The Argument
My position is simple. The superhero films that came out between X-Men in 2000 and The Dark Knight in 2008 were better, on average, than the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They weren’t all good.
Some were dreadful. But the good ones had something the MCU has almost never allowed, a director’s fingerprints all over the frame.
Not every MCU film is bad. Iron Man is terrific. Captain America: The First Avenger is a lovely, old-fashioned adventure, The Winter Soldier is a tight thriller and The Incredible Hulk is better than its reputation. The MCU has made good films. What it hasn’t made, very often, is a film that could only have come from one particular person.
And that, I think, is why the whole machine started to fall apart after Endgame. Consistency sells for a while, sometimes for a long while. Then it starts to taste like the same meal every night.
The Films That Built the Genre
Look at what came out in those eight years. X-Men took comic-book mutants and made them a story about prejudice, with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen playing old friends on opposite sides of a war. Bryan Singer shot it like a serious thriller, and it proved that comic books could be adult drama. X2, three years later, was even better.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, in 2002, was pure Raimi: earnest, goofy, emotional, full of the swooping, rubbery camera moves he’d learned making Evil Dead.
Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker was an awkward, sweet kid, and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin was a cackling nightmare with a broken man underneath. Spider-Man 2 went further, with Alfred Molina’s tragic Doctor Octopus and a train sequence that makes grown men tear up. That train fight is my favorite action scene in the genre, because every blow Peter lands is spent keeping strangers alive.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, in 2005, dragged the genre into gritty realism, and The Dark Knight in 2008 turned it into a crime epic, with Heath Ledger’s Joker as the best villain the genre has ever produced. Nobody else would have made those films the way Nolan did.
Iron Man, the Hinge
Iron Man came out the same summer as The Dark Knight, and it’s the hinge between the two eras. Jon Favreau still had room to be himself. Much of Robert Downey Jr.’s dialogue was improvised, the film felt loose and conversational, and it looked like a Favreau movie as much as a Marvel one.
It was also the film that made the MCU possible, and the success it created is exactly what closed the door on anybody else getting that kind of freedom. Once Marvel saw what a shared universe could earn, the priority shifted from making a good film to making a film that fit.
The House Style
Marvel Studios built a machine, and the machine has rules. Marvel shapes scripts around the franchise plan before a director ever arrives.
It hires directors, many of them from indie films or television, to execute that plan. The effects teams often design action sequences early in production. Marvel keeps the color grading, the music, the jokes, the tone of every film within a narrow band.
You can see it on the screen. Watch ten MCU films in a row and they start to blur together: the same greyish palette, the same wisecracks after every emotional beat, the same third-act sky battle with a glowing thing and a portal. Watch Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and Nolan’s Dark Knight back to back, and you’d never mistake one for the other.
Performances got flattened too. Actors who tried something unusual found it trimmed in the edit or smothered by a quip. Thor, Doctor Strange, Star-Lord and Tony Stark all end up sounding like the same sarcastic guy, and after a while even the gods and sorcerers seem to be doing stand-up. That reflex wears me down more than anything else in the MCU. I’ll feel something for a character for about four seconds before somebody undercuts it with a joke.
Directors Who Left
The clearest sign of what Marvel values is who it lost.
Edgar Wright spent years developing Ant-Man, then walked away weeks before shooting, over creative differences. Patty Jenkins was attached to Thor: The Dark World and left. Scott Derrickson left Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which then went to Sam Raimi, of all people.
Every one of those exits sent a message to the next director: fit in, or go. Nolan, Raimi and Singer never faced that pressure in the same way. Their studios wanted hits, but they hired those men because of how they made films, and then they let them make them.
For Writers
Marvel’s house style keeps every film consistent, and it’s also why so many of them feel interchangeable. The trade between a unified brand and an individual voice runs through every creative project, franchise or otherwise.
Writers face the same choice. A series with rigid rules, a formula and a consistent voice can build a loyal audience fast. It can also trap you. The formula that sold the first three books can make the tenth one feel like homework, for you and for your reader.
Keep the consistency. Just know which parts of your style are the brand and which parts are habit. Keep the first. Question the second, every single book.
Head to Head
Put the films side by side and the difference is obvious. Raimi’s Spider-Man against Spider-Man: Homecoming: Tom Holland is a more believable teenager than Maguire ever was, and Homecoming is a perfectly pleasant film. Raimi’s has a voice, an emotional heat and a sense of style that Homecoming doesn’t try for.
The Dark Knight against Captain America: Civil War: both films are about big political questions, chaos against order, security against liberty. Nolan commits to his argument and follows it to a bleak, brave ending. Civil War spreads its ideas across a dozen characters and an airport fight, and never takes a side it can’t walk back.
Spider-Man 2 against Spider-Man: No Way Home is the most telling of all, because Alfred Molina plays Doctor Octopus in both.
In Raimi’s film, Otto is a tragic character with a real arc. In No Way Home, he’s a nostalgia cameo. Same actor, same character, same quality of performance, and a completely different kind of film around him.
For Writers
Marvel lost directors like Edgar Wright because their vision didn’t fit the plan. The films that got made instead were smoother, safer and less alive.
When you collaborate, with an editor, a co-writer or a client, there’s always pressure to sand off the odd edges. Some of that is good editing. Some of it removes the very thing that made the work worth reading in the first place.
Learn to tell the difference. An edit that makes your meaning clearer is a gift. An edit that makes you sound like everybody else is a loss, and you’re allowed to fight for the strange sentence that only you would have written.
Villains
The 2000s films were far better at villains. Dafoe’s Goblin, Molina’s Octopus, McKellen’s Magneto and Ledger’s Joker all had inner lives, reasons and real menace. The MCU, with a handful of exceptions, has produced villains who exist to be punched at the end: dark mirrors of the hero, generic warlords and CGI armies with no faces.
I’ve written about this at length in The Antagonist Problem. The short version is that a franchise built around its heroes, which can’t let anything permanent happen to them, has very little room for a villain who matters.
Actors Who Brought Something
The 2000s films also cast differently. Singer hired two great Shakespearean actors to play Xavier and Magneto. Raimi hired Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina, character actors with decades of strange, fearless work behind them. Nolan cast Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Heath Ledger, and let Ledger take the Joker somewhere no studio would have approved on paper.
Those actors brought their own weight into the films, and the directors let them use it. The MCU cast brilliantly too, Downey above all, but it tended to shape its stars to fit the house tone. Ledger’s Joker could never have happened inside that system. Somebody would have asked for a joke to lighten the pencil trick.
What the MCU Did Better
Fairness demands the other side. The MCU did things the 2000s films never could.
It built a shared world across more than twenty films and paid it off in Endgame. That’s a real achievement in popular storytelling. It gave audiences a decade of characters they loved and watched grow. It made a lot of people very happy, and it made superhero films the center of Hollywood.
Some of that was worth the trade. But the trade had a cost, and after Endgame, the bill arrived. Phase Four and Phase Five showed what happens when consistency is all you’ve got left and the audience has seen the formula too many times.
The Films That Broke the Mold
The best recent superhero films have mostly been the ones that let a director back in. The Fantastic Four: First Steps has a real visual identity, a retro-futurist look and a tone of its own. Todd Phillips’s Joker, outside the MCU entirely, was a director’s film whatever you think of it. James Gunn’s Guardians films worked because they felt like Gunn.
The genre doesn’t need another shared universe. It needs directors who are allowed to make their own films and studios brave enough to let them. I’d trade five more crossover events for one superhero picture as strange and personal as Spider-Man 2.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The best 2000s superhero films belonged to their directors, and it showed in every frame. The MCU built a brand instead, and a brand can carry a franchise for a decade before the audience notices it’s the same film.
Voice is the thing a formula can’t replace. Readers come back for a voice they recognize, and they drift away from a product anybody could have written. Ask of any chapter you write: could somebody else have written this exact page? If the answer is yes, you haven’t put enough of yourself into it.
Give the Genre Back to Its Directors
Those 2000s superhero films weren’t perfect, but the good ones were unmistakably somebody’s: Singer’s, Raimi’s, Nolan’s. The MCU traded that for a house style and a shared universe, and it was worth billions until it wasn’t. If superhero films have a future, it looks a lot like 2004: a director with a vision, a studio that stays out of the way and a villain worth fearing.
