Thumb on the Button
I watch Marvel films in fast forward. Not all of them, and not the old ones. I’ll happily sit through The Winter Soldier or Infinity War at normal speed any day.
But since Endgame, I haven’t watched a new MCU film straight through. I hold the button down, skim the filler and stop when something worth watching turns up.
It started almost by accident, one film at a time, and turned into a habit. For more than a decade, I gave these films my full attention, because they’d earned it. Then, film by film, they stopped earning it. I’m not proud of it, exactly. I’d rather watch a Marvel film properly. The franchise just hasn’t given me enough reason to in years.
For Writers
The fast-forward button is an audience’s quiet verdict: the story is still wanted, but the running time isn’t worth it, at least not the way it was spent.
Readers do the same thing. They skim descriptions, skip flashbacks and jump ahead to the next line of dialogue. Every skipped page is feedback, a sign that the book asked for more attention than it earned there.
You can’t see readers skimming, but you can anticipate it. Read your draft as an impatient reader would. Wherever your own eyes slide ahead, a reader’s will too, and that’s the page to cut or sharpen. Readers rarely tell you they skimmed. They just stop recommending the book.
Love and Thunder
The first film I really fast-forwarded through was Thor: Love and Thunder. Christian Bale plays Gorr the God Butcher, a grieving father who’s lost his daughter and his faith, and his scenes are dark, sad and frightening. They belong in a much better film.
Around him, the film is a comedy sketch: screaming goats, Korg jokes, Russell Crowe doing a silly Zeus. Every time the film got close to something real, it cut to a gag, as if its own villain embarrassed it. So I started skipping the gags. The film I ended up watching was mostly Bale, and it was a lot better than the one Marvel released.
The sharpest loss is how much Bale was giving them. A grieving father who’s lost his daughter and his faith is a villain most franchises would kill for, and Marvel buried him under goat jokes. I’d have cut every gag and let the film be as dark as he was.
Quantumania and Brave New World
The habit stuck with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
There was a lot of computer-generated scenery, a lot of exposition about the quantum realm and MODOK, one of the silliest characters Marvel ever put on screen. What I stopped for was Jonathan Majors as Kang, the villain the franchise was supposedly building everything toward. His scenes had menace. Almost nothing else did.
By Captain America: Brave New World, I fast-forwarded almost the whole film.
The marketing promised a political thriller like The Winter Soldier. What I got was a thin plot, a lot of talking in rooms and Harrison Ford turning into a red Hulk in a finale that felt like an afterthought. I watched enough to know what happened. That was all the film asked of me.
It’s a strange thing to say about a Captain America film, given how much the character once meant to the franchise. Steve Rogers’s films were the backbone of the whole saga. This one felt like a placeholder, a way to mark time until the next big crossover.
What Fast Forward Means
Fast forward is a quiet kind of verdict. I haven’t given up on the franchise entirely. I still want to know what happens. I just don’t trust the films to be worth their running time anymore, so I take the story and leave the rest.
And I’m clearly not the only one. The Marvels became the lowest-grossing film in the MCU’s history in 2023. Brave New World underperformed. Thunderbolts got decent reviews and still struggled. Some people stopped going to cinemas and waited for Disney+. Some stopped watching entirely. Some, like me, still watch with a thumb on the button. It’s all the same message: you’ve lost us. Studios can read box office. What they seem slower to read is the quieter signal underneath it: people who still watch, but no longer care.
It Used to Be Different
The MCU didn’t always get this treatment from me. For more than ten years, I went along willingly. Iron Man was a delight. The Avengers was a huge, joyful crowd-pleaser. Winter Soldier, Guardians Vol. 2, Black Panther and Infinity War all deserved every minute.
Those films had something in common. They had characters I cared about, stakes that felt real and a story that was going somewhere. Endgame paid all of it off. After that, the characters I’d followed for a decade were gone or retired, the stakes became multiversal and meaningless and the story stopped going anywhere at all. I’ve written about some of that in How the Multiverse Destroyed the MCU and The Snap, the Blip and the Catastrophe the MCU Refused to Show.
Homework
Part of what wore me down was the homework. After Endgame, Marvel expanded onto Disney+, and suddenly the films assumed you’d watched the series. To understand Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, you needed WandaVision. To follow The Marvels, you needed Ms. Marvel. Loki set up the whole multiverse saga.
For a casual viewer, that’s exhausting. A film used to be something you could just go and see. Now each one came with a reading list, and if you hadn’t done it, you sat there confused. Fast forward became my way of catching up on the plot without doing the homework in full. I’ve written more about the damage the series did in The Disney+ Series Drain.
Nothing Matters
The multiverse made it worse. Once any character can return from another universe, any death can be undone and any mistake erased, nothing that happens on screen matters. Why should I invest in a sacrifice when a variant can walk in next year?
The Kang saga, the storyline Marvel spent years building toward, then collapsed after the studio dropped Jonathan Majors in 2023, and Marvel rewrote the whole plan on the fly. For anybody who had followed the setup carefully, it was one more lesson that Marvel wasn’t rewarding close attention. So I stopped paying close attention. That one stung, because Kang was the reason I’d taken my thumb off the button during Quantumania. He was the only thing in that film with menace, and then the villain and the saga built around him were gone.
The Quips
And then there are the jokes. The MCU’s habit of undercutting every serious moment with a wisecrack worked when the films had real stakes underneath. Tony Stark’s quips were funny because Tony was also a man in real trouble.
By Phase Four, the quips were everywhere and the trouble was gone. Every emotional scene ended in a gag, every villain got a punchline and every threat was defused before it could land. When a film refuses to take itself seriously, it’s hard to blame the audience for doing the same, and a comedy you’ve heard before is the easiest thing in the world to skip.
The quips are the part I resent most. A joke that plays on top of real danger makes the danger sharper. A joke that replaces the danger is the studio telling me not to care, and I’ve taken the hint.
Blaming the Audience
The studio’s response to people like me hasn’t helped. When audiences started drifting away, the easy explanation was that the critics were bigots. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law even built jokes around mocking online complainers as misogynists. Some of those complainers were exactly that. They exist, and they deserve the contempt. But most of the people who drifted away weren’t angry about who was in the films. They were bored. They wanted good stories, and they weren’t getting them. Calling them names didn’t bring them back. It gave them one more reason to stay away.
For Writers
Marvel answered audience fatigue by treating its critics as bigots. It drove away the much larger group who were simply bored and wanted better stories.
When readers stop buying a series, the easiest explanation is that they’re the problem. It’s almost never the useful one, and it’s rarely the true one. Most readers who drift away aren’t hostile. They just stopped getting what they came for.
Listen for the quiet complaints, the reviews that say a book felt long or the characters stopped mattering. They’re more valuable than the loud ones, and they tell you exactly what to fix. The angry reader wants a fight. The disappointed reader wants a better book.
Streaming Changed the Deal
There’s another reason fast forward became possible: I’m usually watching at home, on Disney+, because the films arrive there within a few months. In a cinema, you can’t skip. At home, the button is right there, and a film that doesn’t hold my attention loses it within minutes.
That’s a problem for any franchise that depends on streaming. A film made to be watched in one sitting in the dark, with no distractions, has to work a lot harder on a sofa with a remote in hand. Marvel hasn’t made its recent films to that standard. It has made them to fill a catalog.
Other Franchises Too
Marvel isn’t the only franchise getting the fast-forward treatment. Plenty of viewers have done the same with the later Star Wars series, the sprawling DC films and a dozen streaming spin-offs that exist mainly to fill a catalog. The pattern is the same everywhere: a beloved brand, a flood of content and a slow leak of trust.
What’s different about Marvel is how much trust it had to lose. For a decade, it was the most reliable name in popular entertainment. People bought tickets on faith. That faith was the franchise’s greatest asset, and it’s been spent faster than anybody at Disney seemed to realize.
What Would Slow Me Down
It isn’t complicated. Give me characters worth caring about and a villain worth fearing. Make the stakes personal again, instead of cosmic and abstract. Let a director make a film that looks and feels like their own. And cut the jokes that undercut every serious moment.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps showed a glimmer of it. It had a real look, a family at its center and a villain with some scale. That’s the direction. I’d love to put the remote down again and just watch.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Why I’m Watching the MCU in Fast Forward is about attention as a currency. A franchise spends years earning it, and it can spend it all in a handful of films that ask for more than they give.
Every reader’s attention is on loan. Each page either repays it or runs up a debt, and when the debt gets too big, they skim or stop. Treat every scene as a request for the reader’s time, and make sure it gives something back.
Give Me a Reason to Press Play
I fast-forward through the new Marvel films because they haven’t deserved my full attention since Endgame.
I’m not angry. I’m bored, and so, judging by the box office, are millions of others. The day Marvel makes a film with characters worth caring about, a villain worth fearing and a director allowed to be himself, I’ll put the remote down and watch the whole film. First Steps suggests that day might come.
