philosopherking1887:

My ranking of MCU movies

Maybe I’ll add more commentary later, but for now here’s the numbered ranking, best to worst:

1. The Avengers (2012)
2. Black Panther (2018)
3. Thor (2011)
4. Iron Man (2008)
5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
6. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
7. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
8. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
9. Thor: The Dark World (2013)
10. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
11. Iron Man 3 (2013)
12. Ant-Man (2015)
13. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
14. Doctor Strange (2016)
15. Iron Man 2 (2010)
16. Captain America: Civil War (2016)
17. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
18. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Pretty standard, with a few notable exceptions: everyone else hates AOU, but I really like it; everyone loves CA: TWS, CA: CW, and TR (except a few of my friends), but I thought the first was meh and the latter two were characterization disasters. Maybe considered on its own (if that were even possible) TR isn’t the worst MCU movie; I’m judging it as a sequel, which it was supposed to be.

Any thoughts, @fuckyeahrichardiii? Or any rearrangements you want to try to talk me into?

I was looking for patterns in my own ranking and I noticed that a sequel never ranks higher than the first installment in a series (considering the ensemble Avengers movies as their own series rather than as sequels to the individual heroes’ movies). This is interestingly different from the common pattern with other superhero/sci-fi trilogies such as the original Star Wars, the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, and the original and new X-Men movies, where the first is good, the second is better, and the third is (to a greater or lesser degree) disappointing.