Fans have been complaining that the MCU has lost its edge. Sure, it’s easy to blame the slump of viewership in the franchise on things like Marvel fatigue or the loss of the Avengers, but the real problem Marvel is facing is with its creative direction. It’s easy for the most successful series of movies in the world to say to themselves, “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.” It’s certainly worked in the past. But with a big change like Endgame, the MCU was left without its frontman (Tony Stark) and its big bad guy (Thanos). So, what’s to be done?

Instead of going into phase 4 with what seemed like a long-term plan, the MCU charged headlong into it, giving the crowd more of whatever old favorites they had left. An overarching narrative only seemed to appear when Michael Waldron introduced an unnamed Kang in the series Loki. And immediately after Loki became the highest-rated show on Disney+, Kevin Feige made Kang the MCU’s big villain for the foreseeable future.

The problem with Marvel is that they have no trouble telling superhero stories, but every villain is crafted as if Disney were still telling stories in the 90s. Marvel needs to learn that a hero is only as good as their villain is bad.

Related: MCU: 10 Great Things in the Franchise Since the Release of Avengers: Endgame

Heroes and Storytelling

Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man
Paramount Pictures

In any hero’s tale, the protagonist is only as great as the challenges they overcome. The evil they confront, whether external or internal, presents them with an intense struggle. And the drama of that struggle is what gets the audience to believe in the hero. There are a thousand ways to tell the story of a hero. Well, actually, there’s only one way that’s been told a thousand times. But we’re not here to discuss Joseph Campbell’s famous narrative structure.

Marvel has exercised their understanding of heroes well ever since the days of Iron Man. Of course, there have been ups and downs, but overall, the arc audiences have followed, the one that led from individual heroes to the Avengers to their defeat and eventually their ultimate victory, has created an inspiring tale that thrilled us every step of the way. But fans might seem less inclined to jump on the Marvel bandwagon now because we’ve already seen that meteoric rise. Now we’re dealing with its aftermath.

Not only is this decade of Marvel forced to compare itself to its initial Infinity War storyline, but it began doing so without any kind of concrete direction. Michael Waldron’s Loki offered the life raft to the drowning franchise that was Marvel. After Kang emerged, Multiverse of Madness started a storyline with the Young Avengers, which, no spoilers, might be tied to Kang somehow.

Related: Obscure Marvel Characters That Deserve Their Own Films, Ranked

Villains in Marvel

modok ant-man and the wasp quantumania
Marvel Studios

Now that Kang was in the picture, the MCU could start doing a little better. Unfortunately, the blockbuster movies leveraged Kang and other villains in disappointing ways. Both Love and Thunder and Quantumania failed at the box office because they forgot to make their villain threatening. Love and Thunder decided to show Gorr as an after-effect; the audience barely saw him in action.

Though his storyline was sympathetic and redeeming, the only thing truly scary about Christian Bale’s character was how much weight he lost to play him. In Quantumania, Kang was threatening but dispatched quite easily. It felt like the whole movie was wrapped up in a nice knot, so much so that Ant-Man had to have a flashback about how it wasn’t wrapped up. And MODOK, who is a major recurring character in the comics, decided to flip his moral compass after only appearing in two scenes.

The point is that none of these enemies posed any danger to our heroes. The end of Act 2 in a movie is traditionally when they’re at their lowest point, but the payoff we get at the end of the film is based on how far they have to climb to get back on top. And for Marvel, the long-term threat of their big evil guy is proportionate to how slowly they reveal his character.

In the Infinity War story, we started by only seeing Thanos’ chin. It wasn’t much, but after the massive scale of the fight everyone had in Avengers, the fact that people only saw a chin was meant to imply that even though you thought this was a big fight, it was just a chin-portion of what’s to come.

To be fair, these are some of the worst Marvel movies in which to find good examples of story. Disney and Marvel are responsible for creating movies for kids where the good guys always win. But people need villains. As Loki had it explained to him in Loki, his purpose in life was only to be overcome, to exist so that other people could find the best in themselves. And if that person doesn’t exist, if that struggle isn’t challenging, then the hero isn’t a hero to us. And the story isn’t worth listening to.