a movie that was referenced but there was some inconsistency (likely because some screenwriter or director failed to do their own homework) then I was taken out of the movie, losing that suspension of disbelief required to to be sucked into a fictional world, and that made the movie less enjoyable.
Then is the tactic of some of what might be considered the "side projects" in the MCU, typically the TV and web series, where the story ends as status quo ante which makes me feel like I wasted my time on homework that wasn't going to be on the final exam. To make a status quo ante story worth watching requires that the story be very good, and that's hard to do when dealing with multiple writers, directors, and actors which can introduce some contradiction later. It's difficult to write an enjoyable story where the characters can't develop or learn something as it could pose some threat to the enjoyment of another story later in the series.
It's fun to see these side projects develop into Easter eggs on the big screen for those that did do their homework but that can also mean there's no "big reveal" later on since they already tipped their hand to that segment of the audience.
What also took me out of the stories the MCU told was how much the world on the screen deviated from the world I was living in. I found the early Marvel movies enjoyable because it was a world much like my own, with real cities and such that I can find on a map (unlike the DC universe), and involving some real world events at times. That connection to the real world faded with each new movie in the series, and it quickly turned into something as foreign and mythical as something from JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis. There's nothing wrong with creating some new world with near omnipotent beings battling it out in a classic good vs. evil fashion. Where I'm lost is this this is somehow still supposed to be connected to the here and now on planet Earth.
Perhaps the biggest problem in the MCU is that dead people don't stay dead. Well, except Uncle Ben, he always dies. With alternative universes, and time travel, there's an even greater loss on who is who, what happened in a previous story, more status quo ante imposed to make prior homework seem like a waste of time, and so on.
Maybe there is a balance that can be found between the stand-alone stories like in the beginning and the epic team-up stories near the end. I haven't watched a movie in the MCU for a while so maybe they figured that out and I didn't notice.
Requoted against the censor moderation. Offended fanbois? Tribal defensiveness?
I actually thought it was an informative post--but that just shows how long it's been since I read any of those comic books or saw any of those movies... I think I was given a free ticket to one of the first recent series of Spiderman movies, so maybe 20 years ago?
By the way, this might be a funny coincidence: Just reading a genre history of western-style mysteries in Japan. One of the big authors, Edogawa Ranpo, actually wrote about a "kumo otoko", which literally means "spiderman", depending on how you take it. That was in 1930. And yes, his name is a kind of joke based on Edgar Allen Poe. (But the explanation is tedious and not funny--and might sound racist.)
