12. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Sometimes going to the well again and again is a good thing. After all, if you're good at it, why change it? Unfortunately that is a lesson that the Ant-Man franchise learned the hard way, for the film series that is normally considered the MCU's fun palate-cleanser after more serious movies decided to produce a more general "important" MCU outing with its third installment and it backfired completely.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania sees the beloved Ant-Fam dragged into the Quantum Realm, where they encounter the man originally handpicked to be the Big Bad of the Multiverse Saga, Kang the Conqueror. The stakes were higher than ever before but at the cost of what made the Ant-Man franchise so special, and as a result, the film was a bland CGI-heavy spectacle that ultimately underperformed at the box office due to poor word-of-mouth and an overly large budget.
The Ant-Man movies are known for being light-hearted fun all wrapped up into an adventurous heist movie. That's everything that Quantumania was not. And the only real silver lining is that Michelle Pfeiffer's performance as Janet van Dyne was easily among the best of the entire Multiverse Saga.
11. What If...? season 3
The beauty of Marvel Animation's What If...? is that it could take the stars and situations of the MCU and literally reimagine them in anyway it wants to. However, one constant criticism of the show is that it constantly stuck too close to the source material, rarely ever doing anything overly outlandish or unique. The third and final season unfortunately fell into the same trap and the few times that it did try to do something original, it was just so random that it didn't land like it should have.
There are some brilliant episodes in the final season (The Winter Soldier and Red Guardian working together? Ironheart trying to save the world? Shang-Chi and Hawkeye as law enforcement in the Old West? All brilliant!) but rarely did this season feel like a final chapter of what should have been Marvel's most innovative show.
A show like What If...? could have run for many more seasons, delivering high octane, exciting, and wholly wacky concepts that the MCU's Sacred Timeline couldn't, but it stayed too close to its inspiration in a run that was far, far too short.