I do love taking a look back at an entire movie franchise I have watched every entry of and deciding how it goes from best to worst. It’s a great conversational piece, too, for the comments section. How would YOU rank them, et cetera, et cetera.
One of the franchises I’ve had a strong desire to do for a while now has been the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s my favorite cinematic franchise of all time after all, and I’ve seen every entry at least once!
But there were some problems!
First: The Marvel Cinematic Universe or MCU is thirty-plus movies deep, and I didn’t feel like writing a 50,000-word article!
Second: The Marvel Cinematic Universe is in the midst of itself and has no signs of slowing down, releasing multiple new offerings every year. So a definitive ranking would become obsolete and out of date in a hurry!
So what to do?
Well, luckily for me, the Marvel Cinematic Universe releases movies in “phases”. What’s a “phase”? No one really knows! But that’s how they group movies together. They look at a bunch of films they have released, pool them together, and say, “This is a phase!”. It was just a phase, Mom.
Well, that works for me. I’m going to rank the MCU by phases, starting with the first one. Are you ready? Then let’s get into it!
6. Iron Man 2
Oh, Iron Man sequels. What are we going to do with you?
For as good as the first Iron Man movie was (hold on to that thought…), its sequels haven’t exactly been the MCU’s best outings. And we kick off the ranking of the phases with Iron Man 2, which, according to my updated-in-real-time Letterboxd list, is my second-lowest-scored movie in the entire MCU.
It shouldn’t have been that way. It had Mickey Rourke in the midst of his big Hollywood comeback! He should have brought gravitas and potency to the series. Instead, he brought an absurd accent and a pet bird.
Whiplash was a really unimpressive villain, even as Sam Rockwell was doing his usual absolute best to make Justin Hammer a threat to Tony Stark. But the climactic fight scene was nothing to write home about, and the scenes of drunk Tony ultimately went nowhere.
So it’s pretty easy for me to say this was the low point of Phase One.
If you want more in-depth thoughts on this one, click here.
5. The Incredible Hulk
Until Captain America: Brave New World came out and revived the corpse of this picture, you would have been forgiven for forgetting that this entry was a part of the MCU. Or maybe even that it ever existed at all.
Remember when Ed Norton was The Hulk, guys?! Before the higher-ups (highers-up?) at the burgeoning MCU decided he was too much of a headache to work with? And no one really knew if this was technically a sequel to Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie? Good times.
But yeah, seventeen years after the fact (SEVENTEEN YEARS! Oh my gosh, we are all very old), Marvel pulled this back out on us and made it relevant again.
Too bad they didn’t make it any better.
4. Thor
Oh, Thor with blonde eyebrows. What WERE we doing in the early days of this franchise?
While this might not be a substantial leap, it is quite a step up from Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk. Thor is a perfectly good movie for a franchise that was figuring out what it wanted to be and wasn’t quite a behemoth yet. We had a young Chris Hemsworth who could still pass as a college-aged kid in those days (shout out to the inimitable The Cabin In The Woods), a proud Anthony Hopkins bellowing his lines, and a gleeful Tom Hiddleston playing around at becoming the MCU’s first iconic villain.
While it isn’t great, Thor provided some quality entertainment and showed that Hemsworth and Hiddleston were going to be forces to be reckoned with as the series grew along with them. It also played around at times with the “MCU Humor” we’ve all come to know and [verb].
There are a lot of pieces that started taking shape in this one.
For more in-depth analysis, click here.
3. Captain America: The First Avenger
This was a tightly contested spot for me, because whereas I probably LIKE Thor more, I have to confess that Captain America: The First Avenger is a little bit better of a movie.
There are a lot of similarities, though. A young and likable actor named Chris (Chris Evans) was plucked from Hollywood mediocrity just like Hemsworth was. And in a sink or swim business, he Michael Phelps ‘ed his way into our hearts. Future stand-out characters like Peggy Carter are introduced and put on their way to becoming fan favorites. And elements that would matter well past this individual flick (The Tesseract, anyone?) are presented.
You know what I always forget? That TOMMY LEE JONES and STANLEY TUCCI were in the MCU already! And they were! Here! They added some real thespian heft to the early days of this franchise.
For more in-depth analysis, click here.
2. Iron Man
Iron Man–the beloved progenitor of this whole experiment–isn’t number one? Even in its own phase? It does feel a little wrong, but I’ll explain why it isn’t (at least for me) in a moment.
Look: Iron Man is great. Robert Downey Jr’s rebuilding of his career was going fine before Iron Man came along, but this strapped a rocket to him, proved he could deal with IMMENSE pressure from success, and turned him into a household name. You could argue that RDJ IS the MCU. After killing off Tony Stark and seeing diminishing returns on critical success years later, Kevin Feige and Disney reached for the Break Glass In Case Of Emergency mask and recast him in a new role; THAT’S how big of a deal he is.
This whole movie was The Great RDJ experiment, and it passed with flying colors. Despite not being the highest-paid actor on set, this flick is all about him. And he proved the viability of a film universe that was without Marvel’s biggest name characters–The X-Men and Spider-Man.
1. The Avengers
While Iron Man proved the MCU could work, it wasn’t quite until The Avengers hit that it was proven that it could soar.
The Avengers was the culmination of these other five films. It showed that audiences had an appetite for serialized storytelling in theaters. It was determined that the whole damn experiment was going to succeed.
All you had to do was take several immensely talented actors, establish them on their own, then put them together under a [then] then-well-regarded director and let them all play. I would call it lightning in a bottle if not for the fact that Marvel just kept doing it for the rest of the decade.
For more in-depth analysis, click here.
And just like the MCU itself in this era, we are off and running! Next time, we’ll obviously be covering Phase Two.
In the meantime, let us know: how would YOU rank Phase One of the MCU? Tell us in the comments.
Until next time… take care!
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is streaming on Disney+