Marvel’s post-Avengers: Endgame era has come under intense scrutiny for continually serving up some of the worst-reviewed entries in the entire MCU. Phase Five opener Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was supposed to wipe away all the negativity surrounding Phase Four, but it only went and doubled down on it by earning the franchise’s joint-worst score on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet, this revamped ranking of the movies based on RT’s ratings proves that it’s all subjective.
One Redditor decided to take the critics and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes and create a combined score for each MCU film to date, and the result was that it changed the franchise’s qualitative ranking pretty substantially. For starters, the impossible happened, and Phase Four, the most widely derided of all Marvel phases, now claims the two top spots on the list. According to this combination ranking, the greatest MCU movie of them all is Spider-Man: No Way Home, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in second.
Both of these films are already among the top highest-rated Marvel films according to Rotten Tomatoes’ critics ratings — with their 93 percent and 91 percent scores, respectively — however their near-perfect 98 percent audience scores are what shunt them forward into the gold and silver spots for this list. Meanwhile, Iron Man and Endgame share the honor of having RT’s highest critics scores at 94 percent, but their 91 and 90 percent audience ratings see them drop to third and fifth place in this alternate ranking.
At the other end of the list, Quantumania enjoys a slight reprieve by coming in second-to-last instead of joint last, with the review-bombed Captain Marvel instead slipping into that position. All in all, blending the audience and critics scores together gives Phase Four a much fairer go of it, with its entries scattered throughout all four tiers of the ranking. Does that mean all the talk of Marvel reaching the end of its glory days is overblown? Who knows, but it certainly looks like reports of the MCU’s death have been greatly exaggerated.