I’ve only seen the first Iron Man, GOTG1, and Black Panther, so I don’t really follow or have a sense of it as a whole. 

Iron Man was before we (or more importantly they) knew there was a MCU, and Black Panther seemed to stuff most of its MCU stuff into the Avengers following. GOTG though, that was kind of suffering from having to work it into plot, which is maybe why I can’t remember the plot at all. Some kid gets abducted by aliens when his mom dies and becomes comedy Han Solo, and then there’s a prison break and two candy-colored sisters fight? I dunno.

More than plot though it seems like they’re stuffing more thematics into these things as they get into properties with less preexisting name recognition. Go see GOTG if you care about the MCU, or you like the music and Star Wars knock off space operas of the late 70s-80s! Go see Black Panther if you care about the MCU, or about the place of blackness in the modern day! Go see Captain Marvel if you care about the MCU, or about female representation, or have nostalgia for the ‘90s!

But for all that it’s always superhero movies, the rise of the hero, the set piece battles, and that’s probably a thing keeping me from seeing all of them, I don’t have that much appetite for the genre. And it seems we’re never gonna get, say, a Daredevil that’s a murder mystery with Matt Murdock approaching from different angles as a lawyer and a vigilante

Having grown up in the 80s and 90s when Marvel would just shove the X-Men into everything it’s kind of amusing how they’re trying to tell stories specifically without them now, though. (And in turn, I suddenly realize that for all its action, Logan was the breakout from the “superhero” genre that I was longing for in the last paragraph.)