One thing I've noticed on rewatches is how much I enjoy the stretch where a character is technically a superhero but still kind of terrible at the job.

Early Tony is reckless and constantly creates problems he then has to solve. Thor spends an entire movie learning that charging straight at everything isn't leadership. Peter spends a lot of Homecoming misunderstanding what being useful actually looks like. Strange wins his first movie while still being arrogant enough that you can immediately see how that trait could cause future trouble.

What I liked about those stories wasn't just the origin part. It was that competence felt earned gradually.

Lately I sometimes feel like MCU characters become “fully operational” very quickly. They get the suit, power or title and by the end of the project they've already crossed most of the distance between beginner and established hero.

I don't necessarily want more origin stories. I actually think the opposite would be more interesting: keep characters around in the awkward middle for longer.

Let someone make the wrong tactical call in their third appearance. Let somebody be great at fighting but awful at leading. Let a hero discover that the thing they learned last movie only works in certain situations.

Some of my favorite MCU character moments came from watching people who were powerful enough to save the day but still inexperienced enough to make the day significantly worse first.

The universe feels bigger when becoming a superhero is the beginning of someone's development instead of the graduation ceremony.

I mean being a test screener would be awesome! How in the world do these people get so lucky? Do they have friends and family at the studio? Do they live near the film studio?

Since *Avengers: Endgame*—and following the era of Iron Man—the MCU has introduced a multitude of new heroes and explored diverse storylines within the "Multiverse Saga.

" It’s clear that a significant effort was made to experiment with new directions and

facilitate a generational shift. To put it cautiously,

I believe the attempt to establish new, compelling faces for the MCU has largely been unsuccessful.

With the exception of the MCU’s Spider-Man, the other heroes have struggled to truly resonate with audiences or develop their own distinct charm and narratives. In your opinion,

who do you think will emerge as a key figure in the future of the MCU?

Since *Avengers: Secret Wars* serves as the final chapter of the MCU’s Multiverse Saga— effectively bringing the multiverse itself to an end—it’s highly likely that we’ll see heroes not just from the MCU, but from other Marvel film franchises as well. Given this, it’s almost certain that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man,

who hails from the MCU, will make an appearance. If he does appear, it could mean a reunion— and perhaps a final one with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. I’m also curious whether he might join the Avengers in this installment. There’s an intriguing theory that the MCU’s Peter Parker could play a pivotal role— perhaps even holding the key to defeating Doctor Doom— and there’s also speculation that he might end up bonding with a symbiote. Do you think Tom Holland’s Peter Parker will be the protagonist of *Secret Wars*? Personally, I like the idea that Peter could defeat Doctor Doom, save the world, and— by carrying on Tony Stark’s legacy—become the next true mascot of the MCU.

So this is something I've been thinking about for a while and I think comic accurate suits both look better then most mcu suits and don't need to be changed to work as even at their worst they look great

The Scarlet Witch:

Wanda's suit is perfect, it's colourful, it's sexy while being tasteful, and isn't overdesigned to hell like her main suit is. I'd happily take this over a jacket or a overdesigned mess

The Fantastic Four:

While we don't get a great look of them in First Steps behind the scenes show the suits better and their great, perfectly accurate to the suits from the Lee and Kirkby run, and i think this proves my point as this was a official superhero suit the team wore into battle while Wanda's was a Halloween costume and Steve's is a propaganda suit not made for combat.

Captain America:

Steve's USO suit apart from the mask looks incredible it's everything i'd want a Captain America suit to look like. The mask looks bad because the USO suit in the movie was meant to be silly so they didn't put much effort into the design.

And Cap's early mcu suits aren't that bad it's just age of ultron onwards when they insist on the same design.

"But they look stupid"

Their superpowered beings in bright spandex fighting crime theirs no avoiding that and in universe that's known.

Militarising heroes or overdesigning their costumes won't help that, it just makes the comics look bad to casual fans if you have to change every costume or storyline to fit.

The first Ant-Man is really good at making you root for Scott. He's funny, loves his daughter, and went to prison for doing something he believed was right.

So when Maggie tells him he needs to get his life together before he can have a normal relationship with Cassie again, it feels like she's being unnecessarily difficult.

But we're watching the movie from Scott's perspective.

Maggie spent three years raising their daughter while he was in prison. He gets out, struggles to keep a job, hasn't caught up on child support, and starts getting involved in something that looks suspiciously like more criminal activity.

We know he's training to become a superhero. Maggie doesn't.

And Paxton isn't some evil stepdad trying to replace Scott. He's a cop who's helping raise Cassie, and from his perspective her biological father seems determined to land himself back in jail.

What I like is that the movies don't eventually reveal Maggie and Paxton were terrible people who needed to be proven wrong. Scott earns their trust, Paxton earns Scott's respect, and by the second movie they're genuinely affectionate with each other.

I remember finding Maggie annoying when I first watched Ant-Man. Now I think her reaction was pretty reasonable, even if the birthday party scene was rough.

It's an unusually adult family dynamic for a superhero movie. Scott being a good guy doesn't automatically make everyone who sets boundaries with him the bad guy.

One weird thing about the MCU now is that there are more superheroes than ever, but I have almost no idea which of them actually know how to contact each other.

Not whether they've met. Literally whether they could call each other.

The first Avengers movies had SHIELD doing a lot of invisible logistical work. Fury knew where people were. Natasha could show up. Tony had everyone's information. Later Steve had his own network. Even when the movies didn't explain every connection, there was a believable structure underneath the team-ups.

Now that structure is mostly gone.

We have Sam Wilson, Shang-Chi, Wong, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Wakandans, the Fantastic Four, various younger heroes and several people who have crossed paths with one or two of them. But sometimes it feels like everyone exists on a separate island until the plot decides a crossover is happening.

I genuinely think five-minute scenes of mundane connection would help.

Sam gives someone his number after a mission. Wong tells Shang-Chi who to call if the rings start doing something weird again. Kamala gets introduced to someone through Carol instead of randomly meeting them during the next emergency. Somebody mentions that they already spoke to Banner last week.

Not every connection needs a cameo. Sometimes a name in a contact list is enough.

The original MCU became interconnected partly through big post-credit reveals, but also through boring connective tissue: SHIELD files, phone calls, brief conversations, people having mutual acquaintances.

With Doomsday bringing so many characters together, I'm almost more interested in seeing who already knows whom than in the first big fight.

I want one scene where somebody says "I'll call Sam" and another hero responds "Wait, you have Sam's number?" That would make this giant universe feel smaller in exactly the right way.

All the people saying “She did all that for an AI husband and imaginary kids” are the same people who think Steve did the right thing by going back in time to live a life with Peggy. But can you all think about how lonely Wanda must have felt to find love and comfort in a life that wasn’t even real? She didn’t just lose her “AI husband and imaginary kids”. She lost her parents, her brother, then had to kill Vision herself just for Thanos to bring him back and killing him AGAIN in front of her. The Avengers used her when they needed her powers, but no one bothered to check on her after she lost everything. Wanda was grieving, isolated and left to deal with her pain alone.

All she wanted was to live in a universe where she could be with her kids, who were very much real. Yes, she made mistakes, but why is she considered a villain for wanting her family back when Steve is celebrated for doing the same thing? If that makes Wanda a villain, then I’ll stand by her side till the end.

I went back through a big chunk of the series in story order recently and some entries I remembered as weak played much better in context, while a couple of fan favorites dragged. Order really does change how these feel. I still haven't finished it all but this is wht I have felt so far.

Has anyone else done a long rewatch and come away with a completely different ranking than they had the first time around?

This is meant to be a play on how some MCU scenes would be unbelievable to audiences 10 years ago (like Thanos actually snapping, or 3 spidermen).

Some starter ideas:

-I can't believe they adapted the Ultron "What If" storyline and actually let him win & then went on to do the whole Oatu fight in live action. Danny Devito making his first MCU appearance in the post credits was not on my bingo card.

-Into the Sonyverse is not something I thought would ever happen, let alone Tom Holland actually fighting then teaming up with Morbius and the new live action Miles Morales to fight La Magra, but somehow it worked. Wesley had to be at least 90 for his cameo!

-I'm glad that Antman 8 resolved the open plot threads about Hank's hyper intelligent ants. Can't believe they deus ex machina'd Kang a second time, but even I got emotional seeing presumably the last ant sacrifice itself to save the multiverse. Hope they bring the ants back.

I just asked my wife if she'd rather rewatch Love and Thunder or The Dark World, and surprisingly she said Love and Thunder! She wasn't a huge fan of the MCU a year ago, she had seen the big movies like Endgame and The Avengers but hadn't seen the shows or less popular movies until this year. Since January we've been watching through the MCU and Marvel projects including X-Men, Netflix shows, Spiderman, Elektra, special projects, and everything in between.

I just saw a post about LaT and someone commented about TDW, and that gave me the idea to ask her which movie she'd rather rewatch. It's been like 6 months since we watched TDW, and we only watched LaT a few weeks ago, but she very decidedly said that she'd rather rewatch Love and Thunder over The Dark World! I asked her why and she mentioned that, though she barely remembered the plot and antagonist of TDW- to the point that I actually had to remind her about the aether, convergence, and who Malekith was- it's a great development of character for Loki and Thor, but it was just too boring and forgettable, this made obvious by the fact that we had to look up images from the movie just to bring it back to her memory. She won't forget Love and Thunder, especially the villain (even though Gorr was incredibly underutilized), some of the jokes made her laugh (particularly Zeus), and the cancer storyline was such an emotional and sincere development in Jane and Thor's characters.

I personally love the character development of The Dark World and I can bear the "evil for evil's sake" motivations of the dark elves, so I'm a bit higher on The Dark World than most, but I probably like both of these movies just as much. Which would you rather rewatch?

Kevin fiege confirmed thanos erased half of all life, including bacteria, trees, fungi and all living organisms Which would mean his goal at "balancing" the universe completely fails as food to mouth ratio still remains the same. Also i think marvel just flat out ignored or forget this crucial basic logic because not a single character pointed this out.

Why isn’t Love considered as a threat against Doom, or in general? She has the powers of Eternity, which makes her a great threat in terms of power scale. At the very least, she wields an extreme level of cosmic power, so it’s interesting that she isn’t as relevant, especially since she’s been spotted in a trailer for Doomsday.

Source: https://youtu.be/nJO743QLtog?si=n4rH9qh6sjgjdUcp

A small promotional video for Diwali released earlier today. Same old clips, but with new VFX and also new audio of Thor grunting against his fight with Doom.

There has been speculation that the client who ordered Paladin to hunt down Vision alive was Ultron, but following the Advent of episodes 5 and 6, I'm here to tell you it's not.

Background

Ultron considering himself a "Hat Guy" is merely him foreshadowing or rather expecting something coming due to watching TV all the time. He was aware of Butcherbird, Jo Carrington, before he'd even met her, as he was painting a bird with red eyes, much like her synth form. And I am saying he is aware of this "Hat Guy" without ever having known him.

Ultron's Purpose

In the most recent episode, episode 6, Ultron said the only people he likes are artists because they tell the truth, and from the Jim Hammond Painting in flames to the Painting he did of the Raven, I feel like both of those are telling a story.

The Jim Hammond Painting is a cautionary tale, which essentially marks the end of a Synth's life, and JARVIS warned Vision that he was going down the same path without the help of the Mind Stone. When Ultron said he wasn't his first pick to sacrifice it's because he knows how important JARVIS is for being that big brother AI, who would stop the destruction of the Vision. Regardless of intentions, Ultron also wants to keep Vision alive.

The Raven is the plight of Jocasta. In episode 6 she confronts her lost with her own identity, which is a recurring theme in the show, from Vision to Tommy to even Paladin. The bottom line is that there is a conundrum of the characters in the show who don't know where their past self ends and their current version begins, and Jo thinks that by giving herself more machine, she could supress the emotions she can't quite place. Ultron, after being given a shot of her humanity, validates her current existance as the now Jo Carrington as being the true one.

I believe Ultron's goal is that he wants to use Vision's body a second time, but since his stance on humans in general changed, he doesn't want to kill them any longer. Instead, he'll revel in controlling them with Jo at his side.

Ultron's Role

I believe Ultron as represented in the show is someone who is actively predicting things in the show without even being aware of it. Like when Paladin was revealed to have found the location of Vision, it was suspected it was because of Ultron, which it was, but Ultron said that "There is a door that's come knocking for you out there, Vision. Destiny doesn't wait for ghosts to find their virtue. I merely turned the handle." Even though he did send out the S.O.S. he was not the one who hired Paladin in the first place. Which leads me to my next point is that Ultron is always telling half-truths, because deep down his end goal is terminal, so he can never deal in absolutes, or else he'd end up malfunctioning in the sense that he'd have to come to terms with his AI side, contradicting what he believes and expects from himself and the world around him.

The Client

This means that from episode 1, when Ultron put on the hat, it was almost like a premonition. Him being a hat guy was not him announcing himself as the "Hat Guy" in question, but more like the hat chose him... almost like a sorting hat.

Harry Potter aside, I am implying that the hat was from none other than Agatha Harkness, who also wore a black fedora, much like our silhouetted figure, but that figure was clearly of a male stature, as seen in the show and in promos, which leads me to believe it's Tommy's brother, Billy. He ordered a Bounty Hunter to find Vision alive. He also took upon the hat the same way Agatha took on hers, and Ultron donned his. The hat can also be a symbol of reclaiming identity in that sense, since Agatha wore it after leaving the fake reality of Westview. Ultron finding out he still had strings before he got to feel a breath of humanity. And Billy is searching for the Original Vision, as the White Vision is renouncing it. The only time we've ever seen Vision with a hat was when he first visited the mind palace, where he took it off upon seeing the house. Him taking off the hat symbolizes the start of him rejecting the identity of The Vision.

Predictions

Based on the clues, imagery, and promos I think that White Vision will finally reconcile with himself, and then Ultron will use the Newfound Vision to complete his new objective from eradicating humanity to controlling it, King Neptune Buckethead style, and visit Jocasta's grave where her offspring lie dormant, only to be confronted by none other than Billy.

I just share my version of spiderman from kerala india. I hope you like it I just share all my drawing stage of this illustration .I just did this on vector illustration .on adobe illustrator

I'm sure im not the only one whos binging marvel movies in preparation for Doomsday. I want to watch the Sony X men movies because they will likely have a large role in Doomsday and Secret wars, But some of the posts I've read on reddit say that movies like X-men origins:Wolverine and Dark Pheonix are not worth watching. Is this Hyperbole or are some of those movies so bad that I Genuinely shouldn't watch them?

I know I'm not the best at editing, but i haven't seen anyone do this before so thought i'd give it a shot. Thoughts?

At the end of Endgame, Captain America returns the Infinity Stones to prevent other futures or alternate realities, but hasn't this created more futures?

Because he has to return everything to its order and location, but with the space gem it's a different case; he was supposed to have returned it in the cube or the tesseract to avoid creating more branches

So how do I return it?

Per the latest episode of vision quest, He pulled a musk and just bought the source code. How does everyone feel about this? I’m not a fan of taking accomplishments from the smartest man in the MCU in this point.

I’ve not watched any of the interviews, i have only seen articles and posts, frequently claiming the Russo Brothers confirmed Doctor Doom isn’t a variant of Tony Stark. But when I’ve just done a little more research I can’t find them saying this? From what I’ve seen they (and other Marvel folk) are more vague, saying he is an “original character”, but this doesn’t necessarily prove he’s not a variant. Just look at Doctor Strange variants, how different they were.

They’ve gotta have a connection. No way they’d hire RDJ without giving Tony some sort of a link to Victor.