No franchise has ever done it quite like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A sprawling universe across comic books, movies, and television all, the MCU has countless characters involved in its canon across a number of years. However, with so many characters across an incredible amount of entries into the franchise, not all of them can be winners.
A few of these characters were fumbled in major ways by the movies they appeared in; other characters made catastrophic mistakes that nearly destroyed their universe. Either way, every character on this list changed the MCU for the worst in some capacity, be it narrative or meta-textual.
10 Black Widow Ended Up Being Too Little, Too Late
When the Avengers first assembled, there were only six original members. Of these original six, only one hero was a woman: Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, was the sole female member of the team. As a result, people started asking for a Black Widow movie— something the MCU continuously delayed.
While cries for the movie continued, it became something of a game for the MCU to deny the film as well as denying any other female characters meaningful development in the process. Now that Black Widow finally is getting her own movie, it’s far too late; she has already died in canon, and fans are frustrated that men continue to take center stage in the MCU.
9 Quicksilver Was Wasted Immediately
The post-credits scene for Captain America: The Winter Soldier surprised audiences by giving them a sneak peek of an upcoming couple of “experiments:” Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. While the latter, also known as Wanda Maximoff, has become one of the main players in the MCU, the former, her twin brother Pietro, was immediately killed off.
The character died in the climax of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the movie that truly introduced the two in any depth. This death was such a huge narrative misstep that the MCU is still trying— and failing— to correct it to this day, as WandaVision clearly showcased.
8 Ralph Bohner Made A Mockery Of What The MCU Is Trying To Become
While Marvel Comics may be one huge entity in the world of comic books, the characters are not all gathered together in the movies. For a long time now, the Avengers and the X-Men have been unable to cross paths in the films, but all of that is now seemingly about to change. As the MCU had only a Scarlet Witch character, and the Fox X-Men movies had only a Quicksilver character, it seemed logical that combining the franchises would also result in combining these two characters.
However, when WandaVision seemed to introduce Quicksilver and combine universes, it didn’t actually do anything meaningful. All for a lame joke, Quicksilver was actually a guy named Ralph Bohner, and the MCU threw away one of the best ideas they’ve had in years for nothing at all— a consistent problem for the franchise.
7 Thunderbolt Ross Is Emblematic Of A Larger Problem In The Franchise
The MCU has a problem of forgetting their characters and canon altogether. While The Incredible Hulk is technically an entry in the MCU, it is rarely ever treated as such, and is hardly ever referred to, even in passing. In fact, Thunderbolt Ross’ daughter, Betty Ross, was in love with Bruce Banner for a long time, but she’s apparently completely vanished from the franchise.
Thunderbolt Ross is representative of more than a misstep; he is a symbol of every time the MCU has completely given up on a past storyline, pretended it never happened, and moved on with their lives. The franchise is full of these, sadly, as Thunderbolt was only the first of many.
6 Pepper Potts Has Just Never Clicked
As with Thunderbolt Ross, Pepper Potts is emblematic of a larger problem within the MCU. She’s a character who has been around since the literal first movie in the franchise, and yet she never really moves beyond more than Tony Stark’s smart, attractive mate who always takes him back.
She is the one who always bothers him to stop being Iron Man more than anything else, and barely has a presence beyond her existence within Tony’s life. Unfortunately, this is frequently the case for supporting characters in the MCU, especially women. Pepper, like Thunderbolt, was the first of many characters that would receive this treatment in the franchise.
5 Trevor Slattery Is The Original Ralph Bohner Mistake
When the Iron Man trilogy was closing out with Iron Man 3, fans were curious to see which famous Iron Man supervillain would be the main antagonist of the movie. The first teasers showed off the Mandarin, one of the fan favorite villains from the comics. It seemed that viewers were going to get everything they wanted with the Mandarin finally facing off against Iron Man as the trilogy drew to a close.
However, the Mandarin wasn’t actually the Mandarin at all. The character was actually a fake-out, and the real character was an actor named Trevor Slattery. People are now calling Ralph Bohner “The Mandarin 2.0,” to put into scope just how terrible both of those fake-outs were.
4 Hawkeye Has Never Quite Been Himself
Clint Barton is a true and genuine fan favorite from the comics. Readers not only love Hawkeye, but recently he has seen a resurgence of popularity in the comic book world. Despite this, Hawkeye in the movies is a gruff guy who immediately gets brainwashed and isn’t even really part of the Avengers team he’s supposed to help found.
The character also gets used as a plot device more frequently than anything, inexplicably being given an entire secret family halfway through and also, for some reason, not being the one to die when Black Widow offers to sacrifice her at the end. Hawkeye was just mistake after mistake through the movies.
3 Star-Lord Messed Up In A Major Way
While Star-Lord is an excellent character, not all of the characters that made the MCU worse are actually “bad” characters. A few of these characters simply made terrible mistakes that literally did alter the narrative real world of the MCU for the worse.
When he found out from Thanos that the monstrous alien had killed his adoptive daughter, Gamora, he went absolutely wild with rage and grief. He broke the hold that Mantis had over Thanos by attacking him, and thus allowed Thanos to eventually get loose. He went on to collect the Infinity Stones and complete the Snap, as intended.
2 Iron Man Made The Biggest Mistake Of All
Much like Star-Lord, Iron Man made choices in the MCU that changed the universe for the worse and sent the entire franchise spiraling in a different direction. Also, similarly to Wolverine over in the X-Men movie universe, the MCU focused far too heavily on Tony Stark, and didn’t give enough space to other characters in the franchise.
Iron Man is a consistent, constant presence, and he doesn’t always use that space well. His time in Age of Ultron was spent ultimately creating Ultron and wreaking such havoc that the franchise is still cleaning up the messes caused as a result of his actions. Iron Man’s choice to create Ultron is what changed the MCU forever, and arguably for the worse.
1 Ultron Was The Worst Of The Worst
If Tony Stark’s decision to create Ultron changed the MCU for the worse, than Ultron himself has got to be the worst character of all. This guy— who is not even, strictly speaking, a guy— was invented by Tony Stark to protect the world, in theory. Instead, Ultron is a strangely smarmy genocide machine who decides to protect the Earth by wiping out humanity.
The destruction caused by Ultron changed the entire landscape of the MCU for the worse, in a literal canon sense. In a meta-textual sense, looking at the MCU from the outside, Age of Ultron was a terrible movie and changed the MCU for the worse, for a time. All in all, Ultron was the worst of the worst in all senses.
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