[!WARNING] This post is going to be full of things that are "spoiler shaped" for the MCU films and TV shows of the last several years. I'm about to argue that most of them aren't really spoilers and I don't feel like any of what I will include that is "spoiler shaped" should ruin your experiences watching these Marvel things, but if you are spoiler averse and not caught up on MCU take whatever caution you feel you need.

At the end of Season 2 of Loki the titular god of mischief and chaos literally assumes control of Marvel's entire cinematic multiverse. As we look forward to the weird expectations (both high and low) of the of the next Avengers film, this seems like the strongest figurative lens to me with which to look back on the somewhat recently completed Phase 5, it's relationship to Phase 4, and maybe temper expectations (in both directions, including my own) on what to expect as Phase 6 continues.

The first three phases of the MCU were a masterwork of making Order out of the Chaos that is the film-making process. Built as a complex multi-studio mutual assured destruction pact, the MCU had no assurances that any individual movie would get to production and relied on the budgetary whims of Paramount and Universal Studios. There was said to be a deep plan, but most of the pieces were assembled one at a time in standalone movies where the only obvious connections were fan bait Easter Eggs placed with the hope that they might play out later. They didn't always, and there were some missteps and continuity errors, but everyone marvels at how much they were able to pay off by the Endgame and make it seem like the whole thing had followed a single, well-organized plan all along.

We don't know yet know how Phase 6 will finish and if it will or will not deliver some similar capstone, some similar pay off, or some twist that will put the previous phases into some other perspective, perhaps as if to show off some grand plan all along like Endgame concluded. It is easier to expect that they cannot ring that bell twice. It is easy to succumb to "superhero fatigue" and feel tired about it all. Even the usually effusive Mikey of Movies with Mikey on the channel Filmjoy, a channel whose very mission is to seek joy in films rather than cynicism, eels doubt that Avengers: Doomsday may be the doomsday of the MCU, and expresses some sense of "superhero fatigue" and expects to fall off the ride soon, probably at Doomsday.

I can't blame anyone feeling that way. I don't expect to change any minds with a post like this one. I can only offer my perspective. But in the spirit of the mission statement of Filmjoy (YouTube), we've got a lot of movies and TV shows in Phases 4 and 5 and a couple in Phase 6 we can dig into and find at least some of the strange joys in them, and I think that is worthwhile. This really isn't a post trying to tell anyone that they are wrong about how they feel about what is going on with the MCU, this is a post for me to jabber on about all the dumb fun I've been having, whether that is useful to you or not or you want to be persuaded to try a different approach to the recent Phases.

If the first three phases of the MCU seemed characterized at building a lot of Order out of the Chaos that is film-making, I think the last two phases have been about making Chaos out of the Strict Order of the Disney processes and corporate expectations (as well as maybe subverting some of the expectations of the fans that the MCU built). Where the early MCU was a gamble and about the most chaotic way to build movies one could imagine, the modern MCU is a tent pole expected to send to theaters at least two Disney movies per year and one Sony movie every two to three years, presumably into perpetuity, deliver some number of direct-to-streaming TV episodes to keep people paying for those Disney+ subscriptions, and sell all of the toys and theme park trips that they can manage while doing all of that. None of that is a secret. (A lot of it is a burden, with great success comes greater obligation. Not one of Uncle Ben's best bon mots, that one.) Similarly fans still want and expect Easter Eggs that pay off all those terrible comics they read in their youth, or their half-remembered nostalgia for animated TV shows of the 90s, or their hyper-fixations in Marvel wikis. Fans desperately want the assurance and the excitement that everything is leading somewhere and will pay off as well as it did in Endgame. They are not wrong to want that, to seek that, to try to play ahead, and to keep hoping that all the "homework" will pay off. All of that is a hard, strict pressure on the movies, a demand for their shape and their contents.

The recent phases have been chaotic, both for fun and for confusion. What if the Chaos is the point here? If anything the through line of Phases 4 and 5 seems to be that the Chaos may be the point. It's kind of the outermost plot of Thunderbolts Asterisk Colon Asterisk The New Avengers that everything is chaos and out of your control, like your accidental supergroup becoming a Named Supergroup by some politician for political points, and you deal with it as best you can. What if we also just need to collectively embrace the Chaos? I know that's hard for some of us. But it is also an easy answer to some of the causes of "superhero fatigue" such as concern/angst/FOMO that you haven't/won't/can't "do all the homework": try embracing the chaos. You maybe don't need to do all the homework. Some of the people doing the most homework right now are having the least fun and I don't think that's entirely a coincidence. There are payoffs and rewards and callbacks still, but some of them hurt, because they are so chaotic.

As someone who has been watching it all and enjoying the ride for what it is, not treating it as homework, I can safely tell you that right now with hindsight it is all chaos and none of it matters enough to let it be considered homework to slog through. Where the first three phases made a serial narrative out of a series of intentionally standalone films, I think Phases 4 and 5 have made an incredible batch of standalone TV shows and films that seem serial, but are all almost still incredibly standalone. Watch what you want, enjoy what you can. I can (and will below) offer a travelogue of some of the joy I've had in these phases and maybe that will be a useful navigation guide for someone looking to embrace the chaos that already fell off the ride or is worried they may fall off soon. I'm not great at embracing the chaos either, but let's find all the joy we can. Use my abridged homework notes here if you need them.

The Kang Dynasty "Problem"

Okay, let's get this out of the way first: I know very well that the giant, allegedly, Thanos-sized elephant in the room is Kang the Conqueror. If you are responding "Who?" then "Congratulations you may have already won", you probably don't even need to know who Kang is/was at this point and can maybe skip this section. Kang has been the biggest, mostly self-assigned homework problem of Phases 4 and 5, and also the biggest political meltdown of real world drama outside of the MCU. The MCU role originating actor for Kang, Jonathan Majors was found guilty of assault and harassment, so Disney dropped his contract. (As they should.)

I have believed all along that Kang was a misdirect and sort of an Anti-Thanos or Reverse-Thanos, with a lot of cameos that would lead to him not being the Big Bad across three phases. Big up front, whimpering out in the end versus the reverse arc of Thanos' whisper campaign and some whimpering cameos up front ending in a big hurrah of villainy at the end. I'm not the only person "doing all the homework" to believe this about Kang, but I believe it is a rare opinion still. Perhaps I did extra credit, I don't know yet.

Kang became explicit homework to self-assign when in 2022 Kevin Feige stood in front of a San Diego Comic Con crowd and announced the first of the two-part Avengers spectacular to end Phase 6 would be subtitled The Kang Dynasty. Kevin Feige has lied about subtitles to Comic Con crowds before. Captain America: Civil War was originally Comic Con announced as Captain America: Serpent Society to avoid some types of spoilers. Even more recently Disney's massive marketing engine was hilariously "wasted" on months of selling a movie as just Thunderbolts Asterisk for a very last minute theatrical reveal that it was in fact full titled Thunderbolts Asterisk Colon Asterisk The New Avengers. What a silly, chaotic prank, I thought that that was great.

Per the wikis (since I read fewer comics than I'd like), The Kang Dynasty was a weird comics storyline that would have needed an incredible amount of work to rewrite it to fit the MCU. (It blew up the Marvel multiverse at the time in a way that made a big splash on comics readers in part because of decades of multiverse lore.) It would have need even more simplification than Age of Ultron needed to get from comics page to screen. It was also a terrible title and had unfortunate aspects of ancient "yellow fever" racism baked into its terrible title. Even when it was announced I felt fairly certain that there was no way Disney's marketing team, the same one that needed a ton of convincing and all of an Asian director and an Asian protagonist and an Asian actor for the role to even consider attempting "classic" Iron Man villain The Mandarin (and his ninja gang The Ten Rings) as anything more than a fake out, was going to let that make it all the way to the final marketing title. To be fair, that same Asian director was originally attached to the Avengers project so maybe there was some fake out even on Disney marketing at that Comic Con announcement to okay that title.

In 2024 after actor Jonathan Majors was cancelled from the MCU, Kevin Feige stood in front of another Comic Con crowd and this time made a big deal that the subtitle of the next Avengers movie was in fact Doomsday. To many fans, especially the ones doing all the homework but maybe not whatever weird extra credit I've been following with the existing expectation that The Kang Dynasty was a fake title, this was a huge surprise and seemed a drastic shift in the intent/plan of the movie. Even the attached Director and screenwriter had left, which added to make it look like a big shift. To be fair, the originally attached Director left to direct a Spider-Man movie, which we and Sony all still know is still bigger than the Avengers and that keeps Disney in their love/hate MCU partnership with Sony, and the new Directors came with a screenwriter attached to their hip (possibly surgically so, by Disney, in part presumably given their winning track record together in the MCU despite somewhat a critically-losing track record outside of it).

The MCU isn't afraid to recast actors. They recast Iron Man's best friend, The War Machine, in only his second intended appearance, officially for contract financial negotiation reasons but allegedly for domestic assault reasons not dissimilar to Jonathan Majors', albeit without a final conviction in a court of law. They recast The Hulk, the most globally recognizable Avenger the MCU had access to in the first phase of the MCU. They most recently recast beloved character actor William Hurt who passed away too soon to see some deep cut callbacks to his earliest MCU work. If the MCU can recast The Hulk, the MCU can recast anyone. If Kang mattered and The Kang Dynasty was the real plan, they'd have no difficulty recasting him. (Especially because "Multiverse Shenanigans" reasons in the comics already had that character shifting faces/disguises/looks over the years.) QED homework over-achieving nerds, and I say that with love as one of us.

All of that is out of pocket. What's actually in the movies and TV shows, and is it fun? Can we find the joy in it? Can we embrace all the real world drama as Chaos and move on? Does Kang "need" to be recast?

The titular Kang the Conqueror shows up in one and only one place across both Phases 4 and 5: Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. If the title doesn't clue you in, it is a chaotic jumbled mess of silly fun with the MCU's overtly silliest superhero. Kang was trapped in the Quantum Realm, the silly place Marvel characters go when they "Honey I Shrunk Myself" too hard. He acts as a somewhat friendly face in the first act and then does that sudden but inevitable betrayal you absolutely expect from the introduction in the first few minutes and becomes the film's ridiculous villain by the third act. It's a standard boring heavily telegraphed Face-Turn-Heel plot, but it's not about the plot it's about the silly friends we meet along the way and Paul Rudd smirking around and about it all.

The after credits scene, which Phase 1 used as an Easter Egg buffet, has the sort of won but mostly humiliated Kang show up in an arena full of multiverse clones of himself and says some nonsense that sounds important and like it might be called back to in a future movie. Phase 1 of the MCU taught a generation of nerds that these after credits stinger were some sort of grand connective tissue, because it was the easiest place to throw Easter Eggs and more importantly to fit a scene that the next movie could shoot in their production schedule and easily attach in the other film's post-production scheduling, knowing by that point what the next movie was really about and might best make it look like everyone was planning ahead more than playing by the chaotic seat of their pants, as is most film-making. Phase 4 and 5 kept doing the same thing of attaching these after credits stingers full of Easter Eggs, and some of them have even still come from the next production, but almost none of them have actually had anything connective to do with the next production. They are punchlines. They are truly meaningless homework, almost each and every single one of them.

So many of my friends upset about the "I thought the next Avengers movie was going to be The Kang Dynasty" rug pull get that feeling directly from this one, chaotic, silly after credits scene. One scene. In an Ant-Man movie! An Ant-Man movie that spent a giant chunk of its runtime mocking Kang as a useless idiot. Imagine if Thanos' first appearance was to replace Yellow Jacket in the first Ant-Man movie. Thanos would be a laughing stock well before you ever got to Infinity War. It is a credit to Majors' acting talent and on screen charisma that somehow an Ant-Man movie seems like a major tentpole for why Kang should plausibly be the Big Bad in Phase 6 of the MCU. I find this hilarious. I found it hilarious when Quantumania came out. I still find it hilarious now.

If you are only watching the movies Kang the Conqueror is explicitly a joke.

But we're not only watching the movies, we're doing all the "homework", so we have to talk about the Disney+ TV show Loki. Kang the Conqueror is not in Loki. You can skip the rest of this with the answer that Kang the Conqueror is still a joke in the MCU, trust me.

But if you need more homework notes, Loki does have two Jonathan Majors characters who maybe aren't entirely jokes, depending on how much you think a show about the Norse and MCU god of mischief and chaos can even be for serious and not itself a joke. The big bad, after many twists and turns (the journey is more fun than the final "twist" here!) is a stupidly monologuing Majors originated character with the silly name "He Who Remains" doing his best impression of The Architect from The Matrix and mansplaining the multiverse to everyone, but also especially Loki. He claims to be the good guy, of course, and that his goal is "simply" to protect the multiverse from even worse copies of himself, specifically Kang the Conqueror. (Ooh, name drop easter egg, wow.) This is all tell not show. Is Kang the Conqueror worse than a busy body with a terribly dumb name that thinks he knows the one and only right way how to rule the entire multiverse? We don't actually know in that first season, but if you've seen The Matrix film I mentioned and you're a fan of multiverses and you're not a fan of mansplaining, it certainly feels like "He Who Remains" is also a bit of a joke. A scary joke, but a joke. (Possibly also a knowing in-joke about Kevin Feige's role in the MCU in the first three Phases. See also the She-Hulk TV show for more fun on that subject.)

In the second season we get a more interesting Majors originated character, another "Kang Variant", Victor Timely, an eccentric inventor from a past Chicago World's Fair. More interesting in that the character has a lot more to do, not necessarily because it is a better character. Majors played him as a stuttering nerd stereotype to the nth degree that it is almost (but not quite?) ableist and offensive to neurodivergence and, uh, yeah that sure was a choice to make for a character with a TV season long sort of arc. (To be terribly fair, even if the actor wasn't a sleazebag, it might be good riddance either way, if you get what I'm selling. TV has enough Urkels.) By the end of the season Victor Timely is both the catalyst for and the hindrance to Loki doing what Season 1 Loki could not and truly deposing "He Who Remains" and becoming "the god of stories", replacing a "benevolent" dictator of order and a single easy to digest timeline with a god of mischief and chaos and a messy, unruly multiverse.

I find it especially useful to note that this Loki Season 2 story is the exact reverse of the comics Kang Dynasty. In the comics, there was an overt real world attempt to prune decades of crazy multiverse lore and Kang the Conqueror was the face of that. In the Disney+ MCU (which is still separate from the movie MCU despite trying to feel more connected) Loki says no to a simple timeline and yes to chaos and weird branching multiverses and takes his rightful place as the god of its stories. That's a background thread in Phase 4 and 5. We can take that as a figurative statement about the film MCU, and that's what I'm embracing in this post and why I led with it at the beginning.

Kang the Conqueror is a joke and has already been deposed in TV by Loki. Kang the Conqueror is humiliated by Ant-Man and a joke in the films. Anything else to do with Kang the Conqueror is probably gilding the lily, I don't think we need to recast Kang. I don't think it is a big deal that Avengers: The Kang Dynasty turned out to really be Avengers: Doomsday.

There's one more piece of comics homework involving Kang the Conqueror with respect to both Fantastic Four and the Young Avengers, and Fantastic Four: First Steps maybe hinted at it a tiny bit, but we still haven't had a real announcement of a Young Avengers movie, just a series of teases about it. So save that homework for a rainy day or look it up yourself in Comics Wikis if you love possible spoilers like I do.

While we are here, let's talk about the joy in these MCU properties: Loki is a gorgeous, fun TV show. It delivers a lot more of Tom Hiddleston's Loki, which you would expect. It delivers a great Owen Wilson character. It delivers some fun cameos from interesting character actors playing alternate universes' Loki. It includes a very Loki (in the Norse sense of mischief and chaos) will they/won't they romance question mark question mark between Hiddleston's Loki and a Lady Loki that prefers to be called Sylvie. The journey is fun. This biggest misstep is maybe too much Jonathan Majors, especially knowing what we know now about the actor being a sleeze, but the actor is so charismatic and there are many quite fun moments with Victor Timely, possible offensiveness aside.

I unrepentantly love Quantumania. It cements Paul Rudd's silly Ant-Man as the MCU's silly tell all book writer in the opening moments. (If you were doing all the homework and you hadn't already guessed from the silly Captain America: The Musical featured in the Hawkeye show, not that Hawkeye is "required homework" to enjoy the opening of Quantumania, whichever order you encounter them in is funny.) Ant-Man movies are such a fun vehicle for Paul Rudd to go silly or go home, and I have enjoyed all of them so far.

One other thing I enjoyed about Quantumanania was that it attempted the first Live Action MODOK. If you don't know what a MODOK is, I recommend the ridiculous stop motion Hulu exclusive series, one of two shows that made it out of the gauntlet of attempted "Offenders" TV shows. (Netflix got the street level Defenders, an erstwhile collection of heroes that defend New York City, with an eventual "team up together" Defenders show. Hulu tried to do shows for a bunch the Offenders, a supergroup of many of the weirder and more R-Rated Marvel anti-heroes: Howard the Duck, Dazzler, Hit-Monkey, and MODOK. Of those only MODOK and Hit-Monkey actually made it to Hulu streams, with no team up.) That's not homework, you won't learn anything useful about the MCU from that MODOK show. It's "What if Robot Chicken had a budget to do an entire show just about MODOK wanting to live a normal family life?" which is a ridiculously silly premise and the whole thing is a silly, fun time (with Patton Oswalt!).

It doesn't exactly work in Live Action. Nobody expected it would. Quantumania has fun with it and it is chaotic fun and I think the important bit is that they tried. MODOK is not a character you can do if you are taking yourself too seriously. It is not a grimdark anti-hero or villain you can do "realistically". It is first and foremost a comic book character. My favorite part to the MODOK appearance in Quantumania is that they stunt cast Bill Murray seemingly just to have one of the few living actors that could straight man deliver with any semblance of gravitas the phrase "Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing". The way Bill Murray delivers the line reading in question, it doesn't sound out of place in the MCU. It sounds like a serious threat. It's one of the silliest acronyms in comics, a genre full of silly acronyms. It's less silly in print than said out loud, which the 90s animated shows found out quickly and some of them even tried to distance themselves from it and used other choices for the acronym, because it is awful to say out loud, even by a voice actor with almost all the takes they need to get it right.

That was such a fun moment in theaters because enough of the audience takes the earnestness of Bill Murray's read at face value and most of the rest don't know if they should laugh because it isn't punchline shaped. I think it is one of the under-rated line readings in the entire MCU, a great reason to stunt cast Bill Murray, because if there was one actor in the world that could do it, it was probably Bill Murray. It really put some of the comic back in comics for me there.

The WandaVision "Problem"

If there is one Disney+ show that you "must" see, according to a lot of the homework suggestions, it is not Loki, it was WandaVision. WandaVision was great, chaotic fun. If it did anything particularly well, it completed an arc from Ant-Man and the Wasp about FBI Agent Woo deciding that he needed to learn some basic sleight-of-hand magic tricks after Ant-Man teased him with such. It's a small payoff that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of the MCU, but a chaotic fun detail and we're talking about silly things I enjoyed in the chaos along the way.

WandaVision plays with the TV format in a knowing, metatextual way and is also one of the top TV shows in the MCU simply because it had TV staff that understood and loved the TV format, not just film-makers trying to make a 6 hour movie and after the fact splitting it at roughly the hour marks as so many of the other Disney+ era TV shows easily accidentally became.

WandaVision is also the "required" homework that makes Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness weirdly harder for some to watch. The reason for that is text in the show, and repeated text in the sequel show Agatha All Along (similarly one of the best of Disney+ Marvel TV shows if for no other reason than that it was top to bottom designed to be a TV show), but very easily missed if you assume the "main character" in a TV show is always the protagonist and can't be the antagonist. Especially very easily missed if you think the "main character" of WandaVision is the first titular character, Wanda, and not, say, FBI Agent Woo and his sleight-of-hand tricks and also his coworker through strange circumstances Thor's Midgaard-friend Darcy, as maybe a counter-example.

Here's where I feel maybe the most bad about spoiling details because the show itself is a lovely slow drip, if you haven't seen it. True classic TV red herrings and cliffhangers and "you'll have to come back next week" edge of your seat thrills, that were especially thrilling week to week as it streamed. But it has also been long enough since it dropped and most of it has been spoiled in so many ways since that is is worth spoiling to do a decent recap to get to the heart of why the homework accidentally hurt so many people: The overt plot of WandaVision is that in grief after the death of Wanda's love, Vision, Wanda, the Chaos Witch of Marvel, takes over an entire small town, meddles with their minds, and makes everything a family sitcom, decade hopping with her growing power over the town. In the end of the show she is finally confronted with her own culpability in suborning an entire town of hostages, barely sort of hints at an apology, and uses that to convince herself to go hide out on the planet's most evil Mountain (which yes, of course a superhero filled version of Earth has a most evil Mountain; Mountains can be evil in comics) with the MCU's most evil book. (By this point if you had done "all" of the homework, you'd even recognize the MCU's most evil book from Agents of SHIELD and its multiple seasons about it, including one with Ghost Rider dealing with the evils of this most evil book, which somewhat doesn't fit the same timeline that WandaVision and Agatha All Along do because in those same years the book was supposedly solely in Agatha's possession, but also it is a book and multiple copies and editions can exist.)

But even in the text of WandaVision strictly by itself and especially with the not so subtle horror cinematography around the book every time it is shown in WandaVision, it should be clearly an "evil book" whether or not you also pick up it is "the most evil" because that isn't directly in the text.

Despite the show saying Wanda did an awful thing on a level that was beyond ordinary human scale levels of awful and that the ordinary humans like FBI Agent Woo and Darcy couldn't stop her, they could only redirect her, so many fans saw the last episode as an anti-hero redemption arc, not a final, full and complete Heel Turn. I personally don't know what part of "most evil Mountain" and "most evil Book" was so hard to understand that Wanda's takeaway from WandaVision was absolutely not "time to go back to heroing" but definitely "let's get serious about doing the evil on purpose, not just by accident".

Wanda is the start-to-finish villain in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (DSMOM). She plans to do unspeakable things with the MCU's most evil book, having finished studying it. If you've only been following the movies, DSMOM does an alright job of leading you to how Wanda got there from "her love was killed and she spiraled into crazy grief that she could not escape" to more text about the most evil book in the universe being the most evil book. Partly because Doctor Strange has some similar grief to exorcise. Partly because DSMOM is an incredible work of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead horror stylings applied the most possible ways to a superhero film. I still think that is one of the greatest Director hires just to get the right sort of genre switchup in an MCU film, because I loved the way Spider-Man 2 used that camp horror sensibility for Doc Ock, and it was very cool seeing the MCU give Sam Raimi a chance to do that, but at the scale of an entire film's worth of camp horror.

If you came into DSMOM thinking the finale of WandaVision was a redemption moment and missed the text about Wanda going to an evil Mountain with an evil book; If you thought Wanda had already gotten her fill of grief out on a poor small town full of hostages (and also punishing Agatha a little bit extra, for kicks), DSMOM was a shock. A beautifully chaotic prank. The seeming protagonist of that show you enjoyed went full chaotic evil and you didn't suspect the "happy ending" was anything but. It was delightful chaos. Wanda truly is the Chaos Witch.

DSMOM is better if you didn't do "the homework" first. WandaVision I think is chaotically improved with spoilers and watching it after DSMOM, knowing ahead of time Wanda is in a truly bad spiral and where it all ends.

(Semi-related aside for bonus extra credit: Seanan McGuire wrote a full novel called "What if… Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were siblings?" and it was a great read on Wanda's Chaos magic and her potential multiverse relationships with Doctor Strange and Spider-Man in a briefly, hauntingly beautiful alternate universe, where a Wanda had an Uncle Ben to learn great responsibility from, that was also doomed from its start to such eventual heartbreaking cruelty as such "What If…?" questions often are. I loved it and would recommend it. For the most part I felt that you only really need an MCU-level awareness of the characters to enjoy the book. I noticed some Easter Eggs for comics/old animation fans, but nothing worth doing homework on.)

Chaos After the Credits

I mentioned it when discussing Kang's problems, but I think it deserves its own section, too. In Phase 1, Marvel hit upon the idea of the after credits stinger as a place to tease a big worldbuilding Easter Egg or the next film or most often both, an Easter Egg that tied into the next film somewhat directly. They even discovered the trick of letting the after credits stinger be filmed by the next film in late enough stages of production to shoot an extra bonus scene of setup to even more directly connect the teases to plans for that in production future movie.

In doing this the MCU taught a lot of us that the after credits stinger was "important" and sometimes a major lore drop.

Especially from hindsight, almost all of the Phase 4 and 5 after credits stingers seem like punchlines and jokes instead of Phase 1-like "critical setup". They have much of the same shape as the "lore full" ones meant to tease the serious fans that the thing they were hoping for might happen next. But in Phase 4 especially they have been such deep cuts and characters so few care about, that even with weird stunt casting they aren't so much "oh wow, Nick Fury!" moments as they are "wait who is that and why do they matter?" in every case. Almost no one is going to go "Oh wow, Star Lord's half-space-pirate, half-space-chipmunk second cousin from his half-brother by space marriage's side of the family who betrayed everyone and died like a chump! I loved that storyline and I can't believe they got Mick Jagger to play him!" I think I made up that specific example, but I'm not certain enough to care how much it resembles the real thing, in either chaotic direction to look up any real examples. It's been a lot of silly chaos, and I understand the nature of fandom that there are fans for all the deep cuts and oddball storylines, it's great to get excited about that. But also, everyone else maybe doesn't need to do that "homework". The "Who?" audience reactions to post-credits stingers were some of the funniest in Phase 4, in hindsight after Phase 5.

The Marvel Studios Versus Marvel Television Thing

Starting with WandaVision, Disney/Marvel shifted its TV strategy from ABC (RIP Agents of SHIELD) and Netflix, to the new Disney+ service (and some Hulu stragglers). To inaugurate this new era of Marvel television, they attached the same Marvel Studios production logo that the movies got to Disney+ shows. That added to the impression that they were "homework" to understanding the movies. They've since started distancing them again and Marvel Television has its own production banner again and they added the secondary Marvel Special Presentation and Marvel Spotlight banners to further distance some, but not all, TV projects from "will have anything to do with the movies". (Wonder Man was delightful and had this extra bit of distance as a "Marvel Spotlight", which is a shame because it played off some fun in Shang Chi and hopefully we'll get more Wonder Man, we can hope even in a movie.)

The most distance is the Marvel Animation banner. Marvel has made it pretty clear that not of it is or can be expected to be MCU "canon". Animation has such different schedules and lead time/planning than films that I don't blame Marvel for not trying to synchronize that watch. It's a line in the sand that I'm going to take in the travelogue that follows. (I'm including Marvel Spotlight for the sake of Wonder Man.) I've already mentioned The Offenders more than they warrant. I'll miss the chance here to write more about how delightful X-Men '97 and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur are to different parts of my inner child, but it will also save me from struggling to find something nice to say about Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man or Marvel Zombies.

A Brief Travelogue Through Most of the Rest of MCU's Chaos Phases

I've covered most of the drama and the "too much homework" problems. The two next hottest takes I have are Eternals was under-rated and generally better than people remember it, even some people that claim to have watched it recently, it's delightful in chaotic ways and tries some very Kirby-esque things especially being the beta test of some real Celestials in Live Action, ahead of Fantastic Four: First Steps which owed it thanks for the homework (hurrah, no more boring space clouds! let's get that Kirby Kosmic weirdness, yes please) and also that The Marvels was nearly perfect and too many people slept on it.

Drama and hot takes out of the way, I suppose something more chronologically oriented is in order to finish out the list, because I am a nerd and despite talking about embracing chaos in this post, it still seems handy to have a bit of structure. I'm going to start from the Wikipedia timelines which try to reflect in-universe chronology more than release date chronology, and also remind us that canonically because of the time jumps in Endgame the MCU is technically ahead of our real timeline by roughly two and a half years. Thanks nerds that edit Wikipedia for that weird reminder.

Phase 4

Black Widow I enjoyed. It was great seeing Scarlett Johansson get a staring vehicle (and unfortunately timed to cause all the residuals drama that it did for that effort) and had an excellent supporting cast (some that get to shine later in Thunderbolts Asterisk).
WandaVision was excellent. A lot of highlights, and the best most "TV paced" of all the Disney+ shows. Just the one big problem from it that has its own section earlier.
I think Shang Chi is a classic superhero romp in the best ways. Also, makes Iron Man 3 better.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a fun buddy action comedy with a pair of the MCU's finest lesser utilized up to this point talents (who become more important after this, obviously).
Eternals is under-rated fun and chaos, dipping into Kirby's most weird stuff, which is so deeply Marvel. (Even if Kirby also took some of it to DC, but DC has an even weirder relationship to its New Gods than Marvel with groups like the Eternals.)
Spider-Man: No Way Home was silly and weird and took some good chaotic advantage of the cinematic multiverse of Spiders-Men. Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man got some closure I don't think many of us realized how much he needed to have on screen. It wasn't Spider-Verse levels of fun chaos, but it was the MCU trying its best to get close.
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness gets mentioned in the dedicated WandaVision section. Worth recapping: classic camp horror film from Sam Raimi, absolutely fun.
Hawkeye was a fun romp with the dullest Avenger and one of the more exciting Young Avengers. Some huge cameos, particularly in bringing back the Netflix street-level Defenders team back to Marvel Television.
Moon Knight I almost bowed out in disinterest midway through, it's not a character that really speaks to me despite interesting casting. However the MCU version of the goddess Taweret eventually shows up and brings some joy to the grim darkness that helped me finish the season.
Wakanda Forever was excellent given the dark circumstances leading in to it that's its real lead passed away. I liked the somewhat fresh attempt at Namor, the MCU's much darker anti-hero Aquaman counterpart. (Fun fact: Namor also strangely predates Aquaman by a couple years according to first appearance records, as one of the Golden Age characters Marvel inherited from predecessors/acquisitions).
She-Hulk was a lovely bit of fourth wall breaking TV with an excellent cast. Deserved but so far has not got a second season.
Ms. Marvel was a lovely leisurely run through of the character's Origin Story with again an excellent cast. Her family is so great.
Thor: Love and Thunder was exactly a "sophomore slump" album to Thor: Ragnorok, but was still great and you have to almost always grade "sophomore albums" on a curve. I still hope we can get a complete trilogy from Taika Waititi to finish out that take on Thor, but I'm expecting we won't get that between Taika being busier than ever and box office results of the sophomore slump.
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special was a delightful throwback to holiday specials of old, and maybe a little forgettable/throwaway or maybe the Star Wars Holiday Special to a new generation, you decide. (I'm more likely to watch it again than the Star Wars one.)

Phase 5

Deadpool & Wolverine was just about everything you want in a Deadpool movie, this time now with "welcome to the MCU" fourth wall break jokes. (Not quite as well as She-Hulk did MCU fourth wall breaks, but they both have different sorts of fun with it.)
Echo was really cool to see a hero that used ASL as their preferred communication method. I don't think the ASL was shot particularly well, with many parts of signs cut off/out of frame but I still appreciate the really cool attempt at diversity, and ASL will always be a language I find beautiful to see wherever it shows up. (I've lost almost all ability to sign I learned in High School at this point, but I still feel like I recognize a bunch of it when I see it signed, which also likely relates to why I'm critical on film portrayals that often don't capture entire signs.)
Ironheart was fun. I like the character and my biggest complaint was she doesn't get enough moments to bad ass in her own show and it doesn't seem certain yet she'll get a full movie.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania gets a lot of discussion in the section about Kang the Conqueror. In summary it was a big chaotic nonsense mess, but I found that delightful because all I wanted from it was to be a big chaotic silly thing. It's Ant-Man.
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 was a touching swan song to that version of the Guardians team and to James Gunn leaving Marvel for good (for now?) to helm their Distinguished Competition. The Guardians got a good, complete trilogy (especially including the Holiday Special bridge).
Secret Invasion so far has been my only "did not finish" in Marvel Television. I liked a lot of the reunions in early episodes of SHIELD and SHIELD-adjacent characters, even knowing the reason most of them showed up was to get killed off because that is the nature of that storyline. I also liked that it served no real bearing on The Marvels despite appearing to do so for homework reasons.
The Marvels was fantastic. Almost everything I want in a superhero team up, but with a team of wilder characters. Seemed to require a lot of homework so a bunch of people skipped it, as one of the Marvels first showed up in WandaVision and the other in Ms. Marvel but everything you need from those appearances is well summarized in the film, and more reason to watch that stuff after, if you like both or either character just to get more. Especially because you are going to fall in love with Ms. Marvel's family and need a whole TV show with more time with them.
Agatha All Along was great. Kathryn Hahn is such a great actress and gets a lot of fantastic scenery to chew with a fun ensemble surrounding her to make it wilder.
Daredevil: Born Again reminds us of the best parts of the Netflix Defenders shows, especially Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin.
Captain America: Brave New World was a fun, silly Captain America movie and the surprise follow up to the OG MCU Hulk movie we didn't expect to ever get. It's spoiled in trailers so I don't mind spoiling it here: come for Harrison Ford getting a chance to play President again and also Red Hulk, stay for more "Captain America: superhero buddy cop" fun.
Thunderbolts Asterisk Colon Asterisk The New Avengers is a chaotic movie that asks some deep questions in silly ways about the lines between inept villain, anti-hero, and would-be-hero-given-other-circumstances, the nature of superhero teams both "natural" and "artificial", and with the ultimate bad guy being episodes of depression, something you can't just punch. It's relatable. It's fun. It might remind you, if you are like me, that neither Black Widow nor Ant-Man and the Wasp (no subtitle, the second film) are appreciated nearly as much as they should be.

Phase 6 (so far)

I thought Fantastic Four: First Steps delivered exactly the sort of weirdness I want in a Fantastic Four film. Eternals walked around the Celestials so that First Steps could run straight to the only villain 20th Century Fox cared about for the F4 to face but didn't know how to deliver other than "weird space cloud".
Wonder Man was fantastic. Worth watching. Entirely a standalone, although it doesn't hurt to have seen Shang Chi or might be reason to watch Shang Chi after.
The Punisher: One Last Kill I liked better than I like a lot of Punisher stuff (which is mostly that I don't care for it), partly because it was at turns introspective about how broken the Punisher is as a character (as in well questioning many of the things I dislike about the character). Made a particularly weird accidental double feature with The Bear standalone episode "Gary". I guess Disney found a two-for-one sale for Jon Bernthal projects.

There's not a lot left in Phase 6 (which seems thin compared to Phases 4 and 5 above): We've got a new Spider-Man film this summer. We've got two planned Avengers movies on the Holiday Season schedule this year and next. For Marvel Television there's talk of a third season for Daredevil: Born Again but no confirmed dates (and just as likely to slip to Phase 7 timelines?), and a date for VisionQuest which so far doesn't sound that exciting on paper. That's it on Disney's current announced schedules for Phase 6.

What Happens Next for the MCU?

Disney rearranged a bunch of dates for Phase 7 projects in March which led to a lot of "Phase 7 movies confirmed" style posts, but really all anyone can say is "the next two Avengers movies are expected to greatly shake up the MCU and Disney/Marvel is being tight lipped on what comes afterward, just talking about dates on projects labeled TBD".

I've really enjoyed the chaos phases of the MCU. I think they have been a fun journey and almost every piece has been worth watching on its own. I don't need the next two Avengers movies to capstone it in a "magic" way like Avengers: Endgame did. I had enough fun along the way. But also, maybe I've been lucky in not feeling like I'm watching any of it for "homework" and perhaps that's also why I haven't really felt "superhero fatigue". (I may have also been inoculated against "superhero fatigue" by the Arrowverse, as it set quite a few bars high and low on what I am willing to tolerate from my soup operas.) Maybe Avengers: Doomsday won't be that great, but it doesn't make Phases 4 or 5 worthless, or at least not worth trying to enjoy on their own without worrying about "how does it all connect?" I'm still very curious to see what the next few movies do, but I've enjoyed the ride so far along the way.