The MCU Phase 4 – The MCU Becomes the MSHEU

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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

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1. WandaVision (2021)

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“What is grief, if not love persevering?”

The strongest opening the streaming era gave the franchise, and it works because it commits to a formal idea for long enough to become disorienting. The sitcom pastiche is executed with real care across decades of house style, and the audience spends three episodes not knowing what they’re watching. That’s the most interesting position this franchise has ever put a viewer in.

It resolves into a conventional fight between two women in the air. That’s the seam where the format reasserts itself. What survives is the idea underneath: a person has built a place where the loss didn’t happen, and the show is honest that her comfort is harming the people inside it.

Kathryn Hahn is doing two performances at once and the second one only becomes visible on rewatch. Agnes as a nosy neighbor is played entirely straight, with sitcom timing that’s accurate to each decade, and none of it is a wink at the audience.

The commercials are the most inventive thing in the streaming era. Thirty-second breaks selling a toaster, a watch, a bath soak, each one encoding something Wanda can’t look at directly, delivered with no explanation and no character reaction. The first three episodes are the Marvel I’d been missing, strange and willing to confuse me for a while. The commercials alone show what a brave team can do with this material. Then the finale turns into two women throwing light at each other in the sky, and I felt the air go out of it.

The 6 accounts for both halves. Three episodes of real formal invention, three of increasingly conventional plot mechanics, and a finale that answers a question the audience had stopped wanting answered.

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2. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021)

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“The legacy of that shield is complicated, to say the least.”

An argument about who gets to carry a symbol, wrapped in a plot about a stateless resistance movement that the show never works out how to feel about.

The Wilson and Barnes material is good. Two men who didn’t choose each other, sharing a loss, doing therapy in a scene that’s funny. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker is the show’s best idea, a decorated soldier who’s simply not the right man and knows it. The Flag Smashers are the failure. Their grievance is real and the show keeps flinching from it, so they end up as terrorists with a point nobody is allowed to concede, and the finale resolves a political argument with a speech.

Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley is the best thing in the series and appears in two scenes. A man who was given the serum, imprisoned for thirty years and experimented on, telling Wilson that no self-respecting Black man would ever put on that flag, is the argument the show was built to have.

The show never quite decides whether it’s about that or about a chase for super soldier serum, and the two plots run in parallel without informing each other. Zemo returns and is enormously entertaining. That’s its own admission that the material around him was thin.

The 5 is for a series with two superb scenes and four episodes of pursuit connecting them. The subject was available and the format required an action plot, and the action plot won.

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3. Loki (2021)

“For all time. Always.”

The best thing in Phase 4 and one of the two best in the streaming era, because it’s a governing idea and obeys its own rules.

The Time Variance Authority is a bureaucracy, filmed like one, with forms, waiting rooms and institutional signage, and the show is about determinism instead of using it as a backdrop. Owen Wilson’s Mobius is the rarest thing here, a functionary who’s good at his job and decent about it.

Hiddleston gets the version of the character that works: a Loki confronted with evidence of every future he was going to have, forced to be a person instead of a plan. The show is also almost entirely self-contained. That’s why it holds up when so much of the phase doesn’t.

The production design is doing an enormous amount. Brutalist concrete, mid-century office furniture, analogue tape and a mascot cartoon explaining the end of free will, all of it filmed in the flat warm light of an institution that’s existed for a very long time and stopped noticing itself. Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie is the show’s argument made flesh. Another version of the same person, raised entirely differently, who wants the opposite thing. That turns every scene between them into a debate about how much of a life is chosen. Loki is the one I’d recommend to anybody who gave up on Marvel, and Owen Wilson’s decent bureaucrat is a pleasure every time he walks into a room. My reservation is that the Sylvie scenes sometimes play as an argument I admire more than I feel.

A 7 is the highest score in Phase 4 and it earns it by being about something and finishing what it starts. It also has the phase’s only surprising ending. That arrives as a door opening onto a statue.

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4. Black Widow (2021)

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“I’m not a little girl anymore.”

A film arriving several years after the character’s death. That’s a structural problem no execution solves.

Florence Pugh is the only thing in it that works, and the dinner scene is the only sequence with any life. Everything around her is a competent action film with no reason to exist, arriving two years after the character it’s about was killed off. What it can’t do is matter, and the 0 reflects that completely. A prequel about somebody the audience knows is already dead can’t generate stakes, the antagonist is a faceless assassin with a gimmick, and the whole picture reads as a contractual obligation being discharged. Taskmaster is the clearest symptom. A character defined in the source by an ability to copy any fighting style, which is a cinematic idea, is here a masked figure with no dialogue whose identity is a reveal nobody had reason to care about.

The film also arrives after the franchise underused the character for a decade, and it answers the wrong question. What was interesting about Natasha was the present-tense one, what a person does after being made into an instrument, and the film chooses to dramatize the instrument being made.

This one is a raw deal for Florence Pugh. She walks in with more life than the whole script around her, and the studio gave her a eulogy for a character we’d already buried. A decade of waiting for a real Natasha story, and the answer was a prequel with nothing at stake.

Cate Shortland shot it competently and the Budapest sequences have some atmosphere. Nothing here’s incompetent. That’s why the 0 is a comment on necessity and not on craft.

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5. What If…? (2021)

“Time. Space. Reality. It’s more than a linear path.”

An anthology, which is the correct form for a franchise this size, and the only project in the phase whose structure benefits from the shared universe.

Because each episode is self-contained and consequence-free, the show can do things the films cannot. Killmonger as a manipulator, a zombie outbreak, Peggy Carter taking the serum, and a Doctor Strange episode that’s the darkest thing the franchise has produced.

The season-long thread that ties them together is the weakest element and the least necessary. The anthology didn’t need a plot, and attaching one is the volume era’s instinct applied to a format that was already working. The Doctor Strange episode is the best thing the franchise produced on streaming. A man loses somebody, refuses the loss, and consumes enough power over centuries to unmake his own universe, and the episode ends with him alone in a void holding what he saved. Nothing in a film has been permitted to end that way.

Jeffrey Wright’s Watcher is the format’s license. A narrator who has sworn not to intervene lets each episode arrive at a terrible outcome and stop there. That’s the freedom a serial can never have.

The Strange episode is the reason I’d defend this show to anybody. It goes somewhere dark and stays there, and I didn’t expect a cartoon to be the bravest thing Marvel made on streaming. My reservation is the thread tying the season together, which drags a free-form show back toward the franchise it was escaping.

The season’s top half gets the 7. The animation style divides people and the weaker episodes are premise-only, but four or five of these are the most inventive things anybody made from this material.

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6. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

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“If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing.”

The best film of the phase at 6.5, and the best fight choreography in the franchise, attached to a third act that abandons it for creatures.

The film stages the bus sequence and the scaffolding fight with clear geography and real physical performance, and Tony Leung gives the phase its most credible antagonist, a man who has lived a thousand years and is being manipulated by grief.

Then the film relocates to a hidden village and finishes with two enormous digital creatures fighting over a lake, and everything specific about it evaporates. The gap between the first hour and the last thirty minutes is the widest in the phase.

Tony Leung is the reason the film scores as high as it does. Wenwu isn’t a man who wants power, he’s a man who stopped for a woman, lost her, and has been listening to something that sounds like her voice ever since. That’s a real character and the best antagonist the phase produced. A team that included veterans of Hong Kong action cinema staged the bus fight, and it shows in the geography. A moving vehicle, a finite space, a specific goal and a clear escalation, all legible throughout.

This 6.5 is the highest of any Phase 4 film on this site. What holds it back is the last act, where a well-shot martial arts picture becomes a creature battle, and the studio template asserts itself over the thing that was working.

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7. Eternals (2021)

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“When you love something, you protect it.”

An ambitious film that doesn’t work at any level, and the ambition is worth acknowledging before the failure is.

Chloe Zhao shot on location in natural light with a strong visual sensibility, and the central idea, that beings who have watched humanity for seven thousand years were forbidden to intervene, is a real premise. It fails on population. Ten protagonists introduced across two time periods means nobody accumulates enough screen time to become a person, and the film keeps stopping to explain relationships it hasn’t had room to dramatize. The result is a long picture in which almost nothing lands.

The premise deserved better. Beings who have watched humanity for seven thousand years, forbidden to intervene in anything except one threat, is a good idea, and the Hiroshima scene where one of them breaks is the only moment where it becomes a story.

Zhao shot on location in natural light and the film looks unlike anything else in the franchise. That makes the digital third act more jarring instead of less. A picture built on real landscapes ends with two rendered figures fighting on a beach.

It’s a severe 1, and the film supports it. Two and a half hours, ten characters, a romance the audience has no reason to invest in, and a twist about the purpose of the Earth delivered as exposition by somebody nobody has met.

I’ve rarely been this bored by a film with this much talent in it. Every time a character starts to matter, the script cuts to somebody I’d barely met. Zhao’s eye deserved a story with four people in it, and what she got was a committee meeting that runs two and a half hours.

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8. Hawkeye (2021)

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“I’m not a role model.”

A small, warm, Christmas-set crime story about a middle-aged man who wants to go home, and the modesty is the point. Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop is the best new character the phase introduced, and the show understands why: she’s a fan of the person she’s annoying, and the dynamic writes itself.

The Kingpin arrival in the final episode is the phase’s habit intruding on a show that didn’t need it. Everything before that’s a competent, likeable street-level story with a track suit mafia and a deaf antagonist who’s more interesting than the plot requires.

Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez is the best new element in it. A deaf, amputee antagonist whose fighting style accounts for both facts, played by a performer with the same experience, and the show is unfussy about all of it.

The LARP episode is the most likeable thing the franchise made on streaming. Barton fighting people in foam armour, then reluctantly participating in their rules, and the show finding actual warmth in a joke that could have been contempt. I’m fond of this show, and it’s the only thing in the phase I’d call cozy. Steinfeld and Renner bicker like people who’ll end up liking each other, and the LARP episode made me smile. Kingpin barging in at the end like an executive checking on his investment spoils it for me.

A modest show that knows its size gets the 6. It’s a Christmas story about a man who wants to get home, and the only time it stops working is when the wider franchise arrives to make it important.

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9. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

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“With great power there must also come great responsibility.”

The highest scoring film of the phase at 6. That says as much about the phase as about the picture.

It depends on twenty years of films the audience has already seen. That’s a completely different proposition from requiring a series that aired last month. The prerequisite is cultural and not administrative.

It also justifies the returns by using them. The villains are given a reason to be there beyond recognition, Peter’s decision to cure them is a real choice with a real cost, and the film takes everything from him at the end. What holds it to a 6 is that the middle hour is a queue of arrivals, and the pleasure on offer is largely recognition.

Alfred Molina is the reason the curing plot works. Doc Ock restored to himself, appalled at what he became, is a moving twenty seconds and it retroactively improves a film from 2004.

Aunt May’s death is the one thing the picture does that costs it something, and it drives the ending. Peter is left with no money, no relationships and nobody who knows him. That’s the first time the character has been placed where the comics have always had him.

My 6 is a fair reading of a film that’s a superb final twenty minutes attached to ninety minutes of managed nostalgia. The arrivals are handled with skill and they’re still arrivals.

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10. Moon Knight (2022)

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“You’re going to want to see this.”

The most distinctive-looking project of the phase for four episodes and a conventional one for the last two. Oscar Isaac is doing difficult work, playing two people who share a body and are frightened of each other, and the early London material is unlike anything else in the franchise.

The asylum episode is the high point and the show never recovers from resolving it. What follows is a chase across Egypt and two enormous figures fighting in a city. That’s where a great many of these projects go when the running time runs out of ideas. The Marc and Steven material works because Isaac plays them as two people with different competencies instead of two moods. Steven knows Egyptology and can’t fight, Marc can fight and has no interest in anything, and the show gets real comedy and real dread from the handovers.

May Calamawy’s Layla is given the strongest thread nobody finishes, a wife who has been married to somebody who was never entirely present, and the show swaps that for a superhero identity in the last episode.

Four excellent episodes and two conventional ones earn the 5, and the drop-off is exactly where the show explains itself.

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11. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

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“I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.”

Sam Raimi making a horror film inside a Marvel picture, and the seams between those two projects are visible in every reel. That’s why it gets a 3 despite containing the most inventive imagery of the phase.

The Raimi material is excellent. The Illuminati sequence is real body horror, the possessed Wanda is shot like a slasher villain, and the dead Strange sequence is the most inventive thing in the phase. What defeats it’s that Wanda’s turn requires WandaVision, and the film can’t stop to explain it. A viewer who watched only the films meets a hero who’s now murdering people for reasons established elsewhere. That’s the phase’s central structural failure in its clearest form.

Raimi’s fingerprints are everywhere and they’re the reason to watch. Dutch angles, a possessed figure crawling through a mirror, an eye being pushed into a socket, and a corpse animated by the spirits of the damned. It’s a strange thing to find in a studio tentpole.

Elizabeth Olsen is committed and the material isn’t fair to her. A character who spent nine episodes learning that her grief was harming people begins this film murdering a room of them, and no scene bridges those two positions. The Raimi sequences are the only part of this I’d defend. What they did to Wanda is unforgivable. The studio took the most careful character work it had done on streaming and threw it out to hand a movie a villain, and Olsen was left to play the damage.

The 3 reflects the collision. The horror sequences are the most inventive images in the phase and they’re stitched to a plot that requires homework and a protagonist whose arc is delivered in dialogue.

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12. Ms. Marvel (2022)

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“It’s not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world.”

The family material is the only part that works, and the show around it’s an introduction with a plot attached. Iman Vellani is likeable and the Jersey City setting is specific, and there’s a good idea buried in the Partition sequence about inherited history. The rest is a superhero origin at half speed with a villain faction whose motivation changes twice, powers that are altered from the source with no dramatic gain, and an ending that exists to place a character in a film that had already been scheduled. The purpose is the introduction, and everything else is arrangement around it.

The Partition episode is good television and belongs to a different show. A family separated at a railway station in 1947, filmed with weight and specificity, and it’s almost nothing to do with the bangle plot surrounding it.

The visual grammar is the most distinctive of any Phase 4 series, with animation and text spilling across buildings, and it works. The making is fine. The show wasted a lot of good material. Vellani is a delight and the Partition episode has real weight. Then the studio bends the show around a movie that needed somebody to show up in it, and I can’t forgive a show for treating its own lead as a delivery.

Function explains the 1. Strip the introduction obligation away and ask what this story is about, and the answer is a young woman getting powers so that a film released fifteen months later has somebody to put in it.

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13. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

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“Look at this. This is a classic Thor adventure.”

Rated on this site at minus one hundred out of ten. That’s a way of declining to place it on the scale at all. Christian Bale is playing a man whose child died and who has concluded that the gods deserve nothing, which is the best villain premise in the phase, and the film keeps cutting away from him for jokes.

Gorr’s opening scene is powerful and the picture never returns to that tone. Every scene that follows is undercut within a minute, including a cancer diagnosis, a death, and a child army. Ragnarok worked because the comedy was in tension with real weight. This has removed the weight and kept the comedy. That leaves nothing for the jokes to play against and produces two hours that can’t make anything matter.

The Shadow Realm sequence is the one place the film stops. Black and white, silhouettes, Gorr moving through a monochrome world, and for about four minutes the picture is the horror film Bale is acting in.

Jane’s illness is the other casualty. A character returns after nine years with a terminal diagnosis, becomes a hero, and dies, and every stage of that is undercut within thirty seconds by a joke about a hammer or a pair of goats.

This film wastes Bale. He’s playing a grieving father in dead earnest while the movie keeps cutting to the damn goats. I don’t mind jokes, but a picture that had a real villain and a real death in its hands and treated both as setups for gags is a waste I take personally.

Rated here at minus one hundred out of ten. What the number registers isn’t incompetence but waste, since the best villain premise and the strongest emotional material in the phase are both inside this film and neither is permitted to land.

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14. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022)

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“This is a lighthearted legal comedy.”

The lowest score in the phase and the project that most clearly demonstrates what happens when a show is about the discourse around itself.

Its premise is sound. A legal comedy in a world with superhumans is a good idea and the courtroom material occasionally finds it.

What sinks it’s that the show keeps addressing its own reception, arguing with an imagined audience, and resolving its finale by having the protagonist complain to the studio about the ending. A work that spends its energy on the conversation surrounding it’s stopped being about anything a viewer came for.

Tatiana Maslany is good and is given a show that won’t let her be. The best episodes are the ones that behave like a legal comedy, with a client, a problem and a courtroom, and there are perhaps three of those.

That premise had somewhere to go. A lawyer representing superhumans in a world with a decade of documented property damage is a real idea, and the series treats it as a backdrop for commentary.

The minus one is the lowest score in the phase and it’s a judgment about attention. A work that’s primarily interested in the discourse about itself has chosen an audience of people already arguing, and everybody else is watching a private conversation. Nothing wears me out faster than a show that wants to argue with me when it could be entertaining me. Maslany is terrific, and I’d have watched a dozen episodes of her with a client and a problem. The finale spends its energy scolding an audience that isn’t even in the room.

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15. Werewolf by Night (2022)

Unscored for now, because I haven’t seen it. A score goes in once I have. It belongs on the page as part of the phase.

What’s on the record is a one-hour black and white special directed by composer Michael Giacchino, shot as a 1940s Universal monster picture, and generally received as the most distinctive thing the streaming era produced. That it passed without becoming an appointment for somebody who saw every film of the first three phases in a cinema is itself a measurement of what the volume did.

On the record it sits at 7.1 on IMDb and holds the strongest audience response of any Disney+ project in the phase. That’s the figure standing in here until I watch it.

It’s also the only entry in the phase with no obligation to anything. Fifty-two minutes, no established characters, no consequences, and nothing after it depends on having seen it.

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16. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

Unscored for now, for the same reason. A score will be added once I’ve watched it.

A forty-minute special in which Drax and Mantis travel to Earth to kidnap Kevin Bacon as a Christmas present for Quill. It’s a premise that either works entirely or not at all.

It’s also a bridge, establishing material that Guardians Vol. 3 assumes. That’s the phase’s recurring structural habit in its mildest form.

Forty-two minutes, written and directed by James Gunn between his second and third films with these characters. That makes it the rare piece of connective tissue made by the person whose story it connects.

No score here yet and no IMDb figure I could verify for it. A number goes in once I’ve watched it.

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17. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

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“Show them who you are.”

A film made under a circumstance no production should have to manage, following the death of its lead, and the grief in it is real.

The opening twenty minutes are the best thing in it and are a funeral. Angela Bassett is superb throughout and her scene demanding accountability from a room of nations is the strongest performance in the phase.

The rest it can’t solve. Namor is a good idea underserved, the succession plot restates the first film’s structure, and the last act is another armored battle over another maguffin. A film full of real mourning is required to also deliver a franchise installment, and the two don’t fit.

Tenoch Huerta’s Namor has the best introduction in the phase, arriving out of water in a place where nobody can follow, with a grievance about colonization that’s older than the film’s other conflict. The Riri Williams material is the clearest example of the obligation. A student is introduced, given a suit and extracted, and none of it belongs to the film it’s stuck in. Bassett’s grief is real, and she makes me feel it every minute she’s on screen. Next to that, the rest is galling. A studio with any sense of occasion would have made a smaller film about mourning, and instead it handed a grieving cast an armored battle and a new product to launch.

I’ve given a 3 to a picture that’s one extraordinary twenty minutes and then has to become a sequel. Bassett’s performance is the best in the phase and the film around it’s a franchise assignment.