[Itse]

To me, the biggest problem for Marvel is that there seems to be like some kind of a Mandela effect where people remember phases 1&2 completely differently to what it was actually like.

No one considered every new Marvel movie a must see. I say this with some confidence as I move in extremely nerdy circles, and I really can't think of anyone who ever said they felt like they want to see every one of those, and it the movies themselves weren't at all made in a way where you really needed to have seen anything else than the direct prequel to that specific movie and not necessarily even that. Sure we went to watch them, we talked about them, but when one of them was bad it was just "meh", and move on. It wasn't considered "an indication" of anything. That one was just a bad movie, whatever.

(I would also easily argue that phase 4 quite easily matches phases 1 and 2 in general quality. Most of those movies just aren't that great. I know because I own them all on Blu-Ray and watch them regularly, because I'm a Marvel fan and it's kind of my comfort food, but I also still recognize when a movie doesn't really work.)

People just feel about Phase 4 differently because now a ton of people seem to be constantly going to see movies they don't really want to see. Basically every MCU "Fan forum" is now filled with people who complain how none of the new movies sound interesting to them, then they go see them and hate them and declare that the fault is in the movies.

Previously people decided which one of those they wanted to watch based on what looked like fun, and I think they also had more reasonable expectations.

Five years ago it was absurd to think that you had to watch every damn MCU movie to keep up with the continuity, because there was so little continuity that it was mostly completely unnecessary, and what you had missed you could easily pick up from context clues if you're above the age of 5 and had seen a movie before.

Back then it was fine. Inifity War and Endgame however somehow changed the narrative to one where the MCU is somehow considered like a TV show, which it just absolutely is not, and if you're trying to watch it like a TV show you're going to have a bad time. Yes the movies happen in the same universe, but really what happens in one movie for the most part has near zero actual story level relevance to what happens in another movie. This is still and has always been the norm for most of MCU.

This of course is partly Disney's own fault, they've quite understandably leaned upon the idea that the new Phase 4 stuff is somehow a continuation of "the story you really loved" and that you need to go back to watch every MCU film for the full experience, but really you don't, and really only Falcon and the Winter Soldier had straight up narrative continuity from Phase 3. (WandaVision to some extent, but mostly it was just Wanda's backstory and you can watch that show just fine as a standalone thing, same as Hawkeye.)

So yeah, especially the more hardcore fans are disappointed because they want something they're not getting: an overarching story.

In the meantime, phase 4 is not doing that bad in the box office. Marvel movies are still a pretty guaranteed decent entertainment, rarely more than that, but also rarely less than that. Casual fans, aka most of the movie going audience, still go see them despite the absolutely non-stop whining of much of the Marvel "fandom".

The reason I personally actually quite like Phase 4 is that they've improved on stuff I enjoy about these types of movies. Villains have gotten significantly better (except for Kang), soundtracks are better, fight scenes have I think improved, and the styles of the movies are a lot more different now. Shang-Chi leaned heavily into Hong Kong style pathos, Eternals is... actually a pretty weird movie when you think about it, Thor 4 was a very late-eighties early-nineties comedy/adventure etc. They're just all pretty different movies from each other tonally now, which I like, because I go see these things as individual movies and I'm happy that I don't always know where each one is going.

And yes the CGI is kind of shoddy at times, but to me that's less important than just the sheer visual imagination on screen that really wasn't there in the early MCU stuff. Although I guess that might be one reason why some people are put off by them. The MCU has gotten a lot weirder during Phase 4.