Every MCU movie — including 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' — ranked by EW grade (original) (raw)

Everyone has their own personal ranking of the superhero films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In fact, a group of EW writers updated our official MCU ranking. A lot of factors go into rankings like these, from personal taste to the popularity of certain characters. But sometimes it's nice to apply a semi-objective system to such things.

So here, without further ado, is another ranking of the MCU films — according to the letter grades EW critics gave them upon release.

Iron Man 2 (2010): C+

Everett Collection

"He may be out as a superhero and cheered around the world as a peacekeeper, but in Iron Man 2, former weapons mogul Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) can still be a cocky SOB. The man with a battery where his heart ought to be is restless, driven, glib, and grandiose — which is to say, the billionaire industrialist still exhibits all the self-absorbed, antiheroic qualities with which Downey first delighted us in the role. So if this sequel doesn't glow with the same charm as the original, and if Iron Man's face-offs against evil lack edge, the diminished satisfaction has less to do with the quality of the star's trademark catch-me-if-you-can energy than it does with a performance anxiety that now pervades the whole shebang." —Lisa Schwarzbaum

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): C+

Ben Rothstein/© Marvel Studios

"After I saw Ant-Man and the Wasp, I tried to remember if I saw Ant-Man and the Wasp. This is one of those Marvel products peddling self-aware detachment as a defining narrative strategy. Scientists will say science stuff — 'quantum realm,' 'quantum entanglement,' 'quantum tunnel' — and then Scott/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) will deadpan that everyone says 'quantum' too much. Characters joke so much about Captain America: Civil War that you start to wonder if you paid movie-ticket prices to read the internet years ago. It feels less like a feature film than a meme somebody made about an Ant-Man trailer." —Darren Franich

The Incredible Hulk (2008): B–

Michael Gibson/Universal

"The 2003 Hulk, in his rubbery resilience, was essentially a defensive creature (Lou Ferrigno, on the TV series, was even less threatening — the simian version of a '70s hair model — but the new Hulk is offensive in every way, with ugly vein-mottled skin and a way of ripping jeeps in half, then hurling the hunks of metal at helicopters, to create one of those righteous 'Kiss off!' fireballs. He's a rampaging force — Godzilla as bodybuilder — and the director, Louis Leterrier (Transporter 2), stages the film for maximum destructive excitement. It's a big [bash], and in the first huge action set piece, when the Hulk does his smash-and-grab thing and the military holds him back by blasting him with some sort of atomic wind machine, you may for a few moments have that long-sought 'Whoa!' sensation, the one that takes you back to the thrill of the original comics." —Owen Gleiberman

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Thor: The Dark World (2013): B–

Chris Hemsworth as Thor. Everett Collection

"Alan Taylor, who directed this sequel, is a prestige veteran of the small screen (Mad Men, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones), but he brings little of that avid storytelling tightness to The Dark World. The new film sprawls, often with more spirit than reason. And though its images can be exciting (the Oz-like palace of Asgard, airships that glide like daggers), the battles have a video game medieval dazzle that temporarily heightens the senses, then leaves you numb." —O.G.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): B–

"These days, we're so used to feeling short-changed when we go to the movies that it may seem churlish to complain when someone gives us too much. But with Marvel's latest comic-book battle royale, Avengers: Age of Ultron, I walked out of the theater feeling like the survivor of an all-you-can-eat buffet. There are five shock-and-awe action sequences when three would have sufficed. And there are more than a dozen main characters (including a few new ones) all jockeying for screen time when half that number would have already been pushing it. Even the film's rimshot-ready one-liners have the overkill desperation of a stand-up scared of bombing. Either through his own ambition or the mandate of his corporate overlords, writer-director Joss Whedon simply has too many balls to keep in the air for one movie — even a two-and-a-half-hour one — and you can feel his exhaustion." —Chris Nashawaty

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017): B–

Marvel Studios

"No joke, no matter how well it's told, is as funny the second time around. It's still possible to have a good time while also realizing that there's something a little lazy and thin about this sequel. When we were treated to the origin story of how this motley gang of merry-prankster mercenaries came together, there was the shock of the new (at least to the comic-book agnostic)." —C.N.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011): B

Chris Evans in 'Captain America: The First Avenger'. Jay Maidment / Marvel Studios

"Captain America: The First Avenger is stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun. Directed by Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer), the picture is nothing, really, that you haven't seen before, but it's the definition of a square, competent, deliver-the-goods blockbuster. It's set in 1942, and the World War II trappings — gimlet-eyed Nazis, patriotic newsreels, high-stepping USO shows, and the whole earnest spirit of pitching in — are no mere backdrop. The movie is so wholesome it could almost have been made during World War II." —O.G.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017): B

Marvel Studios

"Beneath those long buttery locks and somewhere behind those impossibly sculpted Asgardian abs and biceps, there's always been a gifted comedian with crack timing trying to bust out. [Chris Hemsworth] can't help that he looks the way he does. Plus, it's hard to get a word in edgewise when Tony Stark is firing off quippy one-liners. Thankfully, the big-screen Marvel adventure, Thor: Ragnarok, seems hellbent on finally unleashing Hemsworth's real secret weapon: his humor. With the exception of Deadpool and the Guardians of the Galaxy films, Ragnarok may be the only Marvel-hero movie that feels like it's first and foremost a comedy. And on those terms — and those terms only — it's a triumph." —C.N.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018): B

Chris Evans in Infinity War. MarvelStudios

"Let's be clear, Infinity War is a movie for the fans. Especially those who've spent any time wondering what it would be like to witness Chris Hemsworth's Thor wisecracking with Chris Pratt's Star-Lord, or tagging along with some of the Avengers as they hightail it to Wakanda (the arrival there got a rousing wave of applause at my screening). It's the Marvel equivalent of watching the old 'We Are the World' video (Hey, it's Bob Dylan singing between Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis!). And for the most part, this super-sized mash-up works better than you'd expect. There are occasional tonal disparities when you get a smart-aleck character firing off quips next to a stoically straight-faced one like Chris Evans' Captain America. Even in the real world, if you put a large enough group of people in a room together, all of the different personalities aren't necessarily going to mesh. Comic-book heroes, they're just like us!" —C.N.

Captain Marvel (2019): B

Brie Larson as Captain Marvel. Chuck Zlotnick/©Marvel Studios 2019

"[Brie] Larson is the first woman to headline her own Marvel Studios movie. That's the kind of horror-show fact that leaves you wondering what stone age Hollywood history bombed itself back to sometime around 2008, like there were never any Hepburns at all? Captain Marvel can feel overly (corporately?) anxious about its own feminism. Larson remembers a struggle to be taken seriously — the Air Force didn't even allow female fighter pilots until 1993! — but those memories are locked away from her current Kreeward existence. Until very late in the film, she's a bystander to her own hero's journey." —D.F.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019): B

Jay Maidment/Sony Pictures

"I wound up liking Far From Home more than any Spider-Man film this decade. There's something eerie in the constant assertion of Tony Stark as Tycoon SuperJesus — but don't underestimate the shifty layers the final act. The hero worship has a slippery quality here, with a less cheerful purpose than the sincere devotion ofHomecoming or Into the Spider-Verse. The teen characters really are a blast, even if one key person skips a whole movie of development between scenes. Some digital effects look good in a boring way, and then some digital effects look bad in a perfect way. "Is this real?" asks Spider-Man. In the end, I really didn't know. Far From Home succeeds with an unusual, troubling virtue: The best parts are the most fake." —D.F.

Eternals (2021): B

Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan) in 'Eternals.'. Sophie Mutevelian/Marvel Studios

"Eternals still molds itself faithfully to Marvel form — the winky banter and convoluted origin myths, exotic scene-setting (London! Hiroshima! Ancient Babylon!) and clanging third-act showdowns. But [Chloé] Zhao's imprint is also hard to miss in the movie's steady thrum of melancholy and its deeper, odder character arcs. Her sprawling cast's superhuman powers tend to belie their extremely human traits: They fight, fall in love, and fall prey to their own egos; some have serious day jobs and even non-Eternal husbands (or at least Brian Tyree Henry's Phastos does)."

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022): B

Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, and Benedict Cumberbatch in 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness'. Marvel Studios

"Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, and sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 28 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium." —Leah Greenblatt

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022): B

Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth in 'Thor: Love and Thunder'. Jasin Boland/Marvel Studios

"If Thunder, with its cheerful melee of starry cameos, in-jokes, and Cliffs-Notes mythology, feels a lot like franchise fatigue, it also has frequent moments of gonzo charm, thanks largely to the Technicolor [frenzy] of writer-director Taika Waititi and a cast that seems inordinately game to follow his lead." —L.G.

Iron Man (2008): B+

Everett Collection

"After Tobey Maguire's gawky boyishness and Christian Bale's glower, the 'offbeat' casting of comic-book films is now the new normal. (The trend really started back in 1989, when Tim Burton turned a saucer-eyed noodge like Michael Keaton into Batman.) Yet it's still bracing to see Robert Downey Jr. redefine what it takes to be a superhero in Iron Man. As Tony Stark, a high-living celebrity weapons magnate who is wounded on a trek through Afghanistan, only to transform himself into a hulking mechanical rocket man, Downey doesn't dial down his eager narcissistic wit. Wearing a goatee right out of the beatnik '50s, he's fast and frictionless, as airlessly ironic as a talk-show host who's been shoved onto the air at 3 a.m. and left to his own what-the-hell devices. The key to Downey's mocking, crumpled charm is that no matter whom he's talking to, he's really just nattering to himself. When he climbs into his Iron Man machine suit, with its whirring, clicking limbs and plated chest, flamethrower arms, and mask of a medieval knight, he doesn't disappear behind the tin-can walls of that chunky, atomic-age jet-pack robot. He's still there, a deftly fragile motormouth — a damaged soul who needs armor to fully become himself." —O.G.

The Avengers (2012): B+

Marvel Studios

"This isn't a case of more being less. The four who've already fronted their own Marvel films look all the sharper as supporting studs jockeying for primacy. The magnetically stolid Captain America emerges as the team leader, Iron Man is the nattering narcissist who could hardly give a damn, and Thor is the alien outsider who's more intent on saving his planet than on rescuing Earth. As for the Hulk, the smartest thing the filmmakers did was to get Mark Ruffalo to play Bruce Banner as a man so sensitive that he's at war, every moment, with himself. (The film finally solves the Hulk problem: He's a lot more fun in small doses.) The second smartest thing they did was to allow Tom Hiddleston to let it rip as Loki. He's close to a generic villain, but Hiddleston invests his ravings and evil smile with a sleek mystery and power that suggests he may be an actor of the stature of Gary Oldman." —O.G.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014): B+

Everett Collection

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the first superhero film since the terrorist-inflected The Dark Knight (2008) that plugs you right into what's happening now. Told in enjoyably blunt, heavy-duty strokes, the movie doesn't try for the artistry of The Dark Knight — it's action-fantasy prose, not poetry. Yet there's a hell-bent vitality to its paranoia. When the Captain is surrounded by government officials on an elevator, and he realizes that none of them are on his side, the fight scene that follows isn't just brutally exciting. It expresses the film's theme: that you can't trust anyone in a society that wants to control everyone." —O.G.

Doctor Strange (2016): B+

Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange. Marvel Studios

"When you strip away the Secrets of the East mumbo jumbo and psychedelic special effects, Doctor Strange is a formulaic Marvel origin story, but it's done with high-IQ wit, all but name-checking the myth of Sisyphus and the kaleidoscopic architectural origami of M.C. Escher. (We're a long way from the blunt-force shenanigans of HYDRA here.) Doctor Strange is thrilling in the way a lot of other Marvel movies are. But what makes it unique is that it's also heady in a way most Marvel movies don't dare to be. It's eye candy and brain candy." —C.N.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017): B+

Columbia Pictures

"In a city where the average citizen seems to accept Avengers as a fact of daily life as common as a rat on the subway or a Starbucks on the corner, Homecoming's Parker is still consistently, winningly wowed by his own capabilities; he can't stop saying 'gross' or 'awesome' at the things that shoot out of his body[suit] (which, to be fair, is also just basic adolescence). But he can seem ordinary to the point of confounding the story line, too — less a supercharged arachnid than an adorable puppy with special powers, or the YA dreamboat on an exceptionally well-cast Nickelodeon wizard show." —L.G.

Avengers: Endgame (2019): B+

"With nothing less than the fate of the free world (or at least approximately 50 percent of it) at stake, there's an expected urgency to it all, but an underlying melancholy too — not just for everything that's been lost, but for what won't be coming back. After 11 years, 22 films, and uncountable post-credit Easter eggs, the endgame of an era has finally come." —L.G.

Black Widow (2021): B+

Scarlett Johansson in 'Black Widow'. Marvel Studios

"If Widow, with its winky one-liners and spandexed catsuits, is purely pop feminism, the movie's female gaze still reads like more than a cynical marketing ploy; it's one step closer to real messy life, Marvel-size and amplified."

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021): B+

Simu Liu in 'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings'. Marvel Studios

"But many of the movie's thrills lie in the less familiar: The general lack of major artillery means the action is mostly fought with fists or ropes or arrows, which makes its obligatory stream of mortal combat feel almost balletically brutal (if oddly Disney-bloodless), and far more elegant than the genre usually allows. They'd be [foolish] not to give Meng'er Zhang, as Shang-Chi's ferociously watchable sister Xialing, her own spin-off, and Awkwafina, who spends at least a third of the movie in a fanny pack and lime-green parachute pants, polishes her sardonic slacker M.O. to a high one-liner shine."

Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland in 'Spider-Man: No Way Home'. Courtesy of Sony Pictures

"Pretty much everything that happens after the 40-minute mark is a spoiler that early title cards and even a recorded pre-show entreaty from the cast beg you not to share. At just under two and a half hours, that leaves a lot on the table. So it's safer, maybe, just to say that what seems at first like pure fan service turns out to be some of the best and by far the most meta stuff Marvel has done, tender and funny and a little bit devastating. (There were audible sobs in the theater at an industry screening.)" —L.G.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022): B+

Okoye (Danai Gurira) in the Midnight Angel armor in 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever'. Marvel Studios

"This is a movie very much in mourning for the man it lost — as a star, a colleague, and a friend — which seems like strange if not uncharted territory for a comic-book universe in which death is a Snap, and resurrection rarely less than another sequel or end-credits sequence away. The result still pounds with busy CG spectacle and, at just under three hours, more mythology than any non-Marvel head may strictly need. But it's also contemplative, character-driven, and frequently lovely: a faithful genre player imbued with a rare visual richness and real, painful poignancy." —L.G.

Thor (2011): A–

Tom Hiddleston as Loki and Chris Hemsworth as Thor in 2011's 'Thor.'. Zade Rosenthal/Marvel Studios

"On Earth, Thor is rescued by a team of scientists (led by Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgård), and he is almost childlike in his ability to cause trouble without trying. He speaks in incongruously formal King's English ('I need sustenance!'). Yet the movie, though it's often a very funny god-out-of-water origin comedy, has a stirring emotional core as well. It keeps returning to Asgard, where [Kenneth] Branagh stages the political-familial infighting — centered on Thor's treacherous brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) — like an intergalactic Gladiator." —O.G.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): A–

"Directed with an effortlessly light touch by James Gunn, a low-budget maestro of genre films such as 2006's Slither and 2010's Super, Guardians of the Galaxy represents a risky proposition for Marvel on several levels: a director who's never grappled with a project of this scale before, a menagerie of comic-book characters who are hardly household names (even to fans), and a tongue-in-cheek B-movie vibe that's more Starcrash than Star Wars. But give Marvel props, even with all of its mega-success; the studio's still willing to take chances. Here, that risk pays off big-time. The film's a giddily subversive space opera that runs on self-aware smart-assery." —C.N.

Captain America: Civil War (2016): A–

Marvel Studios

"Part of the fun of Marvel's Avengers movies to date has been having a front-row seat to the super-powered posse fast-balling quippy, barbed insults at one another. When they're not squaring off against doomsday villains like Loki and the ho-hum Ultron, they seem to get off on taking each other down a notch. They're a family, sure. But you got the sense that, like most families, they didn't always like one another. Despite its stars-and-stripes title, Marvel's billion-dollar-blockbuster-to-be, Captain America: Civil War, is essentially a third Avengers movie — it's also the best one yet." —C.N.

Black Panther (2018): A–

Matt Kennedy/Marvel Studios 2018

"Ryan Coogler, the 31-year-old director whose brief résumé already includes an acclaimed indie drama (the 2013 festival breakout Fruitvale Station) and an underdog triumph (2015's stellar Rocky reboot, Creed), clearly fought hard to get Panther to the screen the way he envisioned it: Not as a boilerplate blockbuster window-dressed with Black actors, but a story fully, joyfully rooted in Black culture. It doesn't feel like an accident that a chunk of the movie's most important action happens in his hometown of Oakland, only blocks away from the real-life events of Fruitvale. And [Michael B.] Jordan's kinetic Killmonger is no cat-stroking cartoon villain; he's a genuinely tragic figure, a self-appointed warden of social justice irreparably warped by the wrongs done to him." —L.G.