The MCU is such a disappointment. It feels like a very very very long version of the typical show that started off great and then overstayed it's welcome, except it doesn't even have the characters that made it great anymore.
I used to laugh at DC, Universal and all the other idiotic companies flailing around trying to create their own cinematic universes by throwing out shit movie after shit movie with no planning, but now I can't tell the difference between Marvel and any of them.
It's a shame what unadulterated greed does to a company.
It's a weird "too big to fail" and "consume, dumb pigs" attitude that corporations seem to have.
Hollywood like many obscenely rich organizations, seem to think that the money machine go BRRRRRR without consideration for what was painfully aware in previous generations: you don't get to subsist on garbage and not expect people to ignore it forever.
I'm guessing it's a lot of social media and bot armies flooding everyone's headspace with dopey talking points that they didn't bother to think about, but I remember a time when if a celebrity got too arrogant and started getting mediocre, they would rightfully eat shit for it.
Nowadays, Hollywood doesn't get it, and I think it's become an impenetrable ring of circlejerks made up of trust fund douchebags and nepo babies that have never met any kind of struggle in their lives. They lived with too much self esteem and the only possible explanation for people not to like them is jealousy or some other moral failing, and any creative output they produce seems to come from a regurgitation of older or other media that worked, and so they transpose their meanings into something new without thought as to whether or not that thought would work or if it were somehow relevant.
For instance, a reddit post described The Menu as an eat-the-rich story about people who've never had any kind of outstanding student debt (so, chef could go back to flipping burgers instead of outright murdering people, right?). I've seen more than one internet reviewer observe that a woman with her buff male companion on Venice Beach in 2023 would not get her ass smacked in broad daylight and not even likely if it were night out (but hey, it happened at some point in history and nothing ever changes...don't get me started on Barbie's wild inconsistency on what it thinks patriarchy is and how relevant that definition is).
Even the Marvels suffers from this kind of thinking. The Boys observed that people like team-ups. And why not, it worked before. Except, it worked because everything that went into those team-ups were things that people actually cared a lot about, not things that passively appeared in people's field of view in two of the three leads, and the third hasn't had a relevant hit since before Endgame, when momentum was high.
Now, you see a thousand stinkpieces out there that are willing to acknowledge the rational reasons why The Marvels failed, but damn it if they don't pay at least a little lip service to "muh sexism and racism". I might fall over dead when someone claiming to be a serious journalist admits, hey, this thing had problems, but sexism and racism ain't it. This ain't your white whale, guys.
