10 Ways Marvel Can Stop The MCU From DYING

10. Make Audiences Care About The Ongoing Story

Perhaps the single biggest issue facing the MCU right now is the lack of an overarching, phase-spanning narrative that audiences are actually invested in.

Though the franchise's first three phases certainly took their time building up to Thanos (Josh Brolin), this was buffeted by the outstanding character development and world-building, which felt so fully realised by the time the Mad Titan arrived on the scene and snapped it all away.

Yet almost a dozen movies removed from Avengers: Endgame's satisfying conclusion to the Infinity Saga, how much meaningful story progress has really been made?

Most of the post-Endgame films and TV shows have felt fairly scattered and barely in service of a wider ongoing narrative at all, while major events therein have been ignored by the surrounding movies - Eternals' half-born Celestial sticking out of the Earth, for one.

While Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the Loki series want us to believe that Kang (Jonathan Majors) is a threat worth buying into, most fans don't seem particularly convinced that he'll hold much of a candle to Thanos.

Matching the uniqueness of the Infinity Saga was always going to be incredibly challenging, yet the lack of a clear vision going forward is staggering.

It basically feels like new movies are coming out semi-randomly while being tagged with vague credits scenes teasing characters we may or may not ever see again (Eros, anyone?).

It's exhausting, honestly, because what's the point of establishing a shared cinematic universe if it's just going to feel disparate and disconnected?