'Captain America: Brave New World is the most important Marvel movie ever'

Marvel, right now, is a cinematic damsel in distress — and it has chosen Captain America to save it. Let's face it, that's a totally understandable impulse. If we were going to choose someone to save our life, then Anthony Mackie's former Falcon would be one of our top choices.

It might seem odd, as well, to refer to Marvel as being in trouble. Last year, the studio only released one film, but that film was the mammoth box office hit Deadpool & Wolverine. Franchises in trouble don't tend to release movies that earn $1.34bn (£1.08bn) worldwide. But the success of Deadpool is something of a smokescreen for the wider malaise around the MCU — a malaise that very much still persists.

In fact, Deadpool & Wolverine traded extensively upon that situation. It regularly threw in self-referential barbs about the current, lacklustre state of Marvel's output. "Welcome to the MCU, by the way," Wade Wilson quipped to Wolverine early on. "You're joining at a bit of a low point."

Marvel just hasn't been the same since Tony Stark heroically clicked his fingers at the climax of Avengers: Endgame. That three-hour epic of time travel and fan service stuck the landing like very few story conclusions ever have — take note, Game of Thrones — and proved satisfying to just about everybody. But the machinery of Hollywood's biggest franchise wasn't going to let the small matter of absolute narrative satisfaction get in the way of its progress, so the story had to continue well beyond the endgame.

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There have been high points since then. Spider-Man: No Way Home showed the nerd-pleasing power of the multiverse, while Black Panther: Wakanda Forever found an elegant way to pay tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman. I even had a lot of love for the whizz-bang action and characterful silliness of The Marvels. At least it was short.

At the box office, though, the decline has been sharp. The aforementioned The Marvels proved to be a complete bomb, scoring a mere $206m (£166m) worldwide. This sent everyone back to the drawing board. In the wake of the 2023 strikes in Hollywood, Marvel reshuffled a selection of titles into 2025, leaving 2024 blank on the big screen other than the self-contained Deadpool & Wolverine. It was essentially a soft reset year for the franchise.

Captain America: Brave New World is the first post-reset Marvel film. It's all set up to be the phoenix rising from the ashes of the needlessly complex and narratively directionless Multiverse Saga, dragging this behemoth of a cinematic universe back on to the tracks it seldom deserted for the first decade of its storytelling.

Brave New World will fire the starting pistol on a very important year for the MCU, with the next film Thunderbolts* set to turn previous supporting characters into a team of antiheroes. After that, the summer will belong to The Fantastic Four: First Steps before the Avengers return — along with a decidedly more villainous Robert Downey Jr. — in 2026.

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Captain America has often been used as a way to set the tone in the MCU, with both the second and third Cap movies effectively serving as Avengers-lite adventures in which almost all of the central cast members appeared. Brave New World will be the first film in years — arguably since 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — to deal with the main chronology of the MCU, rather than a siloed set of side characters.

That puts a lot on the shoulders of Brave New World. We don't even know who counts as an Avenger any more and we're only a few films away from a team-up, with one of those movies (Fantastic Four) due to take place in a completely different universe. But it seems that Marvel might be learning the lesson many of us have hoped it would learn in the years since Endgame — keep it simple.

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The multiverse era of the MCU has been a head-scrambling ride on a rickety railway, in which we've met dozens of characters we might never see again — remember Harry Styles as Thanos's brother? — and discarded more storylines than even the most devoted comic book acolyte could hold in their head. Captain America: Brave New World has the chance to bring us back down to Earth and work out exactly where we're going next.

All the signs are there that Brave New World could do exactly what it needs to do. The trailers point to a grounded political thriller, complete with the small matter of Harrison Ford turning red, enormous and angry. Is Marvel back? Well, this really could be the start of a brave new world.

Captain America: Brave New World is in UK cinemas from 14 February.