Phase 1 – Proving It Could Work
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Phase 1: Proving It Could Work |
Phase 2: Finding the Formula |
Phase 3: The Payoff |
Phase 4: The MCU Becomes the MSHEU |
Phase 5: The MCU Pushes the Message |
Phase 6: The Reset
In 2008 Marvel Studios had no studio, no top-tier characters and no evidence that any of this would work. The rights to Spider-Man and the X-Men were elsewhere. What remained was a second tier of the catalog, financed against the characters themselves as collateral, directed by a man best known for comedies and starring an actor most of the industry considered uninsurable.
Six films later they’d built something nobody had attempted. That was a set of separate stories that pay off together. What makes Phase 1 the strongest run in the whole franchise is that none of the films knew they’d be permitted a sequel. Each one had to work alone, because each one might have been the last.
This is the phase I’d hand to anybody who asks why these films ever mattered. A studio with nothing to lose made pictures that care about their own story, and the whole industry forgot far too quickly that this was the recipe.
Nobody was building a content pipeline in 2008. They were trying to make one good movie and hoping they’d be allowed another.
That constraint produced the highest average of any phase on this site, at 8.00 across six films, with a median of 8.5 and nothing below a 5. Nothing after this comes close, and the reason is visible in how these were made and not in who was making them.
Scores in gold are mine. Scores marked IMDb are the public figure, used where I haven’t watched something yet. Anything showing Score to come is on the list and gets a number once I get to it.
1. Iron Man (2008)
► Read the full review of Iron Man (2008)
⭐ 9/10
Robert Downey Jr.
“I am Iron Man.”
Everything the franchise became is present in the first twenty minutes and none of it looks like a plan. People using his own products capture a weapons manufacturer, and he builds an escape in a cave and comes home understanding what he’s been doing for a living. That’s a complete film about one man and it needs no universe behind it.
Robert Downey Jr. was a risk the studio had to be argued into, and the casting is the single most consequential decision in modern blockbuster filmmaking. He improvised heavily, Jon Favreau let him, and the result is a superhero who talks like a person instead of a poster. The final press conference works because Downey plays the admission as impulse instead of resolve.
What separates it from what came later is scale. The threat is one man in a larger suit, the stakes are a single arms deal, and the film never suggests that the world is ending. A story about a person changing his mind is enough, and Phase 1 believed that for six films.
The cave sequence is the reason the film works and it’s almost entirely procedural. Two men build something out of salvage across weeks, with a deadline neither controls, and the film shows the work. Yinsen is a real character with his own reason for being there, and his death is the only thing in the picture that changes Stark permanently.
Jeff Bridges gets less credit than he deserves. Obadiah Stane isn’t a rival genius, he’s the man who has been running the business while Stark got the credit, and his resentment is entirely legible. The scene where he takes the arc reactor out of Stark’s chest is the most frightening moment in Phase 1, because it’s quiet and personal and involves no powers at all.
Watching it now, the strangest quality is how little it points anywhere. There’s no post-credits obligation baked into the story, no character introduced for a later slot, and no dialogue explaining a larger plan. People who wanted this film to be good made it, on the assumption that nothing else might follow.
I adore this film, and my one gripe is the final fight, two men in metal suits hitting each other, which is the least interesting thing in a picture full of interesting choices. Everything before it treats the audience like adults. I’d put the cave sequence in front of anybody who thinks a superhero movie can’t be about work and conscience.
2. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
► Read the full review of The Incredible Hulk (2008)
⭐ 8.5/10
Edward Norton
“Don’t make me hungry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry.”
The forgotten one, and the reassessment is overdue. Louis Leterrier made a fugitive thriller instead of a superhero film, opening with Banner already in hiding in Brazil, already fluent in the discipline of not being found, with the origin delivered in the credits because the audience already knows it.
Edward Norton plays Banner as a man managing a medical condition, and that reading is more frightening than the anger metaphor the character usually gets.
He counts breaths, he watches a heart monitor, and the horror is procedural. The later recasting removed that entirely in favor of a man who has made peace with it. That’s a smaller idea.
Tim Roth’s Blonsky is the other thing it gets right. He’s a soldier who wants what Banner has and can’t understand why anybody would refuse it. That makes the final fight an argument between two attitudes to the same power instead of a collision of two effects.
People who treat this one as the franchise’s embarrassing cousin are unfair to it. It’s a tight, nervous chase picture, and Norton’s Banner is the version I believed. My reservation is that it plays so completely on its own terms that it sits awkwardly in the run, and the recasting left it stranded in a way the film didn’t deserve.
3. Iron Man 2 (2010)
► Read the full review of Iron Man 2 (2010)
⭐ 5/10
Robert Downey Jr.
“I have successfully privatized world peace.”
The first film in the run with visible homework in it, and the point where the machinery starts to show. Nick Fury, Black Widow, a briefcase full of setup, and a plot that pauses regularly to establish something a later film will need.
What holds it up is Stark himself. He’s dying, he’s drinking, he’s behaving appallingly, and the film is interested in a man who has decided that being admired is a substitute for saying goodbye. The party sequence is unpleasant in a way the franchise stopped permitting itself.
Sam Rockwell is the underrated element. Justin Hammer isn’t a dark reflection or an evil genius, he’s a mediocre competitor who wants to be Stark and lacks the ability, and playing the antagonist as professionally jealous is a far more useful idea than most of the villains that followed.
Mickey Rourke’s Vanko is the structural problem. He’s a real grievance, a father who died poor while somebody else’s father took the credit, and the film gives him about four scenes to establish it before parking him in a workshop for an hour. Two antagonists in one picture and neither gets enough room. That’s a pattern the franchise repeated for fifteen years.
The Senate hearing is the best sequence and shows what the film could have been. A man who has privatized world peace, in front of a committee that can’t make him do anything, being right and insufferable at the same time. That’s a whole movie, and the picture keeps leaving it to service a briefcase.
The 5 is fair and I can say exactly why. This is the first entry where you can feel the enterprise being managed, where scenes exist to place objects in other films, and where the protagonist’s arc competes for room with administration. Everything that eventually went wrong is visible here in small.
My feelings about this one are mixed and they don’t settle. Downey and Rockwell are a pleasure every minute they’re on screen, and then the picture stops dead to hand somebody a briefcase and I can feel the studio’s hand on my shoulder. It’s the first film in this run that made me think about a release calendar.
4. Thor (2011)
► Read the full review of Thor (2011)
⭐ 8/10
Chris Hemsworth
“This drink, I like it. Another!”
Kenneth Branagh was an eccentric hire and the correct one. He treats Asgard as a court, the succession as a dynastic problem, and the family as a Shakespearean arrangement of a father, two sons and a secret, and the register holds because he never signals that any of it is silly.
The exile structure makes it work. Thor loses everything in the first act and spends the film as a man with no power in a small New Mexico town. That forces the character to be interesting before he’s allowed to be impressive.
Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is the discovery. He’s not a villain who wants power, he’s a son who finds out what he is and can’t survive the information, and the film gives him a grievance that the audience can follow. Almost every good thing the franchise did with him afterward is drawn from this performance.
Branagh shoots Asgard with canted angles throughout. That was mocked at the time and is the correct instinct. A realm that’s meant to feel like a different order of thing shouldn’t be filmed like a boardroom, and the tilted frames make the palace scenes read as unstable. That’s exactly what the succession plot requires.
The New Mexico material is where the film justifies its 8. A god of thunder walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse is funny, and the humor comes from the character being entirely sincere and not from anybody making a joke. Thor never once acknowledges that his situation is absurd, and that commitment makes it work.
Anthony Hopkins is doing more than the part needed. Odin is a man who lied to a child for a thousand years for reasons he believed were sound, and Hopkins plays the throne room confrontation as a father who has run out of explanations. The films after this reduced him to a plot device and the reduction cost them something.
I enjoy this far more than its reputation says I should, mostly for Branagh’s nerve in playing a family drama straight with a man in a winged helmet. My reservation is Asgard, which never feels like a place anybody lives beyond the throne room. The New Mexico half is the reason to watch, and I’d have taken more of it.
5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
► Read the full review of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
⭐ 9/10
Chris Evans
“I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from.”
The best film in Phase 1 and one of the two or three best in the entire franchise. Joe Johnston made a 1940s adventure serial in earnest, with the period design, the propaganda tour, the Howling Commandos montage and a hero whose defining quality is established before he’s any physical ability at all.
The grenade scene is the whole film. A small man throws himself onto a live grenade to protect people he’s known for a week, and Erskine has already told us the point: the serum amplifies what’s there. Everything afterward is a consequence of a character established in about ninety seconds.
What gives it weight is the ending. He wins, and it costs him everything and everybody, and the last scene is a man waking up seventy years later having lost his entire world. A superhero film that concludes on grief wasn’t obvious in 2011 and almost nothing since has been willing to do it.
The propaganda tour is the sequence that separates this from every other origin. He gets the serum, and the government makes him sell bonds in a costume on a stage with dancers, because a man who can lift a motorcycle is more useful as a poster than as a soldier. It’s a cynical idea sitting inside an earnest film, and the picture is smart enough not to comment on it.
Peggy Carter is written as a professional and not as a prize. Hayley Atwell plays somebody with her own authority who’s better at her job than most of the men around her, and the relationship works because it’s built on competence recognized in both directions. Almost nothing in the franchise has managed that since.
Johnston had made The Rocketeer twenty years earlier and this is the same film with a larger budget and a better script. The 1940s serial register is sustained without irony for two hours, the Hydra design is sinister, and the montage of the Commandos taking bases is the only part of the film that plays like a comic book. That’s a deliberate contrast with everything around it.
Captain America is my favorite of the six by a distance. Rogers is decent before he’s strong, and the film has the nerve to end on loss when almost nobody in this business will risk it. My one complaint is that the Hydra plot is thinner than the people fighting it. I’d watch the grenade scene on a loop.
6. The Avengers (2012)
► Read the full review of The Avengers (2012)
⭐ 8.5/10
Robert Downey Jr.
“If we can’t protect the Earth, you can be damn well sure we’ll avenge it.”
The film that proved the whole idea, and the achievement is structural and not spectacular. Six protagonists arrive from five separate films with established personalities, and none of them is diminished to make room for the others. Joss Whedon’s solution is to spend the middle hour on conflict and not teamwork. The helicarrier sequence is an hour of people who don’t like each other arguing in rooms, and by the time they finally cooperate the audience has been made to want it. The team-up is the payoff.
The New York battle still works because the geography is legible throughout. You always know where each character is, what they’re doing and why, and the single tracking shot connecting all six is the clearest statement of what the film had accomplished. Every subsequent third act in this franchise is trying to be this and most of them forgot that clarity was the point.
Loki is the right antagonist for this story because he’s not a threat to any of them individually. He’s a manipulator, his weapon is division, and his plan works for most of the running time. The scene where he explains what he’s doing to Black Widow, and she turns it around on him, is the best written exchange in Phase 1.
The death that turns the film is engineered and it’s engineered well. Coulson had appeared across four films doing small administrative things. That made him the one character the audience knew without ever having thought about him, and Whedon spends that carefully constructed indifference at exactly the right moment.
The 8.5 is honest about what it is. This is an assembly job of enormous skill, it resolves in a hole in the sky with an army pouring out of it, and the template for that third act became the default for a decade. What holds up is the middle hour, which is people in rooms, and the discipline of never letting a joke undercut something the film needs.
I enjoy the middle hour, and the Widow and Loki exchange is writing I’d happily steal. The portal is the problem. Every lazy blockbuster since has copied the hole in the sky and skipped the hour of arguing that made it worth caring about, and this film handed them the excuse.
Phase 1 averages 8.00 across six films, the highest of any phase, with a median of 8.5. Five of the six sit at 8 or above and the only soft entry is Iron Man 2 at 5. That’s also the only one built around setting up something else.
That correlation holds across the whole franchise. The films that score highest are the ones with no obligation to anything outside themselves, and the films that score lowest are the ones whose job is to deliver somebody to a later project. Phase 2 drops to 6.80 and the decline runs from there.
When I look back at these six, it galls me that nobody in charge learned the obvious lesson. Films made by people who assumed they’d never get another shot beat everything made by people who knew they would. I’d take a studio that’s scared of failing over one that’s scheduled its success a decade out, and I wish Marvel still felt that fear.
The Essays Behind These Ratings
The ratings on this page come out of a longer argument about what the franchise did to itself. These essays set it out.
- A Reviewer’s Journey: The Complete MCU, Reviewed
- Why the 2000s Superhero Films Were Better Than the MCU
- The Romance Problem
- The Antagonist Problem
