Alex Cranz has a piece in The Verge about where Marvel movies went wrong and why audiences can no longer trust the quality of those productions.

I don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses and say every early Marvel film was better than what’s coming out today. I sat through all of Iron Man 2 in the theaters. I remember Avengers: Age of Ultron, too. But as the MCU has become more and more successful, it’s become a victim of its own hubris. It started to imitate the comic industry that inspired it: shoddily putting together solo projects that always feed into some big crossover event and that usually require you to catch up with a bunch of other solo projects regardless of whether you want to, all while being pretty devoid of well-thought-out or consistent characterizations.

What I find most fascinating is the assertion that the movies are now following the path of the comics from which the properties came. It makes sense, though, that success is affecting movies in the same way it affected comic books. I haven’t seen a Marvel movie in a while, and have been at least partially deterred by hearing that you now have to be familiar with the rest of the franchise to enjoy any given entry in it.