- My first pick is “What If…?”. In a multiverse of infinite possibilities, we ended up getting the same old same old. We could have gotten a nice, episodic, self-contained anthology series that had nothing to do with the rest of the MCU (as it was originally marketed as) but then they had to go and add a huge, connecting storyline. Not to mention the animation style could have been a bit better.
- And then there’s Secret Invasion, which by all accounts was a complete mess. A lot of people say that this should have been the main story arc of Phases 4 to 6 instead of the multiverse. They could have slowly teased the presence of Skrulls invading Earth (perhaps by revealing that some of the Avengers were Skrulls all along?) and maybe used the plot of Secret Invasion as a feature film instead of a series.
I liked What If, but was disappointed by Secret Invasion. Supposedly, Secret Invasion’s production was crappy due to the pandemic and the invasion on Ukraine, or something like that.
But my beef with the MCU/Disney post-Endgame is that they are not committing to anything. They go “oh, Secret Invasion flopped, let’s completely scrap everything we had been setting up for that story… oh, Majors is a piece of shit, let’s complety scrap that storyline instead of recasting…” And it’s not like a future movie or show couldn’t retroactively fix a flop.
At this point, I prefer stuff like What If and Zombies, or Agatha All Along, stuff that is somewhat connected but different. The main arc, so to speak, is turning into The X-Files mythos arc, which was famously all over the place and one is better off skipping those episodes on rewatch.