10 Things I Hate About The Marvel Cinematic Universe

If the runaway success of Deadpool has proven anything, it’s that a production budget north of a hundred million bucks isn’t necessary to deliver a successful superhero movie. Hell, a full season of Arrow and The Flash together probably cost The CW around as much to make for the small screen as Doctor Strange did for Marvel Studios as a two hour feature.

With the proliferation of good value, high-end CG effects these days, and the perennial surplus of incredibly talented actors, writers, directors swarming around Hollywood, you could get a decent superhero movie made for far less than Marvel’s grandiose budgets - and you wouldn’t have to futz around with creative accounting to make the damn thing profitable.

2009’s Push, about a secret war between psychic superhumans, cost $38 million to make; 2012’s Chronicle, $12 million, and both those movies look great. If you’re looking at bigger stories, Joss Whedon made Serenity, a Star Wars style space adventure, for $39 million in 2005, and it doesn’t really look any cheaper than The Force Awakens, made for at least six times that amount last year.

It's all well and good having an epic masterplan stretching years into the future with commanding names like Phase 3 and such, but the fact that these event movies are Event Movies costing well over $100m each, shoving aside other flicks and squatting like toads atop the blockbuster lists every year since 2008 means there's no time for the little stories.

Now, Netflix was supposed to be able to tell some of those stories, but it’s not really worked out that way. The runaway critical and commercial success of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage has meant that the Defenders section of the MCU, supposedly featuring the low key ‘street level’ heroes, is now a really big deal.

The fact is, Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye should be able to command his own movie - so why isn’t he? He's a bluff, working class marksman who remains something of an enigma in the MCU to date. Make a wry comedy-actioner with an actor playing the villain that people recognise off TV, give it a $50 million budget and drop it into a fall release schedule with a slimline viral marketing campaign. Then sit back and watch it make Ant-Man style money with Deadpool style profit.

There are any number of characters that would benefit hugely from this approach, including ones already slated for MCU Event Movie ubiquity (like Black Panther and Captain Marvel), and ones like Black Widow who seem destined to remain supporting characters forever instead.

What’s more, telling cheaper stories often means the freedom to tell more interesting stories. There’s an argument to be made that Marvel’s big movies are hitting safe, micro-managed narrative beats every time in order to avoid alienating that all-important mainstream audience.