Polygon.com / 07.05.25

Every MCU movie, ranked

The latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thunderbolts*, closes out the franchises messy, delayed, heavily revised Phase 5, and points toward a cleaner direction for Phase 6  one where every story might still be based in more than 15 years of MCU history, but where the creators know how important it is to keep appealing to casual viewers who cant or dont want to keep up on every new release. Thunderbolts* draws together mostly minor characters from Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ant-Man and The Wasp, but has them all summarize their backstories quickly and efficiently, and doesnt much lean on trivia about those backstories. It feels like a conscious attempt to pull back from the lore-dense previous series installment, Captain America: Brave New World, which brought together threads from 2008s The Incredible Hulk, Falcon and the Winter, The Eternals, and Avengers: Endgame. The homework burden has gotten hefty in the MCU, and as Marvel attempts to ret...
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