The MCU Phase 4 and Beyond (2021-present) Review

Infinity War and Endgame resolved eleven years of setup. What followed was a slate built to fill a streaming service, with thirty-one projects across two phases in roughly four years.

The 4 is arithmetic. I have seen twenty-four of the thirty-one and scored them, and the mean comes out at 3.75 with a median of 5. Rounding to the phase as a whole gives a 4, and the number hides a pattern that matters more than the average does.

That pattern is a split. Thirteen of the twenty-four sit at 5 or above and nine sit at 2 or below, with almost nothing in between. This is not a machine producing reliable mediocrity. It is a machine producing good work and near-worthless work with no middle ground.

The Numbers

Phase 4 averages 4.4 across fifteen scored projects with a median of 5. Phase 5 averages 2.67 across nine with a median of 1.

The median is the number that indicts it. A mean can be dragged down by two disasters. A median of 1 means the typical Phase 5 project, and not the worst one, sits near the floor.

The gap between the two phases is 1.73 points on a ten point scale, which is the distance between a body of work you would recommend with reservations and one you would tell somebody to avoid unless they already know in advance which specific entries are worth the time.

Films and series decline together, which rules out the easy explanation. Phase 4 films average 4.29 and Phase 5 films 2.5. Phase 4 series average 4.5 and Phase 5 series 3.0. The television was never the problem people said it was.

Seven projects are unscored because I have not seen them, and their absence probably flatters the result. Nothing in the unseen group carries the reputation of a No Way Home or a Guardians Vol. 3.

The unseen list is itself a finding. Werewolf by Night, the Holiday Special, Secret Invasion, two seasons of What If, Echo and Daredevil: Born Again went past without ever becoming appointments, which for somebody who saw every film of the first three phases in a cinema is the clearest measurement available of what the volume did.

What the Good Ones Share

Every project scored at 6 or above is either self-contained or a continuation by the people who started it.

Loki in both seasons has a governing idea about determinism, a bureaucracy with rules it establishes and obeys, and a lead who wants something. Guardians Vol. 3 is James Gunn finishing a decade-long story about a specific cruelty done to one character. WandaVision spends most of its run inside a formal idea about grief.

No Way Home is the outlier at 8 and appears to break the rule, since it depends entirely on external material. What it depends on is twenty years of films the audience already saw, which is a completely different proposition from requiring a series that aired last month.

The projects at 1 or below share the opposite trait. New leads, spin-offs and handovers, made to introduce somebody instead of to be about something, with the introduction as the entire purpose.

Both of the Phase 5 sevens confirm it from the other direction. Guardians Vol. 3 and Loki season 2 are continuations by returning creators of things established in Phase 4, which means every genuinely good thing in Phase 5 was planted before the volume decision took hold.

Curation Does Not Scale

Phases 1 to 3 released two or three films a year, and Kevin Feige personally shepherded each. Phase 4 onward released around forty-seven projects in five years across film and streaming.

That process has a throughput limit set by one person’s attention. At three films a year a producer reads every draft and watches every cut. At ten projects a year across two formats, they are approving summaries.

What disappears first is not craft, which can be hired. It is selection, because judgment cannot be delegated without becoming something else, and the split distribution is what selection failure looks like from outside.

The visual effects situation is the same problem in another department, with vendors reportedly working impossible schedules across overlapping projects. That is a supply line where the delivery dates are fixed and the work is the variable.

Homework Is Not a Story

Plot began moving between formats. An arc starts in a series, resolves in a film, and references a special that aired between them.

That assumes total consumption. Somebody watching only the films meets characters behaving as though a relationship exists, and the film cannot pause to explain without insulting everybody who did the reading.

The first three phases avoided it. Every film worked alone and the connective material was a reward for attention. Optional depth became mandatory prerequisite, and the difference is whether your audience can start anywhere.

The multiverse compounded it. If a death can be undone by locating another version of the person, the audience has been instructed not to invest, and no amount of well-staged spectacle recovers from that instruction.

The Audience Learned to Wait

Opening weekends held up longer than quality did, and the decline shows in second weekends and in the gap between openings and totals.

Ten years of consistent quality created a habit of turning up without checking reviews, which is the most valuable thing a franchise can own. Roughly three years of split output spent it, and habits of that kind are far easier to lose than to build.

Streaming accelerated it. A film reaching a subscription service within months trains its own audience to weigh a ticket against a short wait.

The split distribution makes that worse than a flat decline would. If everything were mediocre, an audience would lower its expectations and keep attending out of habit. When half the output is good and half is close to worthless, the rational response is to wait for the verdict, and waiting is the behavior that removes an opening weekend.

The correction has begun, with a reduced slate and several projects canceled or delayed. The casting disruption of recent years forced rewrites at exactly the moment the plan needed stability, which is genuinely outside anybody’s control and made the volume problem worse.

Should you watch MCU Phase 4 and Beyond?

Watch the ones that are about something and skip the rest, which by my count is thirteen of twenty-four worth your time. The decline is real, the average is 3.75, and the useful finding is that the failures and the successes are further apart than they have ever been.

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