The Homework Film
By the time Avengers: Infinity War arrived in 2018, following it without having watched the preceding seventeen films required a dedicated research session or a friend willing to narrate two fictional universes at full speed during the trailers. IGN put together a recap video covering the previous decade of Marvel mythology—a condensed briefing for the lapsed and the uninitiated—and the fact that such a video was considered necessary tells you exactly what the MCU had become.
It started as a superhero franchise and became a proprietary mythology. Iron Man in 2008 was just a film. By 2018, it was a node in a network where the meaning of any given scene depended entirely on whether you’d done the homework. Thanos isn’t frightening without context. Bucky Barnes’ arc doesn’t land unless you know who he was before the ice. The emotional payoffs are real—some of them genuinely earned across eight or ten films—but they’re locked behind a prerequisite reading list.
I remember falling asleep during Iron Man 2. Not from exhaustion, but from something else—the sense that the actual story was being deferred, that everything onscreen was infrastructure for something coming later. I didn’t go back to the MCU for years. By the time I did, I was the person who needed the recap video.
What I kept finding, catching up, was that the franchise works best in its quieter corners. The scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an old man in a museum recognizes someone who shouldn’t still be alive. Thor arriving in Wakanda during Infinity War—the theater I was in actually gasped. These moments work even without complete context because they’re built on something recognizably human beneath the lore.
The scale of the whole thing is genuinely impressive, even as it’s also genuinely exhausting. Eighteen films coordinated across directors, studios, and a decade of release schedules, building toward a single ensemble climax—nothing in mainstream cinema had attempted that kind of sustained narrative architecture before. Whether it constitutes art is a separate question. Whether it works as an experience: mostly yes.
I’ve still never finished Avengers: Age of Ultron.