8 Things Avengers: Infinity War Did Better Than Captain America: Civil War

Is Infinity War now the MCU's gold standard?

by Ewan Paterson
Civil War V Thanos
Marvel Studios

Avengers: Infinity War is a cinematic masterpiece, and while its newfound reverence within the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is probably without question, by the time the dust has settled, Anthony and Joe Russo's film will be hailed as a defining event in the superhero genre, and possibly even as the finest comic book movie ever made.

What the third Avengers film actually achieves is something truly spectacular. Having utilised over a decade's worth of stories, spin-offs and performances to add to its emotional impact, Infinity War has transcended the boundaries of what franchise films could typically achieve. That grants the MCU's latest feature a powerful kind of salience, and while it's somewhat inaccessible to the uninitiated, for those who have taken part in the Marvel Studios experiment, Infinity War is something else entirely.

Seminal moments are no stranger to the superhero genre; Christopher Nolan pioneered the use of sub-genres in his part crime thriller, part drama The Dark Knight in 2008, and the film that launched a thousand others - 2008's Iron Man - sewed the seeds of the cinematic universe franchises today are desperate to imitate.

The latest Avengers can count itself among those films as well, and while the benchmark for the MCU's quality has long been considered Civil War, the Russos' latest effort succeeds their last on almost every account.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.