Guardians is technically Phase 5.
Shang-Chi, Spider-Man NWH, and Doctor Strange MoM were all great and Phase 4. Unfortunately Black Widow, Eternals, and Thor L&T were also Phase 4 and are some of the lowest rated movies in the MCU.
Oh right, I was mixing up Spider-Man FFH & NWH.
Shang-Chi was the kind of quality I expect from MCU.
But I’ll be honest, even MoM disappointed me. It felt like they just abandoned all of the character development poured into Wanda because “heh heh cool Sam Raimi movie” and the America plot was kind of tacked on.
Black Widow, Eternals, Thor L&T, The Marvels all had the potential to be great. It’s like they just gave up on scripts and that notorious centralized quality assurance. Which I know is something a lot of people hated on them for, but I think the difference is obvious. Their centralized production over Phase 3 projects worked.
(We don’t talk about Quantumania. That one was unsalvageable.)
I hope they get back to the old way of doing things as Phase 5 progresses.
I was actually a fan of both the marvels and quantumania. But yeah the rest were bad. Thor love and thunder was perhaps the most disappointing of them all, considering how good ragnarok was.
I actually liked Doctor Strange MoM A LOT. To me, it was what the first Doctor Strange should have been.
As far as Wanda’s development, I didn’t get the impression that she was all good at the end of WV. It was just that she was literally forced to reconcile with her delusions. But that’s it.
In MoM, she has reconciled with her delusions. It’s just not how people were expecting her to. She convinced herself in WV that she wasn’t hurting people. Faced with reality, she decided that’s not a deal-breaker.
To be honest, I was surprised people had an issue with it. It didn’t even seem like a problem when I watched it the first time.
No, I’m happy with the direction they took her after the events of WV. I would just have liked to see that moment she decided to lean into it depicted onscreen instead of being an off screen development. That’s a huge moment to just…not show. I think it would have added a lot to the movie.
