7 Most Disappointing MCU Movies (So Far)

2. Avengers: Age Of Ultron

Living up to the crowd-pleasing brilliance of The Avengers was a thankless and near-impossible task, and duly, Joss Whedon clearly struggled to recapture the same novel magic.

A giant step down from the original, you can practically hear Whedon straining to make this sequel as exciting, funny and important as its predecessor, delivering a bloated, overstuffed follow-up that too often felt a bit, well, lazy.

From the overabundance of quippy dialogue to the shoehorned subplots - especially the romance between Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) - to the throwaway treatment of Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and disappointing depiction of Ultron (James Spader), it's a far more generic movie than just about anyone expected.

It has some great individual scenes - the party in particular - and the performances are reliably solid, but it is a textbook example of a sequel which lacks the freshness of what came before.

And the production was such a stress on Whedon that he decided to part ways with Marvel Studios shortly thereafter.