Marvel fans love to debate which movies they think wasted the potential of their premise—and the comic book storyline(s) they were based on—and which they think were great. And a new Reddit thread has served to yet again make me angry about the opinions of others. While the thread had some of the typical choices, like Thor: Dark World and even including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as one of the more recent choices, the answer that was often included that makes me irrationally angry is Black Widow.
Easily my favorite of the recent movies, Black Widow was a perfect spy flick mixed with the flair of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a way that worked and didn’t serve to give more questions than answers. We know exactly why the Widows were not in other aspects of the MCU and we can see exactly how that movie fit in with the MCU as a whole. I still wish we got it sooner, but a lot of people seem to hate the use of Taskmaster (a better use of the character than the comics, in my humble opinion) and they complain it got too Marvel-y, which I always find to be an annoying critique given that these movies are part of a larger universe.
But the thread as a whole showed us which of the movies in the MCU are a bit more divisive than those that are universally beloved, and while I have my own very positive feelings towards movies like Thor: Love and Thunder as well as Eternals, I know that there are those who do not like them and will bring them up on threads like this to try to make a point. And a lot of the newer entires on this list are, in my opinion, because of recency bias, because we cannot forget the biggest waste of potential that has ever been part of the MCU.
My pick? Well, it’s always Age of Ultron
God, I hate this movie. First, let me set the scene: I just moved to a big city and didn’t have my “Marvel” friends yet and didn’t want to go alone, so when I went to visit my best friends later that year, I watched it with them on DVD. I fell asleep three times, fully because I was bored. Finally, I stayed awake, watched it, and watched as Natasha Romanoff went on a whole thing about how she sees herself as a “monster” because she can’t have kids and that’s how she relates to Bruce Banner in a relationship that didn’t need to happen.
The movie is awash with bad dialogue (thanks Joss Whedon) and random new character arcs that make little to no sense, and while the one good thing it gave the world was my girl Wanda Maximoff, it came with the cost of this bad movie as her introduction. It could have been so much more, and yet we somehow ended up with this movie that just … is a big ol’ pile of nothing—minus Chris Evans ripping that log in half. That was nice.
(featured image: Marvel Entertainment)
