This article was originally published in The Writer’s Everything, Issue #012.

While Disney still has several entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) planned for the next few years, it’s hard to imagine them ever building up to an event of such epic scale as Avengers: Endgame.

The twenty-three films that make up the MCU, however, did not just contribute to an epic team up adventure the likes of which we’ve never seen. They also provided us with a baseline by which to judge superhero films on a whole. 

That is not to say, however, that every individual entry in the MCU is a complete and indisputable masterpiece. As I mentioned in last week’s issue of The Writer’s Everything, there is at least one problem in particular that almost every MCU film shares.

This article was originally published in The Writer’s Everything, Issue #011.

There is no film series more popular than the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Starting with Iron Man in 2008, both the solo and team outings of the various Avengers have since exploded in popularity. After eleven years, Marvel has amassed a collection of successful, interconnected movies that few, if any, will be able to replicate any time soon. 

Yes. Many, many people enjoy MCU films. At the same time, many others, especially storytellers, can’t help but notice the similarities between each new entry and the last. For them, it feels as though Marvel has discovered a formula for their films, sacrificing originality for the sake of success. 

This article was originally published in The Writer’s Everything, Issue #009.

Few characters embody all the ideals that we as a culture hold dear the way Steve Rogers, better known by his crime-fighting alias Captain America, does. Over the course of his eleven appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), he has stood for truth, justice, and freedom, easily snatching the mantle of a pure and innocent do- gooder from the DC Extended Universe’s Superman.

This article was originally published in The Writer’s Everything, Issue #007.

In Avengers: Endgame, Scarlett Johansson’s character, Black Widow, chose to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the universe. Her selflessness won the day, providing the rest of the team with the tool they needed to restore billions of people back to life. While Black Widow’s death scene was a tragic moment in the fourth Avengers film, if we look at it from a thematic viewpoint, we’d see that it was the only possible conclusion for her character’s arc.