Phase 4 Has Fixed Marvel's Villain Problem

thegamer.com:

The Infinity Saga had a huge villain problem. The first 23 films of the MCU were very reminiscent of the comic books in how they introduced a new villain of the week. But at the same time, they wanted the near-world-ending stakes of other huge blockbusters, not the scuffles we got in Saturday morning cartoons. That’s hard to pull off when you need to reset the status-quo by the time the credits roll and get all the pieces in place for the next Avengers movie.

So we got the worst of both worlds. The bad guy pops their head in, and then they’re either dead or locked up by the end of the movie. They can rarely just run off to cause more mischief, because your hero losing that badly is a hard way to justify a two-and-a-half-hour runtime. The antagonist might raise a good point or two, but ultimately, they take it too far and bait the hero into a big CGI fight. The hero is all, “man, that sucks”, and nothing changes. The world stays the same. The conditions that created the villain are not addressed. The stage is cleared for the next antagonist to take their place.

Related: Doctor Strange 2 Is Proof MCU Films Should Give Directors More Control

Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming might be the most egregious example of this. With MCU Spidey opting to be an Elon Musk stan, we don’t get the broke Peter Parker we know and love from the Raimi days. So in comes Vulture, rightfully pissed off that the rich are stomping on him and his workers. There are some cool things at play here, with how Peter takes him down for bringing weapons into the neighbourhood rather than any Thanos-level offences, but it doesn’t change him. He goes right back to the Elon Musk-stanning, and then even inherits some of his own super dangerous weapons of his