It's been a while since Peaches and I posted a picture with our latest reads, which we hope to amend soon. The reason for the delay has been two-fold: 1) we've been finishing up some titles that have taken a bit longer; and 2) since our family subscribed to Disney+ for the month in order to watch Hamilton, the dog and I thought we'd take advantage of the opportunity to watch the entire canon of Marvel movies in (for the most part) story order.
Let's just say that's a lot of book time that wasn't.
Like most folks, I'd seen several of the films when they came out in theaters over the years, but I suffered from superhero fatigue a third of the way through and had walked away. However, as I tend to prefer the MCU to DC in terms of comic book movies (though Spider-Man has always been a stand-alone character in my mind and the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire films superior to the new ones), the work of what it took to pull off the scale of what the filmmakers called "the most ambitious crossover in history" (though Dante would probably have something to say about that) was not lost on me. Talk about 11 busy years of fairly impressive film making.
As a kid who had read a few Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America comics back in the day, I never dug those characters and stories as much as I did Spider-Man or Batman. Maybe I preferred the loner hero stories to the team concept, or maybe I just liked the tools (web shooter, utility belt, etc.) that the latter created to do their jobs (though by that reasoning, I should have at least liked Iron Man, who is my favorite character from the films), but I didn't really follow the Avengers as a whole then.
And Guardians of the Galaxy? Ant-man and the Wasp? Whatever.
In general, I like the movies (some better than others) because I like the characters and the actors who played them. There's no question creator Stan Lee (along with the early visionaries he worked with at Marvel) understood character development and storytelling, and I'm glad he got to see cinematic technology get to a point to bring them to life before he died in 2018 (though with his imagination, I doubt he personally needed much help).
You can see the order in which Peaches and I watched the films here, and below are three groupings of the ones we enjoyed the most (in no particular order in category), thought were okay, or just sat through and endured. Similar to our book reading, our opinions on films tend to match up.
MOST ENJOYABLE
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Iron Man (2008)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Thor (2011)
The Avengers (2012)
Black Panther (2018)
OKAY
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Ant-Man (2015)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Doctor Strange (2016)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
EH...
Captain Marvel (2019)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
DIDN'T WATCH AS NOT AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)
Looking forward to jumping back in with the books (unless Peaches and I decide to try to squeeze in The Mandalorian before we cancel the Disney+ subscription). Oh, and the nightly Alias episodes with Megan and Millie...