It has been two and a half years since the last time we ranked the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A lot has changed since then. Four new movies have been released since the summer of 2019, including Black Widow, which was officially delayed three times due to the pandemic. When we ranked the MCU 30 months ago, Avengers: Endgame had just come out and Disney+ wasn't even a thing yet. Needless to say, it's been a while. Once the largely maligned Eternals hit streaming services, we figured it was a good time to poll the people and develop new power rankings for the 27 movies and five TV shows in the ever-expanding galaxy of Marvel Comics.
Before we get into the fun stuff, we need to explain a few things. If you'll allow us...
How were the movie rankings determined?
In the past, we've used a website to help determine numbered rankings - that is, we used a system where people would rank things in order, from best to worst (e.g., favorite movie, second favorite movie, third favorite movie, etc.). We discovered that that has now become a "paid" feature, and we're cheap, so we couldn't use that anymore. This time around, we used Google Forms, and asked those who took the survey to rate the movies on a scale from 1-10, with an "N/A" column for movies that they have not seen. (The "N/A" column awarded zero points per vote.)
Once we closed the poll, we added up the scores for all of the movies, then ranked them in order of total points, from high to low, with the movie getting the most points as the top-ranked movie on the list, the movie with the least points in last place, and so forth.
Tie-breakers for the three instances where two movies received the same amount of points were determined by examining the number of 8-, 9- and 10-point votes those pairs of movies received. The movie that received the most "high" votes won the tie-breaker. For instance, if a movie with three 8-point votes and one 9-point vote tied with a movie that had one 8-point vote, two 9-point votes and a 10-point vote, the second movie would have won the tie-breaker.
How were the TV show rankings determined?
We used a golf-style scoring system to rank the five Disney+ TV shows, meaning that we asked those who took the survey to rank the shows from best (1) to worst (5) - with a 6-point "N/A" option for shows they haven't watched - then calculated the scores. The show with the lowest point total became the top-rated show and the program with the most points became the lowest-ranked on the list.
Did any problems arise during this process, and were any adjustments made to the scoring?
One big problem with this new method of voting (as opposed to literally ranking the movies) is that someone who really loves Marvel could hypothetically go in and just give everything a 10 without having to explain themselves or justify their scoring. We saw that quite a few people who took the survey gave out lots of 8s and 9s, and a good number of people didn't rate anything lower than a 5 or 6. We believe that taking an average of all of the points helped balance out people who consistently voted high or people who gave responses that didn't make much sense (like irrationally disliking a movie that was otherwise scored highly by others, or vice versa). However, we would have preferred to use the other ranking system that would have, for example, made people assign a rank to the four movies to which they gave 9s.
We had to manually adjust several scores for Eternals, in particular. Two people admitted that they gave Eternals a score, despite not actually having seen the movie. One responder rated it as an "N/A" when they took the survey, then watched it a few days later and provided an updated score. So once we tallied the votes, we zeroed-out the scores that shouldn't have counted and added the points for the updated ranking in question.
We deleted two surveys that had results we determined were intentionally trying to negatively skew the results. We haven't put up with trolls in the past, and we kept it that way.
How will this data be displayed?
First, we'll reveal the results of our survey, which we feel is pretty good but certainly not without flaws, which we will break down below the chart. There were three tie-breakers, as explained earlier in this blog, and the winners of those ties are denoted with a + symbol.
Second, because we previously power-ranked the MCU films back in 2019, we created our own "Signs of the Times" rankings, which we will compare with the list we made three years ago. We added a column to that chart to show how our rankings have changed over the past two and a half years.
Following that, we'll unveil the survey results for our Disney+ rankings. Because this is the first time we've ranked the TV shows, those rankings will not be compared to any other lists; it will simply show how the survey votes ended up.
Finally, we also asked people who took our survey to tell us which Marvel movie they'd want to re-watch most, as well as which movie they'd be fine never watching again. Those results will be displayed as percentages.
With no further ado, here's how everything shook out:
MCU Power Rankings - survey results, January 2022
Analysis: After looking over this list, we notice some major flaws in these rankings - namely, that there were a lot of people who took the survey that hadn't seen recent MCU entries like Black Widow, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Eternals. It's practically egregious that No Way Home didn't even crack the top five, let alone the top two or three. Eternals received half the points of the movie directly above it (that's really, really sad, by the way). This appears to be a combination of the movie being objectively bad and the fact that lots of people simply haven't watched it yet.
Interestingly, the voters appear to really like Ant-Man and really dislike Captain Marvel.
Signs of the Times MCU Power Rankings - comparison between 2022 and 2019
Biggest positive movers: Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming: +2
Biggest negative movers: Spider-Man: Far From Home: -5
Disney+ Power Rankings
Analysis: Despite being the most polarizing program on the Disney+ slate thus far, WandaVision ended up being the best received by our voters. Based on the survey results, we deduced that hardly anyone that took the survey has watched What If...? (which is a shame). Also, it appears that many people either didn't watch The Falcon & The Winter Soldier or started it but didn't finish; it consistently received the lowest non-"N/A" votes of any of the five shows.
If you had to re-watch any Marvel movie right now, which would it be?
Analysis: Is it recency bias or just a great movie? The people have spoken, and they loved Spider-Man: No Way Home.
If you had to choose one Marvel movie to NEVER watch again, which would it be?
Analysis: By and large, it's the usual suspects - but there were also a couple surprises on this list. We demand an explanation!
*****
Final thoughts
First of all, we want to thank everyone who took a couple minutes to fill out our survey. These days, we don't get around to blogging just for the sake of it very much, so any excuse we can find to whip up a nice little post is certainly welcome.
When we first tallied up the results, we felt pretty good about the list. Upon further inspection, however, it became very clear that some movies (No Way Home, particularly) got punished by the "N/A" column, so the final standings weren't quite what we thought they should be. On the other hand, we anticipate some feedback about our SotT rankings (Thor: Ragnarok particularly), too, so let us hear what you think.
In summary, our recommendations would be these:
- If you haven't seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, you should definitely get out and see it.
- If you haven't watched What If...?, summon your strength and get through the first episode (it's probably the worst of the bunch) and give the animation style a chance. It took us a couple episodes to get used to it, but it looks like some of this stuff will end up being pretty important for Doctor Strange 2.
- If you haven't seen Eternals yet... take your time. Literally, find anything else to watch. We live-tweeted it and had a blast because there was so much to make fun of. It's a big, giant mess and there's only one character that is even somewhat likable. By MCU standards, it is really not very good.
- If you haven't watched Black Widow, let's be honest - they made that movie about five years too late, but they do introduce one really fun character that may or may not pop up in an important role in one of the Disney+ series.
- If you couldn't make it through The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, we would be glad to give you the Cliff Notes version. You know how to find us.
Until next time.
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