7 Mistakes Marvel Has Already Made With Phase Three

5. Iron Man 4 Should Have Foreshadowed Civil War

Captain America: Civil War will hit our screens in a hail of repulsor blasts and flying vibranium come April, but has Marvel done enough to build it up? Well, not really, no. The whole clash is feeling a bit self-contained at the moment and it would have been nice for Marvel to have given us a little bit more of a reason to pick a side in the civi war. Whilst it's true that the seeds of disagreement were sown in Age Of Ultron, that film was so crammed that as soon as Ultron started causing hassle and breaking windows Tony's driving need to protect the world in the wake of the battle for New York took a back seat. What's more, Stark and Cap left the Age Of Ultron on pretty good terms, so having them meet up, fight ideologically, fall out, punch each other in the helmet a bit and then end things in a way in which the Avengers can move forward as a team in just over two hours is a big ask. Basically, we should have had a fourth Iron Man movie first. It's a no-brainer really. Iron Man kick-started this whole universe and set the tone for a lot of what followed, and his PTSD in Iron Man 3 also helped show a more realistic aftermath to such a world-changing event than simply hitting up the nearest shawarma restaurant that hasn't been reduced to rubble. Iron Man 4 could have delved even deeper into Stark as a character, using a smaller scale villain (or even better, a sympathetic anti-hero) to put Tony in the type of mindset which would realistically see him put up his gauntlets against Cap. Instead we're probably going to get dropped into the disagreement straight away, with neither character having enough to time flesh out their arguments properly, instead of focusing on Iron Man's point of view for one movie and Steve Roger's beliefs for another. It could be that we haven't seen Iron Man 4 because Marvel don't want to push heroes we've seen a lot of already, or it could be because Robert Downey Jr commands a fee roughly equivalent to the GDP of a mid-size African nation. Unfortunately, it ultimately means Civil War will wind up weakened.