Three ways the MCU can be saved
2. Simplify the stories
Just because the comic books get weird doesn't mean the movies always have to be. As I mentioned before, the MCU's success came from VERY simple storylines. Watch Captain America: The First Avengers again sometime, you'd be amazed that it's an MCU film.
Look at the plots of these first films. Captain America fighting Red Skull in World War 2, Thor going after Loki, and the Destroyer armor. Do you guys remember when the Destroyer armor was intimidating? It looks so low-stakes now.
But that's also what made these films more grounded. For example, in the first Avengers film, it felt great because these characters may have been fighting aliens but they were outnumbered and in Cleveland, I mean Germany before the fight took them into Cleveland, I mean New York. And yeah, living in Cleveland and getting to have coffee at a Coventry coffeehouse a table away from Chris Evans and Scarjo was kinda cool, even if I didn't have that memory, the film would still feel down to earth.
It's what a lot of these films are missing now. You watch almost any Marvel film's behind-the-scene features and you're going to see the characters on solid green sets. It's not uncommon to have the character on screen being the only thing that's real. Hell, in a lot of the films (looking at you Spidey) you can go a full ten minutes without a single real thing appearing on screen.
Having movies that had more realistic threats, even if their leader had a red skull, that took place on Earth and had smaller scales than "all of reality and space" are something I miss in these films. Even Spider-Man couldn't come up with a Sinister Six without feeling the need to tear holes in reality.
Let's bring it back to the norm. Every character has things that can bring them back to reality. I'm hoping that's what "Captain America: New Normal" achieves. One of my favorite Captain America runs was the famous "Not my Captain America" storyline in which Sam Wilson has become Captain America and is finding it harder for him because half the country seems to turn against him solely because they can't handle a person of color being Captain America.
It was a fantastic storyline that actually features Captain America having less access to things than he's used to to the point where he even gets places flying commercial flights and having to deal with the people on the planes who can't keep their opinions to themselves.
As for the big overarching plot of all these Marvel films, maybe we don't even need them right now. Sure, I've talked at great length about Kang in the past, but we don't really need to have one. Imagine how good these storylines could be if we just let them be by themselves. Thor: Love and Thunder was absolutely phenomenal because it just continued what Thor was doing, not the MCU as a whole. There wasn't any need to make it about the events of something else, it was just a solid stand-alone movie. Guardians of the Galaxy is good at pulling this off too, which is surprising because despite how they fly around the galaxy, their stories tend to be very down to earth. Or at least the closest planet, Ego or otherwise.
Of course, there is one other piece of advice, and this one can go for DC as well since they seem to also have a problem with it.,