10 Best MCU Endings

Chris Evans’ Captain America was in dire need of an upgrade by the time work started on his second solo movie. Though he had worked well playing off of the rest of the Avengers, he sorely needed a sense of character progression to match up with his teammates.

However, in a few short strokes, Cap became a badass again on the Winter Soldier.

Acting more as a spy thriller than an actual superhero movie, the stakes of this film are higher than your by the numbers superhero movie, with the entirety of SHIELD being compromised by HYDRA. Though the original ending fight scene against his old friend Bucky is still powerful to watch, the final few frames are where the movie gets real.

After Black Widow defends the team’s actions against a panel of government officials, we see Nick Fury burning what was left of SHIELD before going off the grid for a while.

There’s a lot of twists and turns to be had in this movie, but these last few frames is when you saw the MCU start to grow up beyond your standard beat-em-up movies. Cap may have come out of this movie on the other side, but the work was far from over.