Marvel had a tough choice to make after Avengers: Endgame. It could continue playing the hits, relying on nostalgia and familiar faces to coast until the next event movie, or it could introduce a new generation of heroes to freshen up the MCU.
To its credit, Marvel Studios opted for the second option – but it didn't work out exactly as anyone hoped.
As great as it was seeing diverse faces run around the cinematic universe, Ms. Marvel, Echo, and the Eternals all failed to live up to what came before. It says a lot that Kevin Feige has course-corrected for Avengers: Doomsday, bringing back the likes of Thor, Steve Rogers, and several legacy X-Men characters to be front and center instead of placing considerable trust in the new guard.
Welcome to Road to Doomsday, GamesRadar+'s weekly MCU rewatch series. Over 15 weeks, we'll be revisiting each Marvel movie and TV show on Disney's list of essential movies to watch ahead of Avengers: Doomsday, sharing our thoughts upon rewatching and deciphering what we can learn about the next Marvel mega-event from each entry. Why not relive some MCU highlights and watch along with us?
With a few exceptions, that is. Florence Pugh's Yelena has, of course, shone since her Black Widow debut. But no one quite held their own like Simu Liu's Shang-Chi.
Released in 2021, when Tony Stark's Endgame sacrifice was still fresh in the memory, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may have been a wordy title, but was refreshingly simple in how it cemented its hero as a major player in the MCU thanks to a potent mix of killer fight scenes and sparkling wit.
Shang-Chi doesn't waste time getting moving. In the opening minutes, the ancient Ten Rings – weapons of immense power – are established and, in the present day, the group that shares the same name attacks Shang-Chi on a bus, standing out as one of Marvel's best individual action sequences.
From there, Shang-Chi leads us on a lightning-quick journey, bouncing from kinetic set-piece to kinetic set-piece as he becomes wrapped up in a family drama that adds a more personal touch that has largely been absent in Marvel's recent films. It also adds a splash of mysticism and mystery to the MCU, something that has been sorely missing, making the universe feel a lot deeper and richer before it became distracted by the multiverse.
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