10 things Marvel needs to do to save the MCU

10. Less is more

Look, nobody loves the MCU more than I do, but even I can admit that Phases Four and Five have been a bit overwhelming. That's not to say that I haven't been keeping up with them - believe me, I have - but I can see how, to the general viewer, it would seem like a bit of a mammoth task.

The introduction of the Disney Plus series have certainly contributed to this. In the beginning, that was a great thing. In 2021, when the world needed escapism during the pandemic, Marvel Studios released WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Widow, Loki, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, What If...?, and Eternals all within weeks of each other. Yes, that also took up the whole year. It was wonderful, but at the same time, understandable; because there was a backlog of content due to the production shutdowns/release delays and Marvel needed to get out in front of it.

It ultimately worked, as the vast majority of those titles were well-received and all of them were successful for their respective mediums. But it was still a lot in one calendar year, and as very few of them were actually interconnected, it made Phase Four seem very, for lack of a better term, directionless.

Due to the response of some of the more recent titles in the MCU, Marvel Studios has reportedly developed a "less is more" approach, spreading out the titles that are already confirmed, while possibly being more selective about what gets greenlit. It's a wise strategy because, as the negative response to Secret Invasion and the underperformance of The Marvels show, not every title is a guaranteed success just because it's a part of the MCU.

There are a lot of MCU titles on the horizon, and that's not going to change, but it's a wise choice on the studio's part to slow things down, because contrary to popular belief, you can have too much of a good thing.