The Marvel franchise has one big, big problem

A review of 'Thunderbolts/New Avengers' and where this superhero franchise stands

May 09, 2025

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This review does contain spoilers.

The Marvel franchise is out of ways to end the world.

There are only so many ways to destroy New York City, only so many ways to threaten the entire universe and timeline and quantum realm, only so many times a superhero can hit rock bottom and magically recover before the audience says, “Haven’t we seen this movie before?”

Marvel has broken its movie releases into six phases, “Phase One” beginning with the golden, glorious production of Iron Man in 2008, sandwiching Hulk, Thor, and Captain America in there, and ending in 2012 with the classic Avengers movie we know and love.

Fast forward. Marvel’s “Phase Five” began with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in 2023, which is exactly when I stopped avidly watching. I was seething through that entire film – my time wasted by a point-blank plot and side-quests I didn’t care about. Thunderbolts* i.e. *New Avengers closes out this phase, and I’m left feeling the exact same way I did at the beginning of Phase Five: frustrated and unimpressed.

I want you to keep in mind, I used to be a huge Marvel fan. I was there for the big premieres: Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, etc. In high school, my friends and I had a Marvel movie marathon where we tried to watch as many Marvel movies as we could in chronological order. (I wish I could remember how far we made it). Even before that, I grew up watching the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies from the ‘00s and the Batman movies from the ‘90s.

Know I don’t want to be a hater just to hate. The following might be an unpopular opinion, but hear me out.

In my free time, I spend a lot of time studying what makes a good story. (Research Save the Cat if you’re a writer, it’ll change your life). So much so that I’m the worst person to watch a show with, immediately pointing out what’s going to happen next or where a plot point was unresolved or what scene was unrealistic. This film is technically, precise – it hits its story beats. We have our opening image, our set-up, our catalyst, our debate, fun and games, the bad guys close in, finale, and such.

The problem? Thunderbolts* was a quick hit dealing out brief backstories and over-explanatory dialogue so audiences could feel like they “knew” what was happening without actually knowing much of anything.

I keep thinking about something my former colleague Ashara Wilson said in a recent video: “A couple of writers came out for Netflix saying that they had been told to write for viewers who had the show on in the background, people who weren’t paying attention to the show in the first place. So instead of dialogue being nuanced to show a range of a character’s emotions, it’ll just blatantly state what a character is doing on screen.”

This is exactly what Thunderbolts* did. The writers assumed the audience was not smart enough to put the story together themselves or to infer the actors’ emotions from their facial expression or to enjoy what was happening in the moment enough not to worry about what had already happened in the franchise. It was a dull theater experience because they were trying to appeal to people who have been out of the loop, but in doing so, didn’t explain when they needed to and over-explained when they didn’t have to.

Marvel is struggling to bring back their old fans, having isolated us with bad takes and copy-paste plots. At the same time, they’re struggling to bring in new fans, because who has the time to catch up on over 30 movies and TV shows? It’s a daunting task, and Marvel is trying to remedy that by spending the majority of their screen time explaining what is happening instead of having something actually happen.

I love an anti-hero. A reluctant hero. A rag-tag-gang-of-misfits forced to work together. I love the idea of warring with your good and bad your side. And I do love superheroes.

When I go to a movie, I’m immediately giving the story the benefit of the doubt. This is called suspension of disbelief – I will suspend my disbelief if you deliver on your promise to tell me a good story. When Marvel keeps dropping my suspension of disbelief on a dirty floor and crushing it under their heel like a Saltine cracker, what am I supposed to do?

The set was obvious, the CGI was obvious, and the acting was obvious, which meant the fact that it was a production was OBVIOUS! You might say: Duh, Rachel. It’s a movie. It’s fiction! But that’s not the point! Marvel never earned my buy-in. I didn’t feel like the world was ending because I knew the heroes of this story would find some convenient way to fix it.

And my goodness, the heavy-handiness. I wanted to scream as Marvel tried to employ some sort of meta, reverse psychology. At one point Yelena says something like, “What, you think this is all a marketing ploy?” Is that, like, an inside joke? Because call it what it is, but don’t call it what it is and then pretend you didn’t. Marvel’s Uber and Doordash promotions were not subtle.

If that was supposed to be some sort of satirical commentary on capitalism, it also didn’t work. Go watch The Boys instead (if you can handle graphic images). It’s an almost a one-to-one parody of corporatism and culture right now through a superhero medium.

Point-blank, my Thunderbolts* theater-going experience was awkward. I wanted to go back to the theater for this one to see if it felt the same way as past premieres, but as I sat there in a sparsely-filled AMC, very few of the bits hit. No one around me reacted when they were supposed to, a second or so of time inserted into the film for the laugh that never came.

Marvel, did you even….test this movie? Or did you hand Florence Pugh a script and say, “It’s on you to carry this now!” (None of this is her fault, btw1. She did an excellent job with what she had, and I’d say the same for Sebastian Stan and Lewis Pullman).

The main villain, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, was a one-dimensional caricature, complete with an evil laugh and corporatized ultimatums. I wasn’t surprised when her assistant turned on her because be-so-freaking-for-real-right-now: she was an awful boss. We get to see a few minutes of her origin story, and it still barely gives us a glimpse into her motivations, altogether flattening her arc and making her easily side-stepped.

And now for the part I’m least looking forward to talking about: the depiction of Bob and his mental illness.

The message I received by the end of the movie was that you can’t fight your inner demons alone. It’s a lovely, necessary message. I absolutely think it’s important to represent mental illness and inner struggles in media.

The argument could be made that Bob was meant to represent bipolar disorder – drastic mood swings, memory lapses, struggles with addiction, and severe trauma. He’s in some of the most real, heart-wrenching scenes, as he learns how to overcome his darkness with the help of his new friends. You can feel his pain through the screen. Fighting with his “shadow self” was a very direct yet interesting metaphor.

I didn’t like how certain stereotypes were subtly embedded into this portrayal. Bob was infantilized and easily manipulated, undercutting the intelligence of someone who struggles with serious mental illness. His past drug addiction was made light of. His mood swings and memory lapses were radicalized. If Marvel had officially labeled him, they would be getting a lot more flak – yet another example of Hollywood reinforcing preconceived notions about mental illnesses. They were able to bring it together, tying in Yelena’s own struggles with loneliness and depression, but it still made me double-take.

Plus, Bob’s superhero persona, the Sentry, might very well be the most powerful superhero Marvel has ever brought to screen, which is why Marvel couldn’t let him be powerful. What fun is a superhero with no weaknesses? It leads back to our original problem.

Marvel has exhausted their world-ending stakes. The franchise has gotten trapped much, much too large scale, when, really, what people care about are the immediate stakes for the character. Can Yelena recover from the death of her sister, Black Widow? Can Bob reconcile with both the bad and good parts of himself as he becomes the Sentry? Can Bucky – LOL, JK.2 Imagine giving Bucky screentime during this movie.

Recycled IP with no added depth is killing superheroes more than supervillains are.3 I think we need at least a couple decades between films for large-scale IP reuse to feel valuable.

This isn’t just a Marvel problem: In the 30 freaking minutes of previews I had to watch at AMC, I saw ads for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (I thought the last one was the last one?), M3GAN 2.0 (absurd AI comedy-horror has potential for good satire), The Fantastic Four: First Steps (another attempt at a revamp, we’ll see if it delivers), Superman (DC Comics, are you even trying to come up with a new plot?), Jurassic World Rebirth (Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey, I love you, but I’m not sold), and Tron: Ares (okay, I actually really love the Tron movies).

If Marvel was looking for epic cheers and claps and screams at the end of the movie, my theater was not the one to be in. Headlines like “Not My Avengers” and “B-vengers” in the end credits, while tongue-in-cheek and a clever way to set up a new age for the franchise, didn’t offset the audience’s ambivalence.

Marvel is so, so close to making their movies good again. They have incredible characters like Yelena and Bucky that have been developed across several movies – and new characters like Bob they could develop – but instead, waste time cramming in their plot points and dumbing down their delivery.

There are things Thunderbolts* did well: bringing an unlikely team together, making each anti-hero redeemable, providing depth to Yelena and Bob’s inner struggles. The transformation from Thunderbolts* to *New Avengers was a brilliant PR move, breaking the fourth wall and drawing more attention to the film. Marvel answered the question “Why the asterisk?” with the best possible answer. I’ve never heard of a movie changing its entire title before.

And regardless of what I think, the movie is getting good reviews. If we’re rating it according to fan service, it gets a five out of five. If I wasn’t such a film critic and I had stayed up-to-date with the franchise, I probably would’ve enjoyed it. Surface-level, it checks all its boxes. Maybe I’m just not the intended audience, though I suspect I wasn’t the only person out-of-the-loop on Marvel lore4 who decided to go back to the theater for Thunderbolts*.

The days of the Golden Superhero Film are dead, traded for a washed-out, written-the-night-before-deadline script and someone’s conviction that more is less. I wish I could buy into the “New Avengerz,” but what else do these anti-heroes have to save the world from? All of the aliens, robots, alter-egos, and supervillains have been defeated. There are only so many explosions and laser blasts and bullets they can dodge.

But of course, without a hero, a nemesis, and burden, the story would be over, and Marvel can’t have that. They need to market Wheaties, after all.