It’s kinda strange that it’s all over now, right? I mean, The Avengers are gone. No one else is coming to save the day?

Simple plot and predictable structure, but a lot of fun and a good message at the heart of it. The message isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently so it worked for me. I like that they’re using a Marvel movie to talk about mental health and loneliness. It’s not saying much, but most of these movies don’t say anything at all, so I’ll take whatever I can get.

It’s kinda strange that the golden age of the MCU is over now. The original Avengers are gone. The last few years of this franchise have felt more unstable than ever, and we don’t know if anyone else is coming to save the day.

In her book, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, Joanna Robinson writes the following:

Whedon wasn’t trying to set up Thanos as the Avengers’ next foe. Rather, he just wanted to provide an explanation for where Loki’s army came from, seasoned with a bit of fan service. For its part, Marvel Studios was so focused on making sure that everything came together for The Avengers that it approved the inclusion of Thanos without much thought about what that might mean for the movies to come.

I think sometimes fans give Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige too much credit for the first ten years. They speak about it as though they had this grand plan for everything and it was all figured out years in advance. There’s some truth to it, but there was also a lot of making it up as they go. Even the Iron Man post-credits scene was, as Jon Favreau said in an interview with Robinson, “purely a love letter to the fans and something that would be a fun easter egg for people who sat around until the movie was over.”

Feige was involved in that scene, of course, because he knew that the specific dialogue would have important implications later on. For example, in one version of the scene, writer Brian Michael Bendis had included references to mutants and Spider-Man. Obviously these had to be cut because Marvel Studios didn’t have the film rights to these characters at the time. But I think there’s another reason that Nick Fury isn’t very specific in that scene: Feige was leaving his options open.

One of my biggest criticisms of the MCU in recent years is that it feels like they give a character a movie or show, not because they have a good story to tell, but rather because they just want to set up that character for some kind of crossover later on. It actually feels too planned out. The studio must strike a balance between overplanning and completely winging it.

Thunderbolts* feels a little more like the old Marvel Studios format. Most of these characters come from a previous movie or show, but they don’t feel like they were created purely for this movie to exist. It feels more like someone looked at the roster of bad guys from the past and said, “You know what would be fun…”

I’ll acknowledge that this is almost certainly not how films are actually made, I’m simply talking about how the movie feels. I’ll also acknowledge that the characters John Walker and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine were definitely introduced purely as set up for something else, but it was never very specific. To me, the inclusion of those characters always felt like Feige saying, “Put them in a show and we’ll figure out something later.” In fact, the time between The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Thunderbolts* is the same as the time between Iron Man and The Avengers: four years.

Overplanning in this franchise can lead to quality problems, where characters and projects feel forced, but overplanning can lead to other problems as well. For example, imagine you planned an entire saga of shows and movies around one particular actor to be your main villain, and then this actor is convicted of domestic assault. What do you do then? Apparently you load up some trucks full of money and send them to the homes of Robert Downey Jr. and the Russo brothers.

I don’t know who is coming to save the MCU. Maybe it’s Downey and the Russos, maybe it’s the Fantastic Four, or maybe it’s someone else entirely. Regardless, I want to believe that the team at Marvel Studios is recalibrating how much they outline this universe, even if some of that is due to external factors out of their control. Not having total control is good for creativity; they certainly had constraints when they were first starting out. It’s good to give yourself flexibility; you’ll break very easily if you’re too rigid.

In a 2017 interview with Robinson for her book, Feige said, “Don’t worry about the universe. Worry about the movie.” This isn’t an amazing movie, but at least it doesn’t feel like it’s only worried about the universe. I give Thunderbolts* three and a half stars.