THE RANKING

A four-page MCU special. We can do this all day.

Chris: When did we first come to the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

James: Well, I went to a screening of Iron Man and very much enjoyed it.

Chris: It was good, wasn’t it?

James: Yeah, it was.

Helen: I liked Iron Man. I probably wasn’t sold on the whole concept of a universe. It didn’t really come into focus as a universe for a little while after that. It was Captain America or Thor where you began to sort of see the connections and see that feeling of it all coming together. Ben: I was 16 when Iron Man came out. I went to see it with my parents. It was at that stage where Iron Man obviously wasn’t a big-name character, but they did a great job of making it kind of feel very distinct and vibrant.

Amon: I was 19 when I first saw it. I remember having to go back a second time after going online, after watching it and realising that there was a post-credits scene which I had missed the first time. That’s how I learned my lesson to always stay to the post-credits scene in a Marvel movie.

Dan: I suggested putting Iron Man on the cover of Empire a year before that film came out. A full year, in the summer of 2007.

Helen: So without you, there might be no MCU.

Dan: I think in many ways I am responsible for the Infinity Saga.

Chris: I think there’s a kind of default setting people have with Iron Man where they go, “That’s still the best one.”

Helen: Yeah, it’s not.

Chris: Demonstrably untrue.

Helen: It’s really not bad at all. It’s very confident and very self-assured filmmaking straight out of the gate and a really good sense of the character and the universe and the tone they needed to go for. A lot of that comes from the casting of Robert Downey Jr in particular.

James: That is such an inspired piece of casting. You’ve got to think that if they hadn’t cast him as Tony Stark, would the MCU be what it is now? And I don’t think it would.

Chris: How is it that this franchise has penetrated and permeated the culture in a way that nothing really since Star Wars has? I can’t think of anything else like it where 23 films in, you could count the number of stinkers on the finger of one finger.

James: I would argue that there’s not a single bad film among them. Incredible Hulk isn’t brilliant. And Iron Man 2 isn’t brilliant either. But I don’t think they’re bad films by any stretch. Chris: I do feel that Incredible Hulk is the one stinker.

Helen: Why we’re talking about Marvel is this overall consistency, for one, and the overall commitment to storytelling. There have been little bits of retconning here and there, no question, but generally speaking it feels like they’ve had a plan and they’ve more or less stuck to it.

Ben: I think the way that they’ve interweaved these stories turns casual viewers into sort of diehards. Before you know it, you’re 23 films in, and actively excited about what’s coming next.

Dan: There are lots of similarities between stories — Iron Man and Doctor Strange you could put side by side. But they’re still different tones.

Amon: I think the first Avengers was the tipping point. That was the proof that this could actually work. That gave them the confidence to greenlight things like Guardians Of The Galaxy.

Ben: Isn’t it weird thinking of a time when people would associate ‘The Avengers’ with John Steed and Emma Peel?

Helen: It’s a phenomenal film. I’ve argued that it’s an experimental movie on the basis that no-one had ever done this before, taken the heads of four different franchises and put them in one movie, and thrown it all on one spin of the dice. If this had been bad, if this had been really bad, you could have killed all four franchises stone dead, or damaged them in the way DC arguably did with Justice League. All power to Joss Whedon for doing it.

Amon: I remember the conversations we were having back then about how they could make a movie with six characters work. And now with Endgame… James: It seems so quaint in retrospect, doesn’t it? So bold, ambitious. It’s like a little indie movie.

Ben: I think even though Endgame and Infinity War feel so, so much bigger, the first Avengers film still excites.

Helen: Captain America: The Winter Soldier was my number one for a very long time.

James: Has the single greatest action series in the entire MCU.

Helen: Is that the lift?

James: No. That would be the second greatest. I’m referring specifically to the Fury car chase.

Helen: One of the things that I quite like about the Captain America franchise is that there isn’t any bullshit about ‘never kill anybody’. He’s a soldier and he will kill people. I think that’s a bit more intellectually honest than some of these superhero movies.

Chris: I suspect Guardians Of The Galaxy is in all your top tens.

Helen: It is not. I never connected with this. I think it defaults to a very laddish humour a lot of the time. I disliked lots of bits of Guardians 2 as well, and that’s put me off the original a bit.