Tony and Pepper. Steve and Peggy. Bruce and Natasha. Thor and Jane. Strange and Christine. Fifteen years of romantic subplots, and almost none of them land.
It isn’t the actors. Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow are good together, and Natalie Portman has done this well elsewhere. It’s the shape of the films.
What a Romance Needs
Two people, a room and time. That’s the whole recipe. The audience has to watch them talk about nothing in particular long enough to believe they’d choose each other. Every good romantic subplot in any genre, from Han and Leia to the couple in Speed, buys that time somewhere.
A Marvel film has about twelve minutes of non-plot screen time, and it spends them on jokes.
What the Structure Does Instead
The relationships get announced. We’re told these two are together, usually in a scene where one waits at home while the other saves a city. The film then treats the relationship as an asset to threaten in act three. Nothing is built, so nothing can break.
The worst version is retroactive: two characters arrive in a film already in love, having had their courtship somewhere the audience wasn’t. Bruce and Natasha in Age of Ultron is the notorious case, because the film needs a relationship it never earned and then leans hard on it.
The Availability Problem
Actors are contracted per film, so partners disappear between instalments. Jane Foster is absent from two Thor films and explained away in a line. Christine Palmer turns up in Doctor Strange films for one scene at a time. You can’t build intimacy out of cameos, and the schedule makes cameos the default.
The Two That Work
Wanda and Vision, because a television series gave them nine hours and the relationship was the subject instead of the decoration. The whole premise of WandaVision is grief for a marriage the films never showed, and the show makes you feel the absence retroactively. That’s what time buys.
Peter and MJ, because the Spider-Man films are teenage stories where the romance is the plot instead of a subplot. They talk, they’re awkward, they have scenes with no villain in them. And the trilogy is willing to end on a real cost.
Why It Matters
Romantic stakes are the cheapest emotional leverage in fiction, and this franchise keeps reaching for them without paying the setup cost. When Tony looks at Pepper in the final act, the film is asking for a feeling it hasn’t funded.
It also flattens the characters. People reveal themselves in private far more than in fights, and a film that never puts two people alone in a kitchen has given up most of its characterization.
Craft Note
Craft Note
A relationship is built in scenes where nothing else is happening. If your structure has no room for two people talking about nothing, it has no room for a romance.
Threatening a relationship in act three only works if you spent act one earning it. Otherwise you’re asking the reader to feel something on credit.
Can the MCU fix its romance problem?
Only by giving somebody a film where the relationship is the plot. WandaVision and the Spider-Man trilogy both prove it’s possible, and both did it by refusing to treat the couple as a subplot.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists