Cultural Contexts of The MCU

The MCU (or Marvel Cinematic Universe) is a combination of all of Marvel's superheroes all thrown together into a single universe in order to tell a coherent story across 23 movies (so far). It was the first studio to take a stab at trying something this monumental and it turned out to be very successful for them. however, nowadays people claim that MCU films are getting stale and they're going to fall from the top very soon. I will discuss this now.

Superhero comic books have been a thing since the time of World War II, Marvel created characters such as Captain America and Human Torch in order to keep morale high after the war, DC made their main hero, Batman, run around with a shotgun killing Nazis, and in one of the first Captain America comics he punched Hitler in the face.

Marvel make superhero movies. Superhero movies started gaming popularity in 2008 when Christopher Nolan's Batman The Dark Knight came out, which was a DC property, so naturally Marvel wanted in on the big bucks, so they made their own version of a superhero franchise starting with 2008s Iron Man. Marvel decided to take their own spin on the superhero genre however, so they went ahead and made all of their films take pace in the same universe to tell one coherent story across the sam timeline (sorta, there's time travel and stuff recently where they timeline hop so yes, but actually no)

Iron man came out to both financial and critical success, It was praised for it's amazing acting from Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark) and it's special effects were practically lifelike with the actual real Iron Man suit and the flight scenes. With a budget of $140 Million and a Box office revenue of $585.2 Million it had a profit of a whopping $445.2 Million.

After this massive triumph Marvel started making more and more movies to follow up, with their other heroes ending up with the massive cast that they have today including Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Spiderman, War Machine and many, many more.

Eventually in 2018, Avengers: Infinity War was released into the cinemas, the villain pulling the strings throughout all of the other films was coming into the limelight, Thanos. This was supposed to be the final battle where the heroes finally beat him and have their happy end... No. That never happened, instead it ended with Thanos winning, he achieved everything he wanted to and killed off 50% of the cast. This film pulled viewers in and ended up getting some of the highest rated overall reviews of any Marvel film, people wanted more and they got it.

Avengers: Endgame was the actual culmination of 11 years and 22 films had all come together to tell the ending to this story, this is where the universe/timeline hopping comes into play and start getting confusing but even still this fit went on to be the highest grossing film ever earning $2.79 billion in the box office, beating the infamous "Avatar"'s $2.78 billion after a decade of it's tyranical rule