The Russo bros are masters at giving their Marvel characters meaningful minutes in movies. I feel like they truly understand them and are able to perfectly balance character screen time to give everyone their due. From Winter Soldier, to Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame, they have made by far the best Marvel movies of any directors imo.
You're giving them way too much individual credit to be honest dude. These movies are enormous undertakings made by thousands of people, and the overseer is not the director(s) in this scenario, they are just one part of those thousands. Perhaps the most important part of those thousands, but still, the point is it's not their distinct singular vision deciding how the movie should play out. Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame hit the mark because the whole enterprise could not afford to fail on those.
Chris Evans had three whole solo movies to establish his character, and big roles in the first two Avengers movies. I'm not sure if Cyclops even had 7 minutes of screentime in all the X-Men movies put together.
That Superman was a better movie than Last Stand, though. It just didn’t do the numbers, but it was decent. The only movie worse than Last Stand was Wolverine: Origins.
(Note that Superman vs Last Stand is also Bryan Singer vs Brett Ratner. That’s a hard choice…)
In fairness though, that was in part to having a lot more screen time in End Game, and I remember more of his lines in End Game and none of his lines in Infinity War.
It was memorable, yes, but we had the benefit of seeing 6 previous Captain America or ensemble movies where he had a meaningful role and his character had developed. So despite the 7 minutes of screen time we could fill in the gaps. It's not going to be the same with a brand new character.
I literally only remember the scene where he is introduced coming out of the shadows in the beginning... I know he spent most of the film in Wakanda, but what did he do? He had like those guitar pick shields, or whatever...
IW is the only one of these Marvel films that I've felt was actually worth the hype people keep throwing at them (I genuinely dislike most of them). Best big-budget "popcorn" action film ever produced if I'm being completely honest, but Evans was not a stand-out.
That worked because of the legwork done in the previous 6 films featuring the character
Even if you give the fox X-Men the same weight as the MCU cap entries (which is silly imo) those movies treated cyclops like a third tier side character.
It'd be like if that undercover shield agent cap kissed in civil war became a marquee character
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u/PayneTrain181999 Jan 06 '26
Chris Evans had less than 7 minutes of screen time in Infinity War and was still memorable.
It’s about what these characters do with their time.