Name a Great Marvel Romance
Try it. Name a romance in the Marvel films that moved you the way a real love story does. Most people come up with one or two, and then stall for a long time. The MCU has made more than thirty films, full of attractive, charismatic people, and it has produced almost no memorable love stories.
When I try to answer that question, I stall too. That’s odd, because I’m a sucker for a good love story and this studio has the cast to deliver a dozen of them. Marvel keeps hiring wonderful actors to play partners, hands them a phone and a worried look, and then acts surprised when nobody remembers the couple.
It’s not for lack of trying, or lack of talent. Nearly every hero was given a love interest. Tony had Pepper. Steve had Peggy. Thor had Jane. Doctor Strange had Christine. Bruce had Betty and then Natasha. And most of those relationships are remembered, if at all, as a few scenes of banter and a longing look before the big fight.
The Pattern
Look at them one by one. Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, in Thor and The Dark World, is a brilliant scientist reduced to a love interest, and between films the relationship ended off screen. Rachel McAdams’s Christine Palmer, in Doctor Strange, exists mostly to worry about Stephen and patch him up. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts, in the Iron Man films, has real chemistry with Downey, and is usually on the other end of a phone while Tony does the interesting things.
Peggy Carter, in The First Avenger, is the strongest of them, and her love story with Steve works in that film. But it’s a wartime romance, cut short by the plot, and the franchise spent years using it for nostalgia instead of drama.
The pattern is clear. Romance in the MCU is a side dish, served in a few scenes and cleared away before the main course. Downey and Paltrow are the case that frustrates me most. They had the easy spark you can’t fake, and the films kept putting her on the other end of a phone call. I’d have traded one of the Iron Man battles for a single scene of those two just talking.
Built to Fail
The reasons are structural. First, time. Marvel films spend their running time on action, team banter and setting up the next film. A love story needs quiet scenes, conversations, moments of vulnerability, and those are the first things cut when a film has a battle to stage.
Second, and more important, the franchise can’t let romance change the hero.
A real love story changes the people in it. But Marvel’s heroes need to stay available and recognizable for the next film, so their relationships can’t be allowed to transform them. Love interests get written out between films, or put on hold, or turned into offstage support.
Third, the MCU’s tone. The franchise’s habit of undercutting every serious moment with a joke is poison to romance. Love stories need sincerity, and sincerity embarrasses the MCU, the way a parent’s hug embarrasses a teenager. Almost every romantic moment ends with a quip, usually from whoever is standing nearby. Of the three reasons, that reflex is the one I find hardest to forgive, because somebody chooses it in the edit every single time.
For Writers
Marvel’s romances fail because the franchise needs its heroes unchanged from film to film, and a real love story always changes the people in it.
Any long series faces the same pressure. It’s tempting to keep a romance on a slow simmer for book after book, because resolving it would change the dynamic. Readers notice when a relationship is being kept in a holding pattern for the writer’s convenience.
Let your characters’ relationships move, even in a long series. Let them grow, break, change or end. A relationship that never changes stops being a story and becomes scenery. Readers can feel the difference between a slow burn and a stall.
What Love Stories Need
Compare the films that do romance well. When Harry Met Sally spends its entire running time on two people talking, and lets their relationship develop over years. The Notebook builds its romance through obstacles, memory and loss. Brokeback Mountain and Carol are about love that society forbids, and their power comes from everything the characters can’t say.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and it’s also one of the great love stories of its century, because the premise exists to explore the relationship. Atonement breaks your heart with a single lie. Even Pretty Woman, as light as it is, gives its couple time, obstacles and a real change.
Every one of those films treats the relationship as the story. The MCU treats it as decoration, something to fill a few minutes between set pieces. You can see the difference in how the scenes are shot. A great romance lingers on faces. Marvel cuts away to the next explosion.
The Wanda and Vision Exception
The first real exception is Wanda and Vision.
Their relationship grew slowly across several films, from Age of Ultron through Civil War to Infinity War, in quiet scenes of two outsiders finding each other. In Infinity War, Wanda has to destroy Vision to stop Thanos, and then Thanos reverses it and kills him anyway. The franchise has few moments this painful.
Then came WandaVision, a whole series built around Wanda’s grief.
It’s a love story told through sitcom pastiche, and it works because it treats her loss seriously. Vision’s line to her, calling grief love persevering, became a line fans still quote years later. For once, a romance was allowed to change a character completely, and the audience felt it.
The Peter and MJ Exception
The second exception is Peter Parker and MJ in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Tom Holland and Zendaya have easy, awkward, believable chemistry, and the Homecoming films built their relationship patiently. The ending of No Way Home is the payoff: to save the world, Peter has everyone forget he exists, including MJ.
He goes to see her afterward, planning to remind her, and then doesn’t. He decides she’s better off without the danger he brings, and he walks out of the coffee shop a stranger to the person he loves most. It’s a quiet, understated, devastating scene, and it’s the best romantic moment in the MCU, because it costs the hero something permanent.
That coffee shop scene is the one I’d point to if someone told me Marvel can’t make you feel anything. Holland plays it quietly, and I think the restraint is what wrecks you. The studio’s instinct is usually to undo a loss like this in the next film, and I hope they leave this one alone.
What the Exceptions Share
The two exceptions have three things in common. Both relationships grew over several films, with time to breathe. The films treated both sincerely, without jokes to break the tension. And both changed the characters permanently, through loss.
That last point is the key. A franchise’s love stories only land when the franchise is willing to let love cost its heroes something. Wanda lost Vision. Peter lost MJ. The romances that mattered were the ones that ended, badly and for good.
For Writers
The only MCU romances that landed were built over several films, treated sincerely and allowed to cost the hero something permanent and painful.
Those three things apply to any love story. Give the relationship real time on the page. Protect its key moments from jokes and interruptions. And make sure that loving someone puts the character at real risk of loss, the kind they can’t undo with a spell or a sequel.
Readers remember the love stories that hurt. A romance with nothing at stake is pleasant, and forgotten by the next chapter. A romance that could break a character’s heart, and sometimes does, is unforgettable. That’s the one readers recommend to their friends.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
Weak romance doesn’t only waste the love interests. It flattens the heroes. A character who loves someone and might lose them is more human, more vulnerable and more interesting. Take that away, and you’re left with people who quip and fight and never seem to need anyone.
It also wastes a lot of talent, and a lot of goodwill from audiences who came to care about these people. Natalie Portman, Rachel McAdams and Gwyneth Paltrow are superb actors, and the MCU gave them almost nothing to do. Portman eventually came back as the Mighty Thor in Love and Thunder. That tells you something: to get a real role, she had to stop being the girlfriend.
Bruce and Natasha
Then there’s Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff, whose romance appeared out of nowhere in Age of Ultron. Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo are fine actors, but the relationship had no build-up, and its big scene, where Natasha compares herself to Bruce as a monster because she can’t have children, was widely criticized.
The romance was dropped in the next film and never really resolved. It’s the clearest example of the MCU’s approach, and the worst one: a relationship bolted onto the plot for a few scenes, given no room to grow and then abandoned. Johansson and Ruffalo deserved better than a subplot the studio itself seemed to forget.
Steve and Peggy’s Dance
The franchise’s biggest romantic gesture came at the end of Endgame. Steve Rogers, having returned the Infinity Stones to their places in time, stays in the past and finally gets his dance with Peggy Carter, living out the life he lost.
Plenty of viewers found it beautiful, a reward for a man who’d given everything. Others found it strange, because it erased the life Peggy had built without him and made his earlier romance with her great-niece, Sharon, awkward in hindsight. Either way, it’s telling that the MCU’s most romantic moment came as a parting gift at the end of a character’s story, when it could no longer change anything.
A Way Forward
More romance won’t fix it. Better romance will: fewer relationships, given real time and real stakes. Let a couple have a quiet scene without a joke at the end. Let a relationship change a hero. Let love cost something.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps points in the right direction. Reed and Sue are a married couple expecting a child, and their relationship drives the plot instead of sitting beside it. It’s not a great romance, but it’s a real marriage, and the film takes it seriously. Reed and Sue argue, worry and make terrible choices together, and the stakes of the whole plot rest on their love for their son. That’s more than most Marvel films have managed, and it’s a sign the studio may finally be learning.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Romance Problem is really a problem of stakes. The MCU kept its love stories safe so its heroes could stay the same, and safe love stories are forgettable.
A romance matters to readers only when it matters to the story, when the relationship drives the plot and changes the people in it.
If you include a love story, make it essential. If you could cut it without changing the plot, it isn’t doing its job.
Why can’t the MCU do romance?
The MCU can’t do romance because it won’t let romance change its heroes, won’t give it time and won’t stop joking long enough to take it seriously. Wanda and Vision and Peter and MJ are the proof: the only Marvel love stories people remember cost the heroes something permanent. I want the studio to learn from those two, because I’d happily sit through fewer battles for one couple I cared about.
