Three ways the MCU can be saved

Comic book movies have been having a bit of a hard time recently. Movies that cost obscene amounts of money to make are tanking at the box office and, despite how incredible the first wave of Marvel films did, it seems like the excitement has died down.

Ant-Man's Quantumania film was reported as a flop despite being the thing that was supposed to lead into Marvel's newest big bad.

The Marvels' tagline was higher, further, faster yet the movie failed to achieve none of those success-wise despite it being a film that people were actually excited about when first announced.

Films that people have been excited about have been canceled and films that no one asked for have been green-lit, so what's happening with Marvel, and how do we fix it? And yes, Bob Iger, I will take the job thank you.

First, we need to understand what seems to be the common problems preventing Marvel from progressing in the direction they want to. The easiest way is to compare Marvel at the start and Marvel to now. We'll do this by looking at two different characters: Ant-Man and Spider-Man.

Ant-Man and Spider-Man were insanely successful in their own rights when they were brought into the MCU. When Ant-Man first debuted he was a struggling single-father slash former criminal, and Spider-Man was just a struggling high school student who was learning lessons about responsibility.

But the last time we saw them, Ant-Man was entering a quantum universe made almost entirely out of CGI to fight CGI creatures and save the makeup of reality itself. The last time we saw Spider-Man he was having a sorcerer use his powers to prevent the world from knowing who he was while also accidentally causing a dimensional bleed that brought in Spider-Man villains from other universes.

While there are comic fans who can get excited about this sort of thing, it leaves a LOT of moviegoers confused. There are a lot of people who don't read comics that go into a Spider-Man movie specifically to see a guy shooting webs and catching villains just like flies. They don't go in expecting magic.

And even comic fans can get messed with by Marvel. I'm a huge Ms. Marvel fan. Kamala's books are incredible. But then she got a show. Firstly, they removed her powers and swapped them out with sparkly ones for the show. They claimed it was so that Ms. Marvel didn't get confused for Mister Fantastic but if you get an old white man and a young Muslim girl mixed up that's between you and your optometrist. But having her powers replaced with sparkly pink gems was just insulting. So people who were fans of the character found themselves clocking out.

Even if you still wanted to see the show, there were choices that turned people away. For example, my kids still wanted to see it as they read the Ms. Marvel books and were excited to watch it. Then, about halfway through the first season we had to completely stop because it stopped being about the struggles of a young hero and it became an absolute stab fest as people LITERALLY started getting stabbed to death multiple times per episode.

So let's get into some ideas.