According to the theory of the multiverse, there’s a universe somewhere in the multiverse where the Multiverse Saga was alright.
Unfortunately for us, that’s not the universe we wound up in. We got the one where Phase Four of the MCU had the stink of studio senioritis all over it. Where Kevin Feige took a couple of well-deserved years to drink White Claws on the beach and celebrate making the biggest movie franchise in history.
And now, here we are, 3,279 minutes’ worth of Phases Four and Five richer. We made a lot of new friends along the way. Do you know what’s great about friends? You don’t have to keep them if you don’t want to. Here’s a look at some of the dry skin that the MCU looks likely to slough off in the coming phases.
G’iah
Like the makers of Game of Thrones before them, Marvel Studios recently learned exactly how much the internet can learn to hate you if you make Emilia Clarke too powerful in the last couple of hours of your way-too-expensive fantasy drama.
Clarke has a lot of gifts. She’s a fine performer. So it’s difficult to guess why the makers of Secret Invasion thought that she’d be best utilized by brooding photogenically for eight episodes and then emotionlessly recreating one of the fights from the later points in DC Universe Online where every character has all the superpowers. Unfortunately, she’s now become one of those Heroes season 3 Sylar characters who you can’t write as relatable without cranking down her powers first. Dollars to donuts, if we ever see G’iah again, she’ll be revealing a dramatic weakness and then dying or being de-powered within six minutes of joining the proceedings.
America Chavez
Quick: What were some of your favorite America Chavez lines from Multiverse of Madness?
No? Okay, scratch that. Which part of Chavez’s character arc moved you the most during Multiverse of Madness?
Nothing. Alright, what about this: What aspect of her character stuck with you the most, aside from “she wears a jean jacket” and “Disney ham-fistedly compartmentalized her two moms so they could cut the whole subplot and still secure a release in big markets where they don’t cotton to that sort of thing, like China and Miami?”
You’re right, it was a pretty cool jean jacket.
Ralph Bohner
If the Multiverse Saga has a mascot, it’s Ralph Bohner. No other character so perfectly encapsulates the eye-widening potential of Phase Four, the way it made fans wonder what potential was waiting over Disney’s horizon of infinite money. No other character so perfectly made us realize that the answer, at best, was a wiener joke.
I was working for a different website when I got the screener copies of episodes one, two, and three of WandaVision. I had to sit there for weeks, biting my nails, waiting for my nerd friends to finally see what I had seen. I was something close to manic when they finally caught up to the fact that Evan Peters was returning as Pietro. What did it mean? Had Wanda breached the walls of studio licensing rights and brought the mutants of the X-Men movies I loved so much as a kid into the MCU?
Nope. Again, just a wiener joke. Good one, Ralph. You’ll be missed.
Werewolf by Night
This one’s pretty straightforward. The vibe leaking out of the room at MCU headquarters right now seems to be “sure, you made something unique and brilliant, but unique and brilliant don’t keep the lights on at EPCOT.” Werewolf by Night and its hero, a guy who was a werewolf by night, shook things up in a way that genuinely got its worn-out audience psyched for more Marvel. Will we ever see him again? It’s hard to imagine we will, except maybe in the Blade reboot, assuming that ever, ever, ever, ever, ever gets off the ground.
Every Eternal
As God is my witness, I almost didn’t include the characters from Eternals on this list because I forgot that Eternals came out.
Man-Thing
What breaks your heart about this one is how great it was. In an unexpected ruffle during the plot of Werewolf by Night, audiences got a high-budget introduction to Man-Thing, the theoretically unfilmable swamp monster with a tentacle-based McDonald’s logo for a face. Everything about him was perfect. It looked like he’d walked off the pages of the comics. But with Marvel moving towards safer, more widely appealing bets moving forward, I’m afraid we won’t see him again. Unfortunately, that fear means that I’ll burn at Man-Thing’s touch, but I’m willing to take the hit to see that character design up close one more time.
Kevin Bacon
There are actors who seem like they do MCU projects because they want to be a part of one of history’s biggest film franchises, and there are actors who seem like they do MCU projects because they love James Gunn. Kevin Bacon had already put in his time wearing stupid comic book helmets when he showed up in X-Men: First Class. He didn’t have to do The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. He had Sebastian Shaw money.
No. He did it because the Guardians property is charming, and because the only people who seem to dislike James Gunn are the people who haven’t worked with him. Now that Gunn has closed the book on his time at Marvel, it seems likely that Bacon and the majority of the Guardians team will be cut loose.
Namor
Oh boy, the MCU is in a real barrel of honey over this one. Namor was supposed to represent a bold new era in Marvel stories, drawn from one of the comics’ original superhumans and reimagined as a science fiction celebration of Mesoamerican history. Then, Namor performer Tenoch Huerta wound up accused of sexual assault. That, combined with that time when he praised the MCU for scrapping the “Greek myth” of Atlantis in favor of the “real culture” of equally-pretend underwater city of Talokan, and you’ve got to ask yourself: “How much trouble is a guy with pigeon wings for ankles actually worth?”
Love, Axl, and every other kid from Love and Thunder
You want to know whose fault this is? It’s Stranger Things’ fault, that’s who. Hollywood went 40 years – from E.T. to the dawn of the Netflix original – without one single worthwhile ensemble cast of child actors. The ‘90s had baby Olsen twins pantomiming human behavior in exchange for raw fish like they were dolphins at SeaWorld. The 2000s had eight dozen children indentured to the Disney Channel, drawing mouse ears with invisible wand sparkles in their sleep after 10-hour days of constant, Red Room-adjacent rehearsal. Nobody expected anything better.
Then Netflix tudummed along and grew a bunch of emotionally manipulative, genetically engineered child actors in subterranean vats, all to really make us feel engaged enough to keep paying $8.99 a month whenever a bald kid made garbage move with her brain until her nose bled. “Hey, that looks easy!” other producers probably said as one, and suddenly everyone was all about high-budget movies and shows featuring wave after wave of prepubescents. Could most of them act? No. Of course not. Because they’re not supposed to act. They’re supposed to pretend to give a rat’s down lows about the Pythagorean Theorem and all the other trash we tell kids they’ll need to know if they want to have health insurance someday.
Zeus and his sweet boy
From the moment that Russell Crowe awkwardly stumbled into announcing his role as Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder while calling in to a local radio show in 2022, we should have known something had gone wrong. What we couldn’t have guessed had gone wrong specifically was, in a word, “the whole thing.”
Love and Thunder got weird. Not the good kind of weird, like Taika Waititi usually brings to the table. The bad kind of weird, where there’s clearly no synergy with the rest of the studio, so even though you’ve got a pantheon of gods in your movie and a pantheon of gods in your upcoming Moon Knight series, it doesn’t occur to anyone that it would make sense to at least have characters from one thing cameo in the other thing.
What was worse was the portrayal of Zeus by Russell Crowe, who played the character as a featured extra in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. He later told Vanity Fair that he refused to play the Zeus with an English accent as directed, since the character was Greek. This makes perfect sense, considering the way that he played Maximus of Hispania in Gladiator by doing a Señor Wences impression.
The real crime, of course, was dooming Brett Goldstein’s post credits Hercules to go down with the ship. That said, it was good practice for Goldstein, considering what was about to happen to Ted Lasso.