The MCU has effectively handed off its magic touch to DC. The once-blessed studio has been subjected to many failures in recent memory.

Unlike the new direction of DC, headed by former Marvel director James Gunn, Marvel is flailing to find a cohesive vision. The outlier is Agatha All Along, a Disney+ original that is impossible not to love. Recently, Yassir Lester spoke to movieweb.com about the future of his project, Armor Wars. The story was originally slated to be a television series but has since been relegated to a feature film. It has been some time since audiences have heard any updates, but that isn’t up to Lester. The writer confirmed with the outlet that the film was still in active development, though that is a tricky situation.

“In the same way Blade [starring Mahershala Ali] goes away and comes back the next day, Armor Wars is — it’ll be a thing that happens every few months, then it won’t happen, then it’ll happen again.”

The Mahershala Ali led supernatural film was the most anticipated new project from the studio. It has been two decades since Wesley Snipes put on the shades of the iconic Daywalker. Adding Blade to the MCU would have raised the franchise to new heights. While magic has been acknowledged in the superhero franchise, the subject of vampires has not. Blade is an iconic comic book character that Oscar winning Ali would be perfect for.

It was heartbreaking as fans watched the prospects of the film get pushed further and further away until it was axed altogether. As it turned out, Snipe’s premonition in Deadpool & Wolverine would be correct. There’s only ever going to be one Blade.

Secret Invasion hasn’t helped the future of Armor Wars

Blade has undergone creative overturn and delays since it was first announced but there is no real reason why it shouldn’t be moving forward. For whatever reason, those at Marvel can’t seem to make it work. Armor Wars is getting the same treatment but as unfortunate as it is, the film always had the odds stacked against it.

Armor Wars follows the continuity of the much-maligned limited series, Secret Invasion. Premiering in 2023, the series came at a time when the Marvel brand was still exciting. On the heels of WandaVision and Loki, Secret Invasion had the potential to be another Captain America: Winter Soldier. Based on the comic run of the same name, Secret Invasion follows a secret sect of the shapeshifting Skrulls who infiltrate Earth on every level. In the comic, this had grave ramifications and genuine surprises.

Disney+’s Secret Invasion ultimately turned out to be less of an espionage film and more of a predictable six-episode run that killed off beloved characters for shock value. The series endes with Talos’ (Ben Mendelsohn) daughter G’iah (Emilia Clarke) absorbing practically every ability known to man, making her extremely overpowered. The series doesn’t follow what made the comic so terrifying and the Skrull invasion didn’t have any impact on the MCU, unlike the Hydra plot of Winter Soldier.

One of the strangest developments in the series was the revelation that Rhodey (Don Cheadle) had been impersonated by a Skull. It is unclear where the MCU was planning to take this plot after, but it was supposed to segue into Armor Wars with the world at odds following the Skrull attack. The visceral reaction against Secret Invasion may have made Marvel heads reconsider the plan. But this misstep is consistent with almost every problem with franchises.

Studio executives don’t have a great understanding of what fans want. Marvel was never about alien invasions or big explosions. Viewers just want their stories to be character-driven and have real consequences. Armor Wars has the potential to work. Marvel just has to return to what made it great in the first place.

After a break of eight months, Marvel has finally served up a new live-action TV series in the form of Agatha All Along. If you ask WandaVision lovers, it’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for the past three years — a compelling, creative ride down the Witches’ Road. There’s a ton of positive buzz on social media, but a glimpse at Rotten Tomatoes somehow tells a very different story.

At the time of writing, Agatha All Along is sitting at 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, that is still a respectable fresh score, but due to the way that TV ratings tend to be much more generous than those for films that means it’s still shockingly low for a Marvel series. For comparison, WandaVision is sitting pretty with a 92% Tomatometer. Agatha‘s score will obviously change somewhat over the rest of the show’s run, but at current estimations, its RT rating means it is officially the third worst MCU show, behind Secret Invasion (52%) and Echo (70%).

But is Agatha really deserving of such an ignominious placement in the pecking order, or is the show under a sinister hex of its own?

It’s no secret why Agatha All Along is performing poorly on Rotten Tomatoes

The curious thing about Agatha‘s Rotten Tomatoes scores is that while the critic rating is steadily increasing, proving that more positive reviews are rolling in as critics wake up to the show’s brilliance, its audience score is going in the opposite direction. Early audience reactions — aka the Popcornmeter — were upwards of 80% but now they’re slipping, with the user score also at 74% at the time of writing.

This is tragically not a surprise, given the ranking of Marvel’s prior shows via audience scores. The bottom three? Echo (61%), Secret Invasion (44%), and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (32%). Notice what two of those have in common… They have female leads. And, sure, while Secret Invasion was viewed as a major disappointment with whoever you ask, the fact that its finale saw a female character become the most powerful being in the MCU (Emilia Clarke’s G’iah) probably didn’t help endear it to a certain subset of “fans.”

Review-bombing, particularly for Disney projects, has become a serious, ever-growing problem in recent times, as cancelled series like The Acolyte can attest to. The pattern has become depressingly easy to predict — Show X is promoted as featuring a strong female-fronted energy or containing LGBTQ+ characters and themes, Show X gets unusually low RT ratings. Things are the same elsewhere, too — on IMDb, Agatha has sunk to an unjust 6.7.

In Agatha All Along, Kathryn Hahn’s eponymous character finally escapes a hex that once made her think she was still living in the 1950s. Apparently, certain amateur reviewers out there need to escape from their own similar mental prisons. In the meantime, the rest of us can watch Agatha get better and better as it continues with new episodes Wednesdays on Disney Plus, concluding Oct. 30.

It already feels like we’re living in the apocalypse, which is probably why Netflix seems hellbent on depicting the end times on film. Over the last few years, the streamer has delivered multiple movies based around the end-of-the-world, be it from an impending comet, zombie pandemic or some supernatural force that preys on the senses. 

Some have enlisted casts so starry they warrant their own constellation (Don’t Look Up), while others have gone on to birth massive pop culture moments (Bird Box). Below, we’re sorting through the ten most notable end-of-the-world movies on Netflix, ranked from worst to best. The end times are nigh!    

IO

Margaret Qualley stars as a scientist who, despite the earth’s increasing toxicity, remains on the planet to find a solution. While others have jetted off to colonize IO, one of Jupiter’s moons, she stays behind to research an earth-saving miracle and encounters a man just two days away from leaving earth. IO has a great concept that it sometimes fails to execute, but it’s a very fun watch.

The Silence

Given that it was released around the same period and its plot involved sound-hunting monsters, The Silence couldn’t help but draw immediate comparisons to A Quiet Place. While it’s certainly not as good as the latter film, The Silence earns points for its deeper dive into horror conventions with a cult subplot and eerie sound design. Oh, it also stars Stanley Tucci, which is always a major plus point.  

The Midnight Sky

The end times stretch all the way to the Arctic in The Midnight Sky, a quieter apocalyptic film starring George Clooney as a researcher finding other hospitable planets. Directed by Clooney himself, the film features breathtaking visuals and a third-act twist that throws a spanner in the works.  

White Noise

When a nearby chemical leak causes an airborne toxic event, Professor Jack Gladney (played by Adam Driver) must evacuate with his family in tow. Directed by Noah Baumbach and starring his wife Greta Gerwig, White Noise offers an absurdist and comedic take on the apocalypse and clear parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic. It might not have had the Oscar-worthiness some had hoped for, but it’s certainly a memorable entry into the genre. 

#Alive

If urban parkour was a sport riddled by zombies, #Alive would be the training ground. The 2020 South Korean film follows a video game live streamer trapped in his apartment when an undead apocalypse breaks out. Claustrophobic but still packed with gore, horror, and action, #Alive feels like the spiritual cousin of Train To Busan in all the best ways. 

Cargo

It’s rare for a zombie film to have heart, but 2017’s Cargo delivers on all the feels as Martin Lawrence’s character searches for a home amid an undead outbreak. Fans of the genre’s more thrilling aspects will find plenty to love, too, but Cargo is at its core a film about parenthood. Who said zombies can’t be family-friendly?

Bird Box

Audiences were swept up in Bird Box mania in 2018, when Netflix premiered the Sandra Bullock-starring film to widespread fanfare. Bullock stars as a woman surviving an apocalypse in which a mysterious entity compels people to suicide, battling hysterical fellow survivors and a perilous trip to a safe haven along the way. The film was watched by more than 45 million accounts and enjoyed the best opening week for a Netflix film in the streamer’s history.  

Army of the Dead

Following his acclaimed Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004, director Zack Snyder had much to prove upon the release of his fellow zombie movie, Army of the Dead. Thankfully, the apocalyptic movie delivered on much of its promise, with stylish set design, a totally game cast including Dave Bautista AND Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell, and a fresh take on the genre with a heist twist.

Don’t Look Up

Memorable for its A-list cast that includes Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Cate Blanchett, Don’t Look Up is Netflix’s starriest apocalyptic movie. It follows two scientists who discover that an extinction-level comet is headed towards Earth, and their attempt (and failure) to alert the public to the imminent threat. Director Adam McKay has fun with the clear parallels to the climate crisis, and scored an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.   

Leave The World Behind

Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as a married couple in Leave The World Behind, an apocalyptic thriller chronicling the onset of a mysterious blackout, environmental oddities and a civil war. The film is based on the 2020 novel of the same name, and makes fascinating commentary on society’s penchant for in-fighting when faced with a foreign threat. There’s also plenty of eerie deer symbolism, and a Friends cameo.

Samuel L. Jackson is still passionately campaigning for a Mace Windu television show, and we know the Star Wars fandom has wanted this for years, so what’s really stopping him from coming down upon thee with great vengeance?

During a recent profile on the prequel trilogy run by Empire magazine, the MCU star known for the unmistakable face and voice of Nick Fury exclaimed that he still wants to return as everyone’s favorite purple-lightsabered badass Mace Windu. In fact, he has three words for anyone who says it’s not possible to bring the Mace back, and they’re in the capital. “HE’S NOT DEAD!!!”

We agree wholeheartedly. Sure, Mace Windu was Force-electrocuted by Palpatine himself, and then chucked off the Senate Office building with furious anger, but let’s not forget a golden rule: Jedi don’t take height damage. The Force will have sustained Mace Windu long enough to survive, and perhaps he’s been in hiding all these years waiting for the right moment to resurface and save the galaxy again.

Now, the only thing standing in the way of all that amazing potential is Disney and Lucasfilm themselves. Are you telling me we can develop solo projects for a dozen protagonists and side characters but not give Mace Windu his due after all these years?

Of course, Disney would understandably be a bit hesitant to contract Samuel L. Jackson for such a large-scale project after the Secret Invasion fiasco — one of the most panned and divisive MCU projects to date — but let’s not forget Jackson’s acting was one of the few redeeming qualities of that show, if anything.

Having Mace Windu show up again after two decades is exactly the sort of thing the sinking Star Wars ship needs to hang on just a little longer. But hey, why do that when you can develop a movie no one even asked for?

Much has been made out of the MCU having a bad year in 2023, one which has even cast doubt on the longevity of the once-invincible franchise, but 2024 has only just begun and things are already looking up.

Although we’ve only got the one movie releasing over the next 12 months, Marvel Studios kicked off the year with a bang by premiering the five-part Echo on Disney Plus in early January. Things weren’t plain-sailing for the Hawkeye spinoff, and Daredevil: Born Again prelude, thanks to some bad press surrounding its long delay, unusual release strategy, and middling reviews, but we have reason to believe that Marvel will consider this one to be a slam-dunk success.

Not only that, but its fiscally smart cost-to-benefit ratio likely means that it’s about to shape the future of the MCU on the small screen.

Echo‘s thrifty budget and streaming success means Marvel Spotlight is the way forward

Echo‘s budget has been outed, and it’s quite a shock. According to Forbes, Echo only came with a $40 million price tag, which makes it the cheapest Marvel Studios series of the lot by a huge margin. For contrast, costly disasters Secret Invasion and She-Hulk set the studio back a whopping $212 million and $225 million, respectively, making them as expensive as an Avengers movie. Tatiana Maslany has even openly stated that She-Hulk season 2 is unlikely to happen because the show “blew” its budget.

What’s more, on the back of this Ant-Man-sized budget, Echo appears to have been a quiet hit. Although specific figures have yet to be revealed, the Alaqua Cox vehicle is known to have topped both the Disney Plus and Hulu charts following its simultaneous streaming release (via Deadline). It’s also understood that it led to increased numbers on those catching on Daredevil and the newly canonized Defenders Saga shows too.

When you take a look at this information, there seems only one course open to Kevin Feige; expedite the Marvel Spotlight initiative and ditch the rest. Intended as a banner for street-level, standalone, (and, let’s be honest, cheaper), MCU shows, Marvel Spotlight was launched with Echo and will likely be used for Daredevil: Born Again and its future offspring. Clearly, audiences are hungry for more content set in the DD corner of this universe, and if the studio only needs to spend pennies to send them to the top of streaming charts, then why would they deny the people what they want?

All the signs are pointing to Marvel delivering fewer flashy event miniseries and more, what I’m going to christen, meat-and-potatoes MCU shows — those series that do away with all the CGI and movie tie-ins and focus on old-school gritty vigilantes. You know, basically exactly what Netflix did to great success before Disney Plus was invented. Make no mistake, the echoes of Echo could be felt in this franchise for years to come.

On the face of it, Netflix’s latest Harlan Coben thriller series, Fool Me Once, has little in common with the MCU. Other than the fact that actor Richard Armitage once played a Nazi spy who accidentally helped Captain America. And that the show’s storyline gets so far-fetched it might as well be set in the same universe as a talking tree.

And yet Fool Me Once actually falls prey to a problem that Marvel has repeated time and again on Disney Plus, a problem that particularly plagued the MCU’s most disastrous series ever. Yes, although they may seem to have as little in common as Fool Me Once does with a plausible plot, the Netflix show shares a quality-killing trait with none other than Marvel’s Secret Invasion.

Fool Me Once and Secret Invasion both have fatally short finales

The benefit of streaming services is that production crews can make episodes as long as they like without having to be confined by traditional television scheduling, so that’s why it’s so frustrating when streaming shows decide to hand in tiny-teeny season finales, thereby reducing the impact of a series’ most important episode and therefore the series as a whole.

Both Fool Me Once and Secret Invasion are shows whose premieres were exactly 55 minutes in length but they ended with final episodes that were barely longer than half an hour — the Netflix show’s eighth installment was 34 minutes while the Marvel effort was 38 minutes. Both series were thriller series that required an action-packed but also informative finale to clear up many questions fans had over the course of the run. As a result of their brief lengths, however, both failed in this regard in many ways.

Secret Invasion‘s crimes are legendary at this point, but as a reminder, it left the plight of the Skrulls in an even worse state than at the show’s beginning, with questions regarding Nick Fury’s motivations and actions being left unanswered. Similarly, Fool Me Once drops a massive — and genuinely shocking — twist at the tail-end of its penultimate episode and then crowbars in a rushed conclusion in its 30-minute finale. In a mystery series this is particularly egregious, as various red herrings and the shifty behavior of would-be suspects are left unexplained (Shane, I still wouldn’t let you around my kid, buddy).

Thanks to the bewildering brevity of Fool Me Once‘s end, Maya’s motivations for the self-sacrificial stunt she plays on the Burketts are as mystifying as Fury’s own for being a grumpy sourpuss all season. Likewise, the way the Burketts are brought down is dealt with so swiftly and tied up in such a hurried bow that it makes as much sense as Emilia Clarke suddenly becoming the MCU’s strongest hero to defeat *checks Google* Gravik.

Of course, neither Netflix nor Disney Plus will learn any kind of lesson from these Ant-Man-sized endings, for very different reasons. Netflix won’t care because Fool Me Once is a ratings smash, whether audiences felt let down by the finale or not, while viewers never clicked on Secret Invasion in the first place so few stuck around long enough to be miffed about the conclusion being on the short side.

Fool me once, streaming, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on the MCU.

Secret Invasion serves as a showcase for Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and the other regular spies present throughout the series and touches on a variety of topics people do not always discuss easily like terrorism, torture and, now, just how old the main character of the production is.

What is Nick Fury’s age in Secret Invasion?

For those who are not aware of every single critiqued aspect of the MCU, one thing fans have been consistently troubled by is its general sense of time. Previously, it was assumed every project took place in the year it was released, but, issues with Spider-Man: No Way Home threw this into doubt.

While Secret Invasion is at least breaking this trend, it also does not show what Fury’s age is supposed to be. Some think it is Jackson’s actual age (74). However, if you go back earlier in the franchise, you can find a real answer.

In 2019’s Captain Marvel, we meet the character at an earlier stage of his life before the Skrulls became the vexing problem they are for him now, and in one part of the film we are treated to a shot of his S.H.I.E.L.D identification. If you look closely at it before the camera cuts away, you can see he was officially born on July 4, 1950, in Alabama.

This would make him two years and 11 months younger than Jackson and, while in a different state, the pair do have other parts of their real and fictional lives which cross over.

To begin with, while Fury was raised in Alabama, Jackson came of age in another part of the South (Tennessee). Fury also does not talk about his father, as indicated in Captain America: The Winter Soldier his grandfather was more of an influence and Jackson barely knew his biological father and was more influenced by his maternal grandparents and mother as well.

While Fury went into the military and intelligence sectors, Jackson of course became an actor after flirting with militancy during the Civil Rights Movement and, if you really want to argue, other similarities the pair have are in their wives. Fury is named Priscilla while Jackson has been married to a LaTanya since 1980. Whether more will tie the two together remains to be seen at this time.

All of Secret Invasion is available to stream on Disney Plus.

2008. 2012. 2019. These and many others will go down in film history as banner years for Marvel Studios — years that established, cemented, and proved beyond all doubt that the MCU was the biggest franchise in the world. 2023, though? Not so much.

It’s no secret that, since 2020, Marvel has been on much less surer footing than it was during the golden Infinity Saga era, but even by the end of 2022 there was still much hope and excitement for the future. Compare that to where things stand at the end of 2023, where even the existence of Avengers 5 — surely the safest bet on Marvel’s slate — is shrouded in doubt and mystery.

So, to put it plainly, what the heck happened? To be fair, various external events impacted on Marvel’s year in ways it could not have foreseen, but wherever the fault lies, these 10 mistakes are what caused the franchise to transform in just 12 months from the MCU to the MC-eww.

10. Hiring Jonathan Majors as Kang

Let’s just get the obvious one out of the way first. At the start of the year, choosing to hang the Kang Dynasty on Jonathan Majors looked to be a smart bet. Quantumania bombed (more on that in a moment), but his intense performance in it certainly wowed fans. And then things took a shocking turn. In March, Majors was arrested for domestic violence charges and he faces up to a year in prison if his ongoing trial goes against him. Majors’ career has otherwise dried up, but as far as we know, he remains attached to Marvel for the remainder of the Multiverse Saga. It seems that, as long as the actor keeps on being Kang, the MCU will continually be overshadowed by ugly off-screen events.

9. Making Ant-Man all-important

Unfortunately, Quantumania had enough problems on its plate before all the Majors drama came to light. Although trailers were enticing, once we got to see the threequel it became abundantly clear that attempting to crowbar Ant-Man, the little Marvel hero who could, into a leading Iron Man/Captain America-style character whose job it is to kick off Phase Five, was a terrible idea. The whole appeal of the first two films is their, well, small-scale storytelling, divorced from the wider franchise. Quantumania, meanwhile, creaks under the strain of upholding the entire Multiverse Saga on its shoulders. Ants may be able to lift 10 times their own weight, but not this much.

8. Producer Victoria Alonso fired amid mysterious circumstances

2023 seemed to bring one PR disaster after another for Marvel, and the same month of Majors’ arrest saw long-term studio producer Victoria Alonso suddenly let go from the company. Officially, Alonso was thrown under the bus for producing a movie for Amazon, and allegedly breaking her noncompete agreement, but other rumors swirled that her pro-LGBTQ+ stance was at odds with Disney’s amid the whole “Don’t Say Gay” debacle. Whatever the truth of it, the loss of Alonso — widely viewed as Kevin Feige’s right-hand woman — signaled to the world that things were not going entirely smoothly behind the scenes at the House of Ideas.

7. Revenge of the VFX artists

Audiences’ growing dissatisfaction with CGI in Marvel movies reached a head in 2023, thanks to the release of Quantumania — with its sludgy rendering of the Quantum Realm environment and the general uncanniness of M.O.D.O.K. garnering much criticism. In a shocking expose, VFX artists hit back to defend their reputations, revealing the harsh working conditions they’ve been put under and poor management on Marvel’s part (Alonso was implicated in this too). Ultimately, Marvel’s VFX artists officially unionized, which should hopefully see an uptick in their working experience as well as ensure a better quality of visuals on screen.

6. Letting James Gunn go

Perhaps this isn’t a problem that necessarily arose in 2023, but this year certainly brought Marvel’s folly into sharper focus. James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is easily the most acclaimed MCU movie of the year — it earned the most money, the best reviews, and it’s even landed itself a Golden Globe nomination. Unfortunately, Gunn’s not around to capitalize on this success and help Marvel save itself as he’s busy becoming Kevin Feige’s chief rival over at DC, building on a relationship he established with Warner Bros. following Disney’s attempt at firing him back in 2018. We’ll have to see how the Superman: Legacy vs. Thunderbolts battle goes in July 2025 before we can say how bad a mistake this was, but the odds are certainly in Superman’s favor.

5. The entire Secret Invasion finale

The egregious errors littered through Secret Invasion‘s infamous finale could fill an entire other listicle (oh, wait, they already have). From the nonsensical resolution to the awful CGI used in the Super-Skrull fight (again, not blaming you, VFX team!) to the awkward disconnection from The Marvels, Secret Invasion‘s last hour turned what was once a hugely promising noir thriller series into yet another embarrassment for a saga that already has far too many as it is. No wonder, in the wake of its release, Marvel was announced to be tearing down its current TV-making process and starting again from scratch.

4. The un-timely debut of Victor Timely

Thank God (Loki) for Loki season 2. Like Guardians 3, it was a rare treat beloved by pretty much the whole wide fandom. Although critics and casual viewers were left more than a little confused, the finale — in particular — was one of the strongest, smartest pieces of Marvel production we’ve had since Phase Three. And yet there’s one, well, major decision that ended up biting the show in the behind. At a time when the franchise really needed to distance itself from him, Jonathan Majors returned as Kang variant Victor Timely (albeit a role filmed before his arrest). Due to no fault of its own, the discourse around Loki‘s second season became somewhat dominated by Majors’ inclusion. Especially as Tom Hiddleston wasn’t around to be the show’s poster boy.

3. Ignoring the SAG-AFTRA strike

We can’t blame Marvel Studios specifically for both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that plagued Hollywood in 2023, but it’s up for argument if it handled the situation as best it could. Its 2024 and 2025 releases falling back like dominoes couldn’t be helped, but Marvel’s decision to drop Loki season 2 and, in particular, The Marvels in the fall, which meant the actors couldn’t help promote them, surely is at least partially the reason for the former’s vanishing viewing figures and the latter’s much-publicized box office bombing. Warner Bros., for example, knew enough to hold up Dune: Part Two until next spring, where it likely stands a stronger chance of performing. Who knows what could’ve happened to The Marvels if it had been released at a different time?

2. Marketing The Marvels

Saying the effects of the SAG strikes are the only reason for The Marvels‘ failure would be disingenuous, though, as clearly its status as the lowest-grossing MCU movie of all time is the result of various contributing factors. The movie’s marketing is definitely one of the biggest. For months, Marvel seemed happy to promote this one as a carefree, mid-level Marvel film that was mostly just a bit of fun. That might’ve worked back in the 2010s, but that wasn’t cutting it with the much more discerning moviegoers of the 2020s. When tracking was looking dangerously low, Marvel performed a sharp pivot, desperately attempting to hook us in with sepia-colored Avengers: Endgame clips and even spoiling the post-credits scene (usually a big no-no). But it was too late, the damage was done. Now we’re left to wonder if Marvel’s forgotten the magic of marketing its way to billion-dollar success.

1. Letting the world take the MCU for granted

The ultimate problem that’s plagued the MCU in 2023, however, is that Marvel fatigue ⏤ once a mere myth peddled by its doomsaying critics ⏤ genuinely does seem to be a real thing. This is something that’s been building for years, perhaps ever since Avengers: Endgame, but it’s fair to say that 2023 is the year that people really started drifting away from the franchise en masse. The tragedy is that Marvel has blindly assumed that the public’s love for the universe would continue automatically, so by pumping out content on both the big and small screens, the studio allowed for people to take the MCU’s existence for granted. With only one film coming in 2024, Marvel now has a prime opportunity to take stock and allow audiences to actually miss the MCU and get hungry for more again. Even if Deadpool 3 does promise to be a full meal on its own…

2023 was a year of ups and downs for the MCU, to put it mildly. With three movies and two Disney Plus shows released, the franchise’s offerings veered from universally acclaimed to the most embarrassing bombs Marvel has ever produced.

In some ways, a superhero story is only as good as its villain, so it probably only makes sense that this uneven quality also extends to the bad guys the MCU’s 2023 dished out as well. Across Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Marvels, Secret Invasion, and Loki season 2, we met a couple of villains that MCU fans will be talking about for years to come as well as a couple we could hardly remember a thing about once the credits rolled.

Ranked from worst to best, let’s sort the recent MCU villains we love to hate from those we are ambivalent about tolerating.

5. Dar-Benn

I will happily go on record as a defender of The Marvels — it’s a breezy, fast-paced popcorn movie with wonderful chemistry between its leads and a literal beast of a post-credits scene. But, yes, even I have to admit that Dar-Benn is an atrociously underwritten villain. A throwback to the bad old days of Malekith and Kaecilius, the Kree warmonger is less of a character than a walking obstacle to cause our trio of heroines some headaches in order to get the plot going. To be honest, this was probably exactly what director Nia DaCosta was going for, but it couldn’t have hurt to give Dar-Benn a little more texture.

4. Gravik

Gravik, like Secret Invasion itself, started out with a lot of potential. In the first episode alone, he proved himself one of the deadliest, no-nonsense villains in the entire franchise by killing hundreds in a terrorist attack. Not to mention offing an iconic MCU character in Maria Hill (still not cool, Marvel). Unfortunately, as the weeks went on, Gravik’s overall schemes and motivations grew murkier not clearer and by the end this once impressive antagonist was reduced to an ugly CGI eyesore of a slug fight with Emilia Clarke. Kingsley Ben-Adir might’ve also spent the summer in Barbie Land, but Gravik turned out not to be Kenough.

3. Kang the Conqueror

Third place?! Third place for the much-anticipated overarching evil of the entire Multiverse Saga? Yes, this placement would’ve seemed unthinkable back at the beginning of the year, when the Quantumania trailers were promising something epic and dark, but although we were expecting Kang to tear the Ant-Man family apart, the guy who’s supposed to be the new Thanos actually lost to a bunch of overgrown insects. And, if we’re counting Victor Timely from Loki season 2 as a Kang, then he was also turned to spaghetti approximately 500 times. In other words, the MCU has definitely failed to convince us he’s big bad material, but he has successfully auditioned to become the MCU’s answer to Kenny from South Park.

2. The High Evolutionary

Yes, the actual greatest MCU movie villain of 2023 will come as no surprise — it has to be the High Evolutionary from Guardians 3. He may lack a backstory or detailed motivations, but that’s actually the key to making this mad scientist with delusions of grandeur so thoroughly unpleasant. We all know that the most heinous sin any movie villain can commit is being mean to an animal, so his heartless experiments on Rocket and his friends ensure he’s very possibly the most hateable antagonist in Marvel history. The effectiveness of the character, especially when compared with Kang, might be bad news for the MCU, but it’s wonderful news for James Gunn’s DCU, which may just kill it on the villain front (no pressure, Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor).

1. Miss Minutes

Part of the brilliance of Loki season 2 is that it didn’t have a traditional villain figure, as the plot concerned Loki solving the problem of how to save the TVA and the timeline rather than simply battling a foe. And yet it still gave us arguably the most chilling villain of the MCU’s 2023. Yes, Kang can try all he likes, but there’s no one more sinister and intimidating than Miss Minutes. The contrast between Tara Strong’s perky vocal performance and the AI’s vindictive nature makes for one of the most unique and unsettling MCU antagonists ever. From what we’ve seen so far, it’s easy to believe she’s the real ultimate threat the multiverse is facing right now, not the Kangs. Imagine if she did get herself a body. The Avengers wouldn’t know what had hit them.

For those yet to get tangled in the concept of multiverse and how time has no beginning or end, Loki is just perched on a golden time throne. But those who know how the new God of Stories now has control over the whole of existence and time — do you really believe Loki has not used his powers to battle the threat he sacrificed himself to temporarily defeat?

There is already a very high probability that Loki’s recent “promotion” is the reason why the Time Stone is green, which effectively re-confirms that while he might have just become the God of Stories, the infinite and seamless flow of time affords him the luxury of controlling it at whatever point he pleases — past, present, or future.

This triggered a new, very plausible, possibility — has Loki been tampering with certain outcomes, especially ones that are connected or will directly connect to Kang and his variants, and their nefarious multiversal plots, or whatever comes after him (in case rumors of Marvel cutting ties with Jonathan Majors are true)? 

If we believe that Marvel has been cunning enough to deliberately give the Time Stone — which debuted way back in 2016 — its green hue to match Loki’s glowing jade-colored powers, which keep the multiverse alive and kicking, what else has happened lately that has the God of Mischief written all over it?

None of the good guys died in Ant-Man 3, while Kang got dispatched with insulting ease

Now, the heroes beating a villain and escaping unscathed is not new in the MCU. But Kang was presented as a baddie more powerful than Thanos, and definitely mightier than Ultron, and yet it took all the Avengers and many more to bring both down. 

In Quantumania, we have a bunch of high-functioning super suits that are nothing (underline it, highlight it, circle it) compared to Iron Man’s suits. They are donned by individuals who have never exhibited Tony-Stark-level intelligence and yet they still won — Hope finds Scott in time in the limitless Quantum Realm, their ants, who were somehow pulled into the Quantum Realm with them, just gained hyper-intelligence and evolved with astonishing speed, managed to find Pym, and defeated Kang. 

When Loki took centuries to master the technology of the Loom, no one else was privy to the time it took. For them, he suddenly seemed to possess the knowledge out of the blue. Sounds a lot like what the ants went through, eh? While he can’t make drastic changes to the timeline, he could probably lend enough time to the ones who need it the most.

The Harvest and G’iah

Loki is the reason the Harvest exists, and G’iah managed to get all juiced up on it. Let me explain.

Secret Invasion’s biggest and most deadly flaw; things keep happening out of the blue, events whose existence should have been logically teased a long time ago, or at least from the beginning of the show. “The Harvest” containing the DNA of almost every superhero and supervillain in the MCU was the heaviest of all the last straws. We learn Fury collected it after the Battle of Earth in Endgame, and it somehow included the DNA of even those who were not present during the face-off against Thanos.

Loki could already control minds, and as the God of stories, he now controls time and all of existence. I mean, Fury has never been able to keep a secret to save his life and yet, he kept the Harvest close to his heart for so long? Or has a benevolent God, one who’s been secretly amassing a super army, already had G’iah in mind as the perfect super super powerful hero, and was the one to get all the needed DNA together, while craftily planting the illusion in Fury’s head that he did it all himself?

So, let’s say that either Marvel really messed up writing Secret Invasion, or come up here and join me in believing that Gravik keeping G’iah (who he thought was Fury) in the radiation chamber with him while administering the Harvest, or her somehow keeping up her human disguise even as the procedure forced Gravik to revert to his Skrull form, was a higher power intervening, and not the result of a poorly-penned script.

America Chavez suddenly masters her powers in Multiverse of Madness

… And this was after she consistently glitched around the multiverse, and never practiced to get it right. But suddenly, when Wanda is nearing her desperation-driven villainy, America manages to open a portal to the exact reality whose Wanda was tormented by the OG Scarlet Witch, was already aware of the latter’s agenda, and thus knew what to say to make her realize the error of her ways. Felt more like “someone” who is already controlling every single reality out there, and was the one who made it happen.

Maybe Loki wanted Chavez to survive and aid in the impending multiversal war, knowing that she will come in handy while he is busy holding together the, well, whole of existence. Or maybe, he wanted the alternate Wanda to realize her true potential as the Scarlet Witch, and with the OG version seemingly dead in the MCU, the burden became hers to master the Darkhold, but without letting it control her like it did the heartbroken Earth-616 Wanda.

The re-birth of Love

Now, there is no making sense of Jane’s ear-bleeding penchant for phrases (“Eat my hammer,” anyone?) in the film or well, attributing sense to any of Thor: Love and Thunder’s nonsensical twists. But perhaps the entity Eternity bringing a superpowered Love back to life could be explained, if we bring Loki into the picture.

Towards the end of Love and Thunder, Thor, Gorr, and the steadily weakening Jane are at Eternity’s altar, but suddenly all of them are strangely whisked to the entity’s realm. Here, Gorr, after realizing the destruction he caused, chose to die a good man and asked instead for Love to be reborn, who is born with superpowers that for now, even at her young age, seem ready to trump that of Thor’s. I wonder who else this “coincidentally” reborn Love can beat — Kang, anyone?

This is just us looking at recent developments. Wonder what we will unearth if we dare to unravel the threads of the MCU from its very inception?

It’s been a rough stretch for MCU fans. We take our wins where we can get them. The second season of Loki was a win.

But what if it was an even bigger win? What if, beyond its Aronofsky-esque meditation on loneliness, acceptance, and the beauty of self sacrifice for the preservation of life — beautiful, chaotic, unpredictable life — it was also an opportunity to pretend that Secret Invasion didn’t happen? Wouldn’t that be dope? 

Well, we think it would be dope. What’s more, during the Loki episode “Glorious Purpose,” there’s a thread of dialogue that could just unravel Marvel’s least-beloved property, given a hard enough pull and the extension of a whole lot of disbelief. 

To recap, Loki timeslips his way through a clip show of his adventures with the TVA, eventually landing back on the day when he first met his good buddy Mobius. Mobius shares a thinly-veiled autobiographical story about the time that he hesitated to prune a variant who was destined to kill a few thousand people in an unapproved timeline. The issue: Mobius arrived on the scene and discovered that the variant was an adorable little boy. 

Maybe that’s nothing. The worlds of first-year philosophy and speculative time travel fiction are littered with the corpses of hypothetical baby future-murderers. It could be that this was just another in a long list of arguments in favor of visiting the past and shoving a stick in the spokes of Hitler’s bike when he was a kid.

…Or is it?

Then again, the MCU was recently the home of a high-profile little boy who grew up to kill thousands of people. What’s more, he did it in a timeline that felt anything but sacred – the one in the Disney Plus series Secret Invasion. 

That’s where viewers were introduced to Gravik, the Skrull extremist with a collection of doesn’t-make-a-lick-of-sense superpowers shot through his body. During Secret Invasion’s second episode, we see Gravik as a child, making a lifelong friend in apparent child soldier enthusiast Nick Fury. The kid is already pretty intense by this point, having been orphaned in the war with the Kree, and goes on to become a remorseless killer who explodes oodles of people, replaces War Machine with a duplicate, and somehow manages to make a fight between two Super Skrulls boring.

But what this Owen Wilson-based theory presupposes is, maybe he didn’t do any of that. Maybe Gravik was the little boy that Mobius couldn’t bring himself to prune. Maybe Secret Invasion takes place in a timeline that shouldn’t exist, and the bright light at the end of the series isn’t just Fury and his wife climbing into a sci-fi dealie. Maybe it’s the timeline being pruned by Renslayer, the way Mobius said it was, a few variants later than would have been ideal.

Alternatively, maybe we’re just still sore that the MCU wasted Olivia Colman the way that they did. You mourn your way, we’ll mourn ours.

Carol is already shouldering a lot of blame — for not being there when Monica’s mom died, for not rushing to aid Earth-616 when Thanos attacked, and for joining the second battle a little too late. And now, courtesy of the messy note Secret Invasion ended on, Captain Marvel now has a big target on her back.

Now, this is strictly in-universe, as in the real world, Brie Larson has established beyond any doubts (ones that only trolls seemed to harbor, anyway) that she has not joined the MCU to “prove herself” — she already did that long before she became Captain Marvel. But in the MCU, especially in its OG reality, Captain Marvel will have a hard time revamping her reputation now, unless things take a miraculous turn out of the blue in The Marvels.

In its insane bid to be illogically shocking, Secret Invasion employed many unexpected and unwarranted plot twists. While we are still hung up on the pointless deaths of Maria Hill and Talos, the real curveball was thrown our way by the dear U.S. President Ritson, by announcing that he has introduced a bill that will, from here on, recognize every alien that sets foot on Earth as enemy combatants. Directly burned by the Skrulls — for he trusted one with his life for years — Ritson also openly threatens any extraterrestrial being, and claims every one of them will be killed.

Wow, he is pissed. And what’s more, his words and palpable anger have given others the chance to openly target anyone they think are Skrulls, while hiding their original agenda, and killing them without the fear of consequences.

While we know that a change in authority is right around the corner — Harrison Ford will become the new president in Captain America 4 — it would be childish to expect that the MCU’s Congress didn’t pass Ritson’s bloody bill, as Gravik and the Skrulls did manage to kill thousands of innocent bystanders, and infiltrated the highest ranks of the government with plans of staging a grand coup.

So, while Fury walked away, scot-free, after saving the president, even though he played a big role in keeping the Skrulls on Earth, guess who will now shoulder the brunt of the blame? Yep, Captain Marvel. She is the one who gave Fury agency to make promises to the Skrulls about finding them a home, and it is not a secret. Imagine the kind of reception she would now receive on Earth — the efforts she put in to thwart Thanos already paled in comparison to Tony Stark’s sacrifice, and with the destruction the Skrulls caused, she will now be remembered as the reason the aliens were able to wreck so much havoc.

As the trio is expected to keep switching places in The Marvels, only Nov. 10 will tell if Carol will get a taste of the brewing anger towards her on Earth during her short, glitchy stays on the planet.