MCU Rewatch

As a companion podcast to our An Idea of All Time podcast where we are starting off by watching Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings every week for 10 months, we have also decided to rewatch all of the current MCU movies in chronological order. We have now watched the first two Iron Man movies, because apparently we went from Iron Man 1 straight to Iron Man 2 and I think that was a poor decision for many reasons but lets go ahead and get into it.

I think we can all agree that the first Iron Man movie was an incredible jumping off point for the MCU. Now I don’t know all of the behind the scenes info, but I know a lot of it. So Disney purchased the film rights to the Marvel Universe (most of it) in 2008. Pretty much immediately after the release of Iron Man. Iron Man 2 was then released 2 years later and Thor and Captain America were released a year after that within a few months of each other. This was all in phase 1 so I don’t ever want to hear bullshit internet losers screaming “quality over quantity” ever again. Marvel and the MCU has ALWAYS released projects back to back.

Now let’s start with the movie that started it all. For those of you who don’t know they really chose a comic book character no one cared about. Before the MCU Iron Man was not flying off the shelves. They built an entire franchise around a relatively underrated hero. Beat for beat it is still one of the most comic book accurate superhero films in existence. Jon Faverau did an incredible job and it was very clear that the entire production team really cared about what they were making. It was charming, funny, and action packed and every element was cohesive and landed well. There are really no in depth critiques of the first movie because it was really solid and well rounded. It had some sexist moments but it doesn’t linger in them like the second one does so though casual sexism bothers me I can overlook it because the overall quality of the movie is good.

And releasing essentially 5 movies back to back, of course has never been a good idea because Iron Man was incredible and Iron Man 2 was…not. Not only is it incredibly sexist and irritating, the movie itself is not executed very well. From a story, thematic, character development standpoint the film fails on all accounts. Sexism can not be overlooked in this one because the overall quality of the film is terrible. Now I will never say that comic book films have to be 100% accurate to their source material. I really only insist that characterizations are accurate. But especially here in phase one, the built-in audience was comic book fans…very few randos were going to go watch Iron Man 2, so the decision to completely ruin Whiplash was a bad one. The way he was portrayed in the film was terrible but I am more irritated by the fact that he was a one off villain when in the comic he and Tony have a whole ass title together.

Iron Man started a franchise, it was an amazing start to a new era of cinema and if Disney hadn’t bought in that early there is no way we would have the films we have today. If they hadn’t bought after Iron Man 1 they absolutely would not have bought after Iron Man 2. It was a hell of a downfall.