Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame Broke The MCU: Will It Ever Recover?
The MCU's Infinity Saga came to an end with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, two epic projects that threw the future of the MCU into disarray. After a decade of superhero adventures, Marvel Studios brought all of their existing heroes together in Infinity War and Endgame for one final battle against the Mad Titan, Thanos. Infinity War revealed Thanos' genocidal plan to wipe out half the population of the universe in an effort to stop issues caused by over-population, and after the disbanded Avengers failed to defeat him, Endgame picked up five years later, set in a bleak world ravaged by the effects of Thanos' success.
In the wake of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios has seen a drop in popularity, with projects such as Eternals, Thor: Love & Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania being met with mixed-to-negative reviews. The MCU's Multiverse Saga also brought with it the introduction of original MCU TV shows for Disney+, marking a huge rise in the amount of content produced by Marvel Studios. Criticisms for various Phase 4 projects made it impossible to avoid comparisons to the MCU's Infinity Saga, so it could be argued that the massive success of Infinity War and Endgame actually had a detrimental impact on the future of the franchise.