The Marvel Universe is a very fascinating movie franchise. The way the franchise evolves the storyline through new movies is a great way to tell the story of all the different heroes that reside within the MCU. Of course, the franchise is not perfect, and some movies are better than others, but it is amazing to see how much time and effort goes into developing the storyline year after year to excite fans enough to create one of the biggest fanbases in the country. The MCU is great, or so I think.

I must admit the MCU is an amazing franchise that draws in millions or even billions of fans, I am just not one of them. To anyone, it is undeniable that the Marvel Cinematic franchise is a huge success, simply based on the fact that it draws in hundreds of millions of dollars for each movie that is released under the Marvel name.

As an outsider, all I really know about the Marvel Universe is what I hear from others. I get the reviews of all the newest Marvel movies from my friends that are hardcore followers of the franchise. It is also difficult to ignore when these movies make front-page news. The Marvel franchise is so big that everyone will immediately know how good the most recent movie is when I go on the internet and see headlines that read “Black Panther is the Best Movie Ever” or “Age Of Ultron Could Have Been Better.”

However, while I am not exactly a “follower” of the MCU, I am also not a complete stranger to its work. I have seen some of the Marvel movies and have built opinions based off what I have seen. Two of the movies that I have seen that come to mind are “Captain America: Civil War” and “Spiderman: Homecoming.”

Throughout both of these movies, I found things I liked and thought were very exciting. There were also things that I could not fully understand, which I found could turn away newcomers if they do not have a full knowledge of the Marvel franchise.

“Captain America: Civil War” was a movie that revolved around multiple heroes in the Marvel Universe. The fight scenes in the movie and many other visual aspects were beautiful and amazing to look at. The characters, such as Captain America and Iron Man,  both came off as likable. Even though they were on opposite sides, they both brought up reasonable arguments for their respective sides, which made it easy to care for the characters and get more interested in the movie.

While the movie was great to see, the main problems were with the storyline. While I do understand the movie takes place in the middle of the Marvel storyline, I found that many things could be hard to follow unless one has already seen one or multiple of the past Marvel movies. There are things that are hard to understand, like the relationship between Captain America and Bucky, and how Iron Man knows about Spiderman’s powers even though they have never met. Certain plot holes like these could confuse the viewer and make it hard for newcomers to the Marvel franchise to understand.

“Spiderman: Homecoming” revolved around Peter Parker, the 15-year-old alter-ego of Spiderman. While this movie was not as exciting and action packed as “Civil War,” there are still many iconic moments. The storyline is much less complex, which may be a result of the Spiderman storyline still being new to the Marvel Universe. This movie does have some plot points connected to earlier movies, but Spiderman was introduced in “Civil War,” a movie that I have already seen. This only enriched the plot of the movie, knowing that it was being connected to something much larger.

I can see why Marvel has succeeded where many other franchises failed. For many that are huge fans of the Marvel franchise, including comic books, television shows and much more, it is exciting to see all the heroes in one huge Universe, fighting either together or against each other.

Image from Marvel Entertainment via YouTube.com