10 Ways Marvel Can Stop The MCU From DYING

It shouldn't be terribly surprising that many of the best and most memorable MCU movies were directed and even written by auteurs with a clear, distinct vision of their own - James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok, and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther the three most successful examples.

Yet the franchise is better known for bringing in up-and-coming filmmakers and effectively bending them to the will of the MCU's sausage factory content machine, to the extent that their artistic voice is all but strangled to death.

Talented filmmakers like Jon Watts (the Spider-Man trilogy), Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel), and Cate Shortland (Black Widow) were left helming superhero movies so devoid of personality, stylistically and otherwise, that it feels like they were directed by committee.

What's the point in bringing on talented filmmakers with their own directorial personalities if they're going to just deliver anonymous, relatively mediocre slop?

The MCU would benefit massively from trying to get truly visionary directors on its books and letting them movies that feel distinctly theirs, rather than leaving them at the mercy of their famously hemmed-in pre-production process, where action sequences are often pre-visualised before filmmakers even come aboard.

Continuity of style and tone is important to a point, especially in the MCU's early going, but more than 30 films into the franchise, Feige should appreciate that audiences don't want these movies to look and feel like they all came off a conveyor belt.