“There was an idea…”

Said idea was different to almost every version of the big screen superhero seen previously. Rather than each costumed hero existing in their own sealed-off vivariums, what if they could all share one interconnected universe containing a single ever-evolving and expansive story?

Once the idea gained traction, billions of dollars, and many “phases” of franchise continuity, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) became the envy of every studio with a lucrative intellectual property to siphon and thus many attempts were made to replicate the success of the “Marvel Formula”.

Much like the James Bond series in the decades before it, the MCU is primarily a producer-led franchise, the ultimate mastermind behind the project being Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, though distinct directors like Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon and Taika Waititi have certainly left their mark on their respective entries in the ongoing series.

What keeps us (and wider box office audiences) coming back, aside from the ever-increasing levels of superhero spectacle and long-form storytelling borrowing liberally from 80-plus years of comic books, is the time you’re afforded to grow to love the characters and their relationships with each other, especially in the ambitious team-up Avengers movies.

In this edition of Ranked we at The Film Magazine are assessing every entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and because fans have very different opinions on the best, the worst and everything in between regarding this series, we’ve attempted to find a balance between average critical consensus and general audience reception, as well as genre innovation and the lasting impact on popular culture, to order all of them definitively from worst to best.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration… Every MCU Marvel Cinematic Universe Movie Ranked.

Follow @thefilmagazine on X (Twitter).

33. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

“A guy dressed like a bee tried to kill me when I was six. I’ve never had a normal life.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Review

The Ant-Man films are probably the most inconstant sub-series in the MCU, quality wise, but because the final chapter of their trilogy tries to go both big and small, it well and truly overreaches itself.

Pitting the Lang/Van Dyne family against Kang the Conqueror in the Quantum Realm, force of nature Jonathan Majors playing a fascinating villain isn’t quite enough to save Peyton Reed’s threequel from being just an eye-catching jumble of mismatched, tonally confusing ideas.

For Kang’s first, less maniacal appearance and the start of this whole Multiverse Saga, make sure to watch Season 1 of ‘Loki’.

32. Eternals (2021)

“We have loved these people since the day we arrived. When you love something, you protect it.”

Eternals Review

Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) is a great director, no doubt, but she was just not a good fit for the MCU in this story of space gods guiding humanity’s progress. Considering the usually grounded and singular vision of her work, this was a particularly crushing disappointment for most audiences.

The ambition and epic millennia-spanning scope of Eternals sadly did not pay off in this jarring, misjudged slog of a final product that couldn’t even be saved by a stellar and diverse cast. 

31. The Marvels (2023)

“Listen to me, you are chosen for a greater purpose. So you must go. But I will never let you go.”

The Marvels Review

The Marvels smartly builds a lot of its appeal around its central team-up of Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau and Kamala Khan as their power usage causes them to swap places across the universe, but their found family warmth and oodles of charisma can’t overcome all the film’s flaws.

This needed more purposeful storytelling, a villain that doesn’t feel like a retread of what came before and more direct confrontation of the darker implications of the story. The musical elements will likely make an already decisive movie more so, but the MCU overall could do with some more audacious imagery like what Nia DaCosta does with alien cats.

Watching ‘Wandavision’ and ‘Ms Marvel’ through beforehand will certainly help you connect with two of the three leads that bit quicker.

30. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

“Whosoever holds these weapons, and believes in getting home, if they be true of heart is therefore worthy, and shall possess… for limited time only, the power… of Thor!”

Thor: Love and Thunder Review

Taika Waititi is the kind of distinct voice that gave the MCU a jolt in the arm when it was most needed, and he was vital in reinvigorating the Thor series, but the tonal balance and technical polish certainly felt off in 2022 release Thor: Love and Thunder.

Good performances from Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman and Christian Bale, and some memorable set pieces aside, Thor’s latest adventure battling a god-killer with his now superpowered ex-girlfriend Jane Foster at his side feels like too many mismatched stories smashed together.

Recommended for you: Taika Waititi Films Ranked

29. Thor: The Dark World (2013)

“One son who wanted the throne too much, and other who will not take it. Is this my legacy?”

The God of Thunder’s third film appearance tries to live up to its title with a story of dark elves trying to snuff out all light in the universe. Sadly, a late change in director – Alan Taylor taking over from would-be Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins – and extensive Loki-centric reshoots didn’t help an already disjointed film feel any less so.

Thor’s dynamic with his Earthbound friends is still funny and more Loki (shoehorned in or not) is always a good thing with Tom Hiddleston in the role, but the storytelling is inconsistent at best and Christopher Eccleston under heavy prosthetics as Malekith may be the most boring villain in the MCU so far.

28. Iron Man 2 (2010)

“The suit and I are one. To turn over the Iron Man suit would be to turn over myself, which is tantamount to indentured servitude or prostitution, depending on what state you’re in.”

The MCU’s first direct sequel went bigger and darker with Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark fighting a vengeful Russian inventor, a rival industrialist and potentially fatal health problems. Unfortunately, this ended up being a much less focussed, overblown and not all that compelling movie.

Scarlet Johansson makes her debut as Black Widow here, though she’s just a generic sexy spy at this point and not yet given the dimensions other writers would later bestow. The action is decent enough, but you wouldn’t lose out on much of you skipped over Iron Man 2 on your next MCU rewatch.

27. The Incredible Hulk (2008)

“You know, I know a few techniques that could help you manage that anger effectively.”

Lacking the clear intentions and boldness of many subsequent MCU movies, The Incredible Hulk is stylistically old-fashioned but works slightly better if you view this as a big-budget tribute to sympathetic monster movies (this one was made by Universal, after all).

A movie filled with false starts and one-off appearances (most obviously Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner would be recast with Mark Ruffalo for The Avengers in 2012), very little was carried over to the wider franchise right up until Tim Roth’s reappearance in ‘She-Hulk’ fourteen years later.

This is generally uninspiring stuff, with its most interesting man-on-the-run elements cribbed from the 1970s ‘Incredible Hulk’ TV show.

Recommended for you: Where to Start with Universal Classic Monsters

Even so, 2022 has proven to be the first non-pandemic year since 2017 to not enter a comic book adaptation into the billion dollar movie club, and has reportedly been tumultuous for the genre behind the scenes at almost every studio. As we press into 2023, Marvel continues its pursuit of longer form storytelling on its multitude of direct-to-streaming series and has come under criticism for building a cinematic universe in which everything must get bigger and bolder to remain satisfying to those who’ve already seen it all, while Sony succumbed to an internet meme to re-release Morbius without understanding that they were the butt of a joke, and DC most publicly of all faced scrutiny for late-in-the-year decisions regarding the future of the DC Extended Universe (now to be without Henry Cavill as Superman only weeks after his return) and a public falling out with the world’s highest paid actor, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, regarding his long-gestated DC film Black Adam.

Following 2021, a year of memorable debuts and the ultimate in superhero movie fan service, the comic book genre was forced to diversify in terms of its styles of storytelling in 2022, and as such offered everything from a David Fincher-tinged detective thriller to a horror master’s take on a superhero dealing with issues of the mind, from shallow children’s television-esque nonsense to deep ruminations on grief.

In this edition of Ranked, we at The Film Magazine are comparing each of the 9 major superhero movie releases (not including direct-to-VoD features like Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse) in terms of their quality, their impact on our culture, their importance to the genre, and their attempts at evolving comic book adaptations beyond their previous limitations. These are the 2022 Comic Book Movies Ranked.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

9. Black Adam

For a passion project from a former professional wrestler who earned his career and reputation for being one of the most charismatic men on the planet, it was utterly nonsensical that Dwayne Johnson would play the role of a superhero completely absent of personality. The man formerly known as The Rock, who’d regularly brag about holding the “millions… and millions” in the palm of his hand, was essentially playing a narrative trigger rather than a character, a floating and invincible agent of violence who’d be better named as Mr. Anti-Charisma than the titular Black Adam; his self-serious (but not in a funny Peacemaker way), angsty and hyper-aggressive presentation proving a vacuumous presence that sucked the life out of what was already an uninspired mess of a movie.

With visuals that look like they were taken directly from a mid-2000s historical fantasy film, Black Adam was surpassed visually by even The Rock’s poorly presented Hercules (2014) and the black and blue drabness of fellow 2022 comic book release Morbius. Worse still, Black Adam himself was barely present for large periods, his role in the film taking a backseat throughout the 2nd act as a lengthy list of side characters went in their own directions, each equally as lacking in any kind of truthful essence.

With a narrative filled with conveniences and utterly illogical character decisions, a yellow hue over the entire presentation, a backstory twist that is among the most poorly presented in the history of cinema, and enough poorly generated CG-scapes to take even the most hardened of superhero moviegoers out of any given moment, Black Adam was among the worst superhero films of the decade and must certainly be considered the worst comic book film of 2022.

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In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, viewers are spoon-fed characterisation and exposition using dialogue akin to the airplane method weirdly successful with infants. Viewers and fans deserve more credit.

The MCU web is a complex one. Even for those who have keenly watched every film release, and would be confident naming all characters on the board of a Marvel-themed edition of Guess Who, there are a lot of moving parts, both at an individual film level and in the ever-expanding list of crossovers, cameos, and introductions. So much so, that fans are, with every release, becoming more reliant on blog posts and videos to explain these references. With that in mind, wouldn’t some merciful condescension offer some clarity?

Increasingly often, and never more so than in Marvel Studios’ latest offering Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, we aren’t afforded the privilege. Instead, audiences are left to wonder about – or miss altogether – the myriad of possible connections between characters, between narratives, between universes and even multiverses, instead having the specific plot points broadcast to us in headline phrases. Given the enormous success and budget of Marvel’s visual effects department, it is safe to say that they can be trusted to illustrate events without some of the world’s most famous actors simplifying their performances like they’re a tour guide. But it’s the dialogue that is to blame…

Stronger dialogue is often identified as having two very simple traits: it shows, rather than tells, and; it’s individual and idiomatic. In Michael Waldron’s Multiverse of Madness script, speech does the opposite.

Parts of the film feel like they are a collage of phrases from other Marvel movies, and act purely as a textual description of an on-screen event. Viewers need dialogue to characterise and/or progress the plot, as well as entertain them, but here it is used in a foundational way that feels unfinished. Similar to the production of a first draft, where the script’s job is to build the story’s pillars and walls before they’re painted in subsequent versions with vernacular and believable emotion, Doctor Strange 2’s impressive cast is forced to utter lines that feel like they could have instead been reminders about what CGI was planned for post-production. The experience of watching this film could be noticeably improved by focusing more on allusion, subtext, and inference, rather than by repeatedly staging – and losing – a battle between a line’s quotability and cheese.

Here are some of the worst examples:

‘Kamar-Taj must now become a fortress.’

Wong growls this after a roughly ten-minute insight into Wanda’s commitment to out-do Mrs Doubtfire in reaching her children. Viewers know she’s coming, and for whom, and there is even a neat sequence where all the other sorcerers arrive in defence of the stronghold. Because of these, audiences are capable of inferring that the combative actions and stances of all these characters is a defensive move against Scarlet Witch. So why collapse the tension with a line from an 11-year-old writing a comic book?

Better options for this would be to either: move the plot like this does but in a less derivative way, such as bellowing an imperative to ‘Lock the Gates’; or provide some light-relief in the form of a complaint: ‘When do I get a day off?’ or ‘All you’ve done is give me a headache, Strange’. Wong repeatedly shows this irreverent streak in times of significant tension, so why not then?

‘Come in and tell me everything about your universe’

In one of the other universes Strange visits, he meets previous adversary Baron Mordo, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who enthusiastically delivers this line like a welcoming old friend. Of course, this is how (albeit with a little suspicion shared by fans and Strange) he is portrayed in this moment. But this line is too functional and not realistic enough. Instead, the writer could have used another declarative more indicative of a friendly relationship, such as ‘Let’s get you out of that ridiculous coat’, or used an interrogative that characterises, or perhaps is used as a red herring, to incite trust from viewers. This could be, for example, ‘How’s the tea over there (in your universe)?’ or ‘Is Wong still taking himself too seriously?’ Either could be used as a segue into a subsequent scene where Strange explains his predicament or the reality of his universe.

‘Perhaps if I can pull you from the rubble, the spell will break’

The communication of this plot point is simple to fix: it should belong to the visual medium. Aside from some budgetary constraint (which seems an incongruent concept with Marvel), it seems odd to imagine this being a conscious choice, to have this said rather than shown.

Perhaps, for example, initial jerks of the character out of the rubble are met with a hazing, or a stretching of the spell, a cracking in the pattern seen on screen. This option would avoid that squirm-inducing feeling of being patronised, unfortunately present at various points throughout Multiverse of Madness.

There are more of these, notably ‘Go back to hell’ and ‘Face the eternal consequence’, which both seem like direct quotations from director Sam Raimi’s earlier film Drag Me to Hell, but the rules are the same – not enough of the polishing or individualising that makes scripts effective.

So why did they make the final cut? Surely Marvel, with its seemingly infinite resources and clear ability to manage outrageous plot structures, have included this type of dialogue for a specific reason?

In parts, it is easier to see the motive behind the dialogue. For example, Wanda’s intentionally tropey dialogue, continued from ‘Wandavision’ as a symbol of her naivety about family life and longing for mediocrity, is great. Most audiences notice the stock phrases and priorities, and they work successfully as foreshadowing or dramatic irony. In addition, there are parts of the film where the dialogue appears as scaffolding, acting as a stabiliser for younger viewers or those new to the MCU. Even so, to both demographics, the visual medium is surely a more powerful tool. By eliminating this weaker dialogue, writers can avoid some of the ‘Theme Park’ criticisms of Marvel films made by directors such as Martin Scorsese, and allow audiences to focus on other, stronger, elements of the film.

Potentially the most noteworthy strength of Multiverse of Madness is Raimi’s use of horror tropes, which are, despite their frequency, undoubtedly entertaining, as well as contributory towards a darker tone many have called for to be in more Marvel films. The Evil Dead-esque chase sequences, the violence that pushes the limit of PG-13 content, the obligatory hand springing from the ground, all of these are signatures of a director who appreciates the relationship between fear and fun, a balance films such as Venom and Morbius failed to strike. However, what feels nostalgic and, at times, just delightful, in these visual moments feels limiting and, in terms of audience intoxication in story, sobering, in speech. Maybe these aforementioned phrases were intentional, left in or included in meetings with Raimi and Waldron so that the tone of the fan service is complemented in dialogue. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine the misguided nature of that choice not becoming all too apparent on the first table-read, or take.

Dialogue is so indicative of tone, so powerful in its ability to manipulate the overall experience of a film, that it needs to be used carefully; its ability to cloud other elements of any given movie is both a tool, and an obstacle. By considering this in the drafting process, and perhaps encouraging more cooperation between screenwriters and visual effects producers, Marvel can climb out of the straight-jacket constraints of conventions it has bound itself in, and trust its audiences more than it currently is.

Written by Callum McGuigan

Recommended for you: 10 Best Sam Raimi Movie Moments

In a career spanning more than forty years, Sam Raimi has inspired a passionate fanbase of gore hounds and like-minded lovers of goofy comedy served up simultaneously with scares and shocks. He is also arguably more responsible than any other film director for kicking off the current cycle of superhero cinema that dominates mega budget filmmaking to this day – Blade was arguably the test case for whether Marvel movies would truly work, but Spider-Man demonstrated what was possible if you treated comic book stories seriously and never forgot to be heartfelt.

With such a stylistically distinct and varied filmography and so many creative innovations sprinkling the course of his career, how do we even begin to rank Sam Raimi’s impressive oeuvre?

In this Movie List, we at The Film Magazine have picked just 10 of the most memorable moments from Sam Raimi’s eventful and memorable movies in order to try and sum up what kinds of things he does so much better than other filmmakers. Groovy? Groovy. These are the 10 Best Sam Raimi Movie Moments.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

10. Annie’s First Vision (The Gift)

In a town in rural Georgia, widow Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) puts food on the table for her three sons by doing readings for the locals as a fortune-teller using her family’s gift of foresight. When local socialite Jessica King (Katie Holmes) disappears in suspicious circumstances, likely involving a violent neighbour, Annie is beset by terrifying visions.

The first significant vision sees her wandering down an empty road, then through the mist-shrouded Georgia woodland, before stumbling across a disturbing revelation. It’s the balance between the creepy and the surreal that makes this sequence so memorable. Annie sleepwalks through the woods, wildflowers wither at her touch, and she bumps into a satanic fiddler (a cameo from regular collaborator Danny Elfman) playing horror movie music, before seemingly waking to see Jessica’s grisly fate: her drowned body chained and transposed above her in a tree canopy.

This scene demonstrates how little control Annie has over her blessing/curse, how she could never use her power to warn others of the manner of their end before it’s too late even if she wanted to.

9. The Windmill (Army of Darkness)

After coming agonisingly close to defeating the Deadites once and for all in the present, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) is sent tumbling into a portal that throws him six hundred years into the past. Following a brief imprisonment in the local lord’s castle, Ash is sent on a world-saving quest to find the book of the dead, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, with the promise that it contains not only a spell to banish evil but also the power to send him back to his own time. En route to his goal, Ash hides from an unstoppable evil presence pursuing him in an old windmill, where he ends up fighting many tiny mischievous versions of himself.

First Ash accidentally breaks a mirror, then his reflected images in the shards littered across the floor come to life and dozens of miniature Ashes attack with anything they can carry between them. After a ramshackle fight featuring plenty of ‘Tom and Jerry’ violence, one of the little Ashes enters him (by diving into his mouth) and eventually splits off to become a life-size evil doppelgänger for the original Ash to dispatch.

Sam Raimi had done a similar gag in Evil Dead II where Ash had to battle his own possessed hand both while it was still attached to him and after he’d amputated it, but this scene in the final film of his Evil Dead trilogy is more like a body horror “Gulliver’s Travels” and really makes the most of Bruce Campbell’s unrivalled skill at silly slapstick.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Director: Sam Raimi
Screenwriter: Michael Waldron
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Xochitl Gomez, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Stuhlbarg

In a seemingly throwaway scene in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, loudmouth newspaper editor J Jonah Jameson and his Daily Bugle staffers are furiously brainstorming what to call the new villain in town who will eventually be known as Doc Ock. When the hapless Hoffman (played by Raimi’s brother Ted) excitedly pitches they name him “Doctor Strange”, Jameson wryly responds “That’s pretty good… but it’s taken!”. Who’d have thought that 18 years later Raimi would make good on that joke?

Previously on the Marvel Cinematic Universe… Peter Parker’s secret identity as Spider-Man was revealed to the world so he asked sorcerer Doctor Stephen Strange to cast a spell to make everyone forget. That spell went wrong and the multiverse opened, bringing heroes and villains from other worlds to ours. Elsewhere (‘Wandavision’), Wanda Maximoff created and sealed herself off from the world in her own blissfully happy reality, enslaving the minds of the town of Westview in the process

Now, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) must help protect dimension-jumping teenager America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) who is fleeing a dark force that wants to take her power and her life, all the while encountering alternate versions of his own enemies and allies.

Sam Raimi’s hugely distinctive filmmaking style probably stands up the best to MCU-ification out of all the big name directors who have played in this limitless toy box so far. Black Widow only really felt like a Cate Shortland film for its fairly low-key opening 20 minutes, and while nobody else but Chloé Zhao would have made Eternals look quite the way it did, the naturalistic, personal storytelling of her earlier work was lost amongst the space operatic hugeness of the thing. In contrast, Raimi sprinkles dark humour and disturbing visuals including jump-scares and dismemberment throughout all the usual superhero action, moments straight out of Evil Dead or Drag Me to Hell sit somewhat jarringly but proudly alongside all the predictable fight scenes between super-people. 

Standout scenes in Multiverse of Madness include a New York street battle against a tentacled cyclops, an imaginative and unexpectedly musical magical duel, and a sequence where Strange and Sorcerer Supreme Wong (Benedict Wong) try to protect their charge from her pursuer in magical sanctuary Kamar-Taj by briefly trapping them in the seemingly inescapable “Mirror Dimension”. All of these set pieces remind you that Raimi is still among the best out there at blocking action scenes and keeping the geography crystal clear among the chaos. 

This is a multiverse movie but only to the extent that it is required for the plot to keep moving and the spectacle to keep coming. Don’t go in expecting lots of groundwork to be laid for future entries in the MCU; while we are presented with the entertaining possibilities in regards to characters and who might play them in other universes, it’s pretty explicitly stated that not much of this will stick around and affect the status quo of this series going forward (next year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania looks likely to be the next entry to do that). 

Multiverses are all the rage in Hollywood these days, from Spider-Man: No Way Home, Everything Everywhere All at Once and the upcoming The Flash, and as a storytelling trope they in theory allow you to do anything you can possibly imagine. This makes it more than a little disappointing that most of the worlds Strange and America Chavez travel to are just similar versions of New York with a slightly different colour palette. A dazzling montage that ricochets the pair through reality after reality, including one in which they’re animated and another in which they appear to be made of luminous paint, is all too fleeting.

There is a colossal bit of fan service about halfway through the film’s remarkably restrained 2 hour run-time – the much-teased Illuminati scene that is this secret society of smart superheroes’ first live-action appearance – but even this is gleefully lampshaded after the bare minimum amount of time is given for fans to squeal at who they’re seeing. 

Annoyingly for some viewers, Marvel movies now require you to at least Wikipedia the major plot points of the TV shows in order to fully appreciate their latest big screen releases. In the original pre-Covid plans for “Phase Four”, Multiverse of Madness was set to be released before No Way Home, picking up directly after the events of ‘Wandavision’. The showrunner of ‘Loki’, Michael Waldron, is on screenplay duties here and continues Wanda’s character arc from the sitcom-inspired show created by Jac Schaeffer.

Wanda/Scarlet Witch’s journey – explicit discussion of which would constitute a spoiler – is likely to provoke the most heated of discussions among fans of the character, and it is debatable whether every eye-opening moment she is given here is fully earned, but Elizabeth Olsen is still excellent in the part. 

Elsewhere in the cast, Benedict Cumberbatch is still an incredibly reliable lead allowed to bring a little melancholy to a character who finally has time to register how unfulfilling his life is when he’s not saving half the universe – plus he gets to play multiple iterations of Strange, all of whom have lived very different lives and experiences. Xochitl Gomez is a real find and has a warm repartee with Cumberbatch, while Rachel McAdams gets to be a much more active participant in the action this time around. 

There are admittedly some rather laborious exchanges, telling rather than showing using clunky dialogue to explain what the hell is going on and why it matters. Some of this might be due to having to re-write the film to fit in with the new chronological order of the MCU caused by the pandemic delays, but there must be more interesting ways to keep your audience up to speed. The middle stretch of the film, while not wasting any time, sags and loses focus, though this is the rare Marvel film that keeps momentum in its final act.

Sam Raimi has a mischievous and twisted sense of humour, but he is also a pretty sentimental sort, so in the end this film is all about love. Much like the first Doctor Strange film, this isn’t the deepest of stories but it is memorable on a visual level, moves at a pace and delights in demonstrating how a vivid directorial vision can punch up some samey material. Multiverse of Madness is flashy and pretty exciting stuff that will delight fans in the moment, but whether it will linger remains to be seen. 

Score: 17/24

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