TL;DR: Marvel got greedy and tried to squeeze the goose into laying more golden eggs. Now everything is a mess and the goose is undergoing treatment.
The only upside in all this is it pushed the vfx artists to unionize. Good for them.
Yea it’s easy to forget how sparse the early marvel films were and how it was about the anticipation of where it’s going.
An illustration, maybe: between Thor and winter soldier was a span of three years. In that time we’re a bunch of duds: Captain America I, Iron Man 3, Thor Dark world. That was all there was. Winter soldier was the first good one after Thor I (and one of the best of the franchise IMO). The big exception being the first avengers film, which was huge, and partly because we weren’t getting big marvel films all the time.
Even counting from the first avengers, it was two years until winter soldier filled only with dark world and iron man 3. It was easy to stay on top of the franchise and if you missed a film you could be filled in easily before the next one.
