It’s no secret that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has struggled to get back on its feet since Avengers: Endgame. That movie was the culmination of a decade’s worth of storytelling, and it perfected the art of the crowd-pleasing superhero blockbuster. So, where do you go from there? Kevin Feige, the mastermind behind the MCU, has spent the past seven years trying to answer that question, to varying degrees of success.

Phase Three was the pinnacle of the MCU’s grand experiment — a generational run of banger after banger that will surely go down in the annals of film history — and Endgame provided an immensely satisfying sense of finality with the definitive end of Iron Man and Captain America’s stories. Throughout Phase Four, the MCU got a little hit-and-miss, and by the time Phase Five rolled around, it was going back and forth between “It’s so over” and “We’re so back.”

Ever since Endgame, it’s felt like every new Marvel project is either the final nail in the MCU’s coffin or the savior of the franchise. There have been plenty of underwhelming, half-baked, or outright dreadful post-Endgame movies and streaming shows that have led the fan base to declare the franchise “so over” (Thor: Love and Thunder, Secret Invasion, Captain America: Brave New World), but there have also been at least 13 MCU projects that have sparked “We’re so back” comments.

WandaVision

Phase Four ended up being a mixed bag, with some very polarizing turns, but it got off to a very strong start with WandaVision. After the entire universe was at stake in Endgame, it was refreshing to see such an intimate, small-scale, low-stakes story within the context of the MCU. The biggest conflict in WandaVision was being unprepared for an important dinner party. It was I Love Lucy starring the Scarlet Witch, and just the breath of fresh air the MCU needed to prove it was still worth sticking around.

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings

In an uncertain post-Endgame world, between the too-little-too-late Black Widow movie and the dull, arthouse-y Eternals movie, there was one glimmer of hope: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Director Destin Daniel Cretton nailed the MCU’s signature blend of heart, humor, and spectacle. Simu Liu brought a fascinating new hero into the fold, and the stunt team brought Jackie Chan-style martial arts slapstick and Crouching Tiger-style wuxia acrobatics to Marvel’s mega-scale action set-pieces. It still holds up today as one of the MCU’s most distinctive cinematic visions.

Loki

Marvel Studios’ foray into television got off to a rocky start; WandaVision was a masterpiece, but The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a painfully generic, utterly forgettable action series. Loki was the first show that really caught fire. Unlike the previous shows, which felt like movies chopped up into episodes, Loki actually felt like a television series. It had a juicy sci-fi procedural premise (time-traveling space cops using a god as a consultant) and a delightful odd-couple detective duo at its core: Tom Hiddleston, giving his best performance yet as the God of Mischief, and Owen Wilson as a dry-witted bureaucrat.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

After months of rumors and leaks and outright lies by Andrew Garfield, Spider-Man: No Way Home finally hit theaters and turned out to be what we all expected: a multiversal team-up of all three Spider-Men, fighting side-by-side in the ultimate cinematic crossover event. The Multiverse Saga had gotten off to a pretty rough start, but No Way Home proved it could work.

Moon Knight

With Moon Knight, Marvel finally started to go a bit darker, and a bit weirder. Before Deadpool came over from the Fox-verse, Moon Knight was the closest thing we had to an R-rated MCU project. The violence is bloody, the protagonist is severely disturbed, and not everything we see is real. Moon Knight was more psychological thriller than superhero actioner.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Ryan Coogler had already set a very high bar for the Black Panther sequel when the first movie scored an unprecedented Best Picture nomination. Then, tragedy struck with the untimely passing of Chadwick Boseman, and Coogler had to scramble to rewrite the script. Miraculously, the movie that went through all this turmoil emerged as a beautiful, special piece of work. Coogler turned the sequel into a cinematic eulogy for Boseman, and a reflection of the collective grief that everyone in front of the camera, behind the scenes, and sitting in the audience felt over his loss.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3

Right before he went across the street to collect the keys to the DC kingdom, James Gunn wrote and directed one last comic book movie masterpiece for Marvel. In between two of Marvel’s most notorious box office bombs, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 took the box office by storm, because it wasn’t trying to world-build for the future; it was the closing chapter of the Guardians’ story. It wasn’t about reassembling the Avengers or setting up the multiverse or establishing a new big bad; it was about bidding a fitting farewell to these characters we’d been following for a decade.

X-Men ’97

Although it technically doesn’t take place within the MCU, and instead picks up where X-Men: The Animated Series left off, X-Men ’97 nevertheless came out of the Marvel Studios machine, and it’s one of the greatest things they’ve ever produced. With sharp writing, poignant performances, and dazzling old-school animation, X-Men ’97 has replicated the charm of the original show. Just like the original, it’s as much a melodramatic mutant soap opera as it is a superhero cartoon.

Deadpool & Wolverine

After the lackluster performance of Quantumania and The Marvels, it seemed as though the MCU had lost its magic at the box office. There was a brief time there, around the Infinity War/Endgame hype, where a movie could gross $1 billion just by virtue of taking place in the Marvel universe. Now, post-COVID, you can’t take $1 billion for granted; you have to really earn it. In 2024, Marvel earned it. They only released one movie in the aftermath of the strikes, and it became the movie of the summer. On its opening weekend, when fans came out in droves, Deadpool & Wolverine was a rousing theatrical experience on par with the very best of the MCU.

Agatha All Along

After “saving” the MCU with WandaVision, Jac Schaeffer came back and saved it again with the sequel series, Agatha All Along. This series turned Kathryn Hahn’s scene-stealing villainess into a compelling protagonist in her own story. Once it hits the Witches’ Road, Agatha All Along becomes one of Marvel’s wildest, funnest adventures: a campy, supernatural horror-infused musical road-trip comedy.