![]() The direct follow-up to the first MCU movie is, as a film, a mess. Again, Incredible Hulk isn't necessarily a bad movie, but it feels much more of a piece with the films of the pre-MCU superhero burst than its later counterparts, and that lands it in the bottom of the rankings. Given its protagonist is recast (and redesigned) later in the MCU and its female lead has yet to reappear, its biggest contributions to the MCU are William Hurt's Thunderbolt Ross and Tim Roth's Abomination both have their moments, but neither are key players in the MCU. It suffers in these rankings a bit because those trappings are so minor and/or atypical. It is a bog standard mid '00s action film with some early trappings of what we'd later recognize as the MCU style grafted onto it. Even the worst film of the bunch - 2008's Incredible Hulk - isn't a bad movie. For as much as the franchise may get grief for sanding down the artistic edges of more distinctive filmmakers and only rarely hitting a mark higher than 'well-made popcorn films', it also doesn't turn out very many stinkers. One of the many remarkable things about the MCU as a collective entity is its consistency. First and foremost is the quality of the film itself - how well does it hold up as a movie? Second is its relevance to the overall, ongoing narrative of the MCU - how well does it work as one chapter in a 30 chapter (and counting) story? And how rewatchable is it - we all love returning to our favorite stories to experience them again and spot new things or gain a new understanding of how the movie works, and an MCU film which supports this kind of rewatchability gets some extra credit over ones that don't (which does, admittedly, instill a bit of anti-recency bias into the rankings which causes newer films to need to work harder in the other two criteria to overcome). When rankings the films, a few criteria are taken into consideration. ![]() With Phase Four now complete and the MCU going headlong into Phase Five with the release of Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania, we present our rankings of every MCU movie to date! Since then, there have been an additional 30 films in the MCU released across five self-branded 'phases' (here's how to watch them all!). Jackson's Nick Fury emerged from the credits of the first Iron Man movie to name drop 'the Avengers Initiative', thereby informing us all that what we had watched wasn't just a new cinematic adaptation of a comic book character, or the start of a cinematic franchise of Iron Man movies, but rather, the start of something brand new, a cinematic universe of films. It's been nearly 15 years since Samuel L.
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