mark ruffalo

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

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I made several mistakes before attending a screening of the latest MCU corporate product, Spider-Man Brand New Day. The first was re-watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that I gave 4.5 stars to upon my initial viewing, which was at a drive-in theater on top of a parking garage, continuing to observe COVID protocols in late 2021. In the years since its release, I’ve seen many people online attempt to revisit this film, only to discover that it fails to work at all outside of a theatrical experience, because the film has clear pauses for the audience to react to the return of characters from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films as well as those starring Andrew Garfield in the lead role. I never paid much attention to that criticism. After all, I hadn’t experienced it in a theater, and I found myself sufficiently pleased with the choices of who to include, and I was appropriately emotionally invested. Upon rewatch five years later, however, I could hardly believe how utterly bored I was. The first half hour meanders endlessly as we watch Peter Parker (Tom Holland) deal with the fallout of the exposure of his secret identity (and his being framed for the death of Mysterio) before the first returning villain, Arnold Vosloo’s Doc Ock, enters the narrative. I was still sufficiently moved by Garfield’s Peter’s emotional response to saving MJ (Zendaya) when he couldn’t save his own love, but otherwise, the stakes couldn’t have felt lower or more disinteresting; even the death of Aunt May lacked any kind of resonance this time around. No Way Home is nearly 2.5 hours of film-making so emotionally hollow that it did the opposite of making me excited for Brand New Day. 

My second mistake was probably the most common one for filmgoers, which was that I failed (or rather chose not) to do the homework. And the homework that I did do didn’t even help! Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is in this film, not as the “Smart Hulk” we last saw on the big screen in Endgame, but as his normal, collegiate professor self, with Hulk repressed via a wrist-worn device that exists solely so that it can be damaged later for dramatic purposes. I’m one of the dozens of people who watched She-Hulk through to its conclusion (there is nowhere on this earth that Tatiana Maslany can lead that I will not follow), and even I had completely forgotten about the inhibitor device being a plot point on that show. Even then, the last time we saw Hulk on screen, it was in the final episode, and he was still in his merged Smart Hulk form. So why are we back to a Banner/Hulk Jekyll/Hyde paradigm that hasn’t been the status quo since 2018? I don’t know, and the corporate overlords behind Brand New Day didn’t bother to make up a reason. They know you haven’t been able to keep up with all of this, and that as a result, you’re going to assume something happened on one of the shows you couldn’t be arsed to watch. If there really is a reason that I’m not aware of, please leave a comment on this post. 

The third, and perhaps biggest, mistake that I made was being an X-Men fan. The biggest comic book movie news heading into the weekend last week was the casting of Samara Weaving as the MCU’s Emma Frost, which was both (a) perfect casting and (b) incredibly awful optics at the very least, given that the announcement of the casting of “The White Queen” coincided with the quiet cancellation of both the long-delayed MCU Blade film starring Mahershalah Ali and the TV series Wonder Man, which also had a Black lead. The ongoing win-them-back campaign that the MCU corporate product machine has been working on over the past year has reeked of sweaty desperation for cultural relevance, from the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr. in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday to the near-daily announcements of who’s-been-cast-as-who for the upcoming addition of the X-Men to the franchise. One of said announcements turned out to be something of a major spoiler for this movie, which really seems to indicate that the left and right hands of this greater enterprise aren’t entirely coordinated with one another. 

Enough preamble. It’s been almost five years since we last saw Peter Parker, who enlisted magical assistance in trying to reclaim his secret identity, ultimately requiring that he sacrifice all of his familial connections in order to save the multiverse. In the interim, he’s become New York’s beloved masked hero, taking on countless well-known villains and working with both NYPD detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), the head of the so-called “Department of Damage Control,” a former S.H.I.E.L.D. sub-unit created by Tony Stark for post-battle clean-up. Although his once-girlfriend MJ and former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) no longer remember him, Ned’s frequent social media posts have allowed Peter to keep up with their day-to-day lives. It’s a solitary existence, and it’s taking its toll on Peter, who begins to manifest black eyes and further mutation of his body (including the development of organic web shooters) even before he has a run-in with the film’s villain, a body-hopping consciousness that can move from person to person with ease but can’t possess Peter himself. Things come to a head when Peter learns that MJ and Ned have moved back to NYC after graduating from MIT, putting them in danger from the latest super-threat. 

If you thought that the pauses to allow audiences to whoop and holler when they recognized something that they saw on screen in No Way Home were distracting and unnecessary, you’ll really find yourself taken out of the moment when it happens here. Besides the aforementioned returning Hulk (who one must imagine is a deadbeat dad since there’s been no mention of his space son from She-Hulk in the last four years), there’s also new Black Widow Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Frank “Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) in the mix. These amount to little more than cameos in which Pugh is given nothing to do but make unfunny jokes about the varying sizes of the metaphorical “potatoes” that she and Peter are tasked with (Bernthal is better integrated and better used). The reveal that the villain of the piece is someone that we know from other superhero media is also one of these moments, and although there was a gasp in my theater (second in volume only to the audible excitement at the appearance of Michael B. Jordan in the trailer for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair), I had a much different experience with this revelation. 

I want to tread lightly around this subject, since this might come as a pleasant surprise twist to others, and who am I to steal that joy? This doesn’t appear to be a well-protected spoiler; my barista friend from whom I got coffee this morning already knew it and he’s going to see the film later this week. If you Google this movie, perhaps to see showtimes in your area, the performer and their character are the first result in the “cast” widget, even before Holland or Zendaya. Nevertheless, I’ll touch on this as lightly as I can. Early in the film, the villain’s ruthlessness and casual disregard for human life is made clear as they pilot a stolen tank through the streets of the city causing mass destruction and certain implied death, Peter’s last minute rescue of an awestruck child notwithstanding. After realizing Peter can’t be taken over, when surfing from body to body, the villain deliberately walks the person it’s possessing into the street to be hit by a car; later, the villain compels a possessed MJ to throw herself off a building. In the end, with the reveal that the obviously nefarious operation was unsurprisingly doing nefarious deeds (I’m sorry, what do you mean that the death cult works for you now?), we get a maudlin flashback that explains the character’s trite little origin story. In the moment that Peter turns his monitor around and says, “I’ve identified [them], [their] name is [major spoiler],” I didn’t get the little thrill that the interconnectedness of this universe used to inspire; my first thoughts were a simple “Really?” followed by an image of Don Corleone saying “Look at how they massacred my boy.” They made [redacted] a murderer right out of the gate! What are we doing here? In the same way that the promotional and productive arms of this behemoth don’t seem to be communicating with each other very much, the first and second halves of this film don’t cohere into a whole because our callous, murdering villain of part one is an innocent victim in part two, but you can’t have all that collateral damage early on and not grapple with it later. It’s maddening! 

With the rising tide of more, new Christopher Nolan discourse in the wake of The Odyssey, one of the talking points it appears we failed to leave in the past was whether or not Nolan was arguing for or against a fascist mass surveillance state in his Batman trilogy. The scenes in question revolve around Batman creating a network of cameras for tracking down criminals, and his trusted mentor Lucius telling him that this is a dangerous technology that should never be used. And he’s right! In this film, we get an “I didn’t hear that” reaction from Detective DeWolff when Peter admits that he’s created this very thing, and it’s just a passing joke. It’s not even plot-relevant, since that’s not how Peter manages to get an image of [redacted]’s face; he gets their photo with his goggles. I’m sorry if you thought that you could blissfully take a little excursion into the Marvel Cinematic Universe again and catch up with your old friends without getting soft Flock camera propaganda. Hey, look over here! Don’t think about how those cameras in your neighborhood are being used by cops to stalk women, misread license plates and create deadly situations as a result, or being used to monitor you with no reason and without a warrant. Get used to them being around all the time, because they’re not going anywhere (unless you do something)! They’re a totally normal thing that we’re joking about in your Spidertwunk adventure to normalize it, not a careful, constructed step into a full-blown surveillance state!

This movie is fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re fine. Peter saves the day by opening up his mind and letting the villain get a pep talk from a memory of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), because why not have the cake of milking the main character’s mother figure’s death for all it’s worth in the last movie and also eat it too by having her show up the very next outing. It cheapens the emotional stakes and impacts of both movies, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It would be nice if Peter had a few memories of May reminding him to eat a vegetable from time to time, but if I could subsist on nothing but label-to-camera Little Caesars and look like Tom Holland I wouldn’t bother with leafy greens either. Some extra iron might have helped with his spider-puberty, though.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mickey 17 (2025)

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When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

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Oh boy oh boy oh boy! It’s here! It’s finally here! We’re in the Endgame now. All good things must come to an end, after all.

Speaking of all good things, remember how that was the title of the series finale for Star Trek: The Next Generation? And how that episode showed our dearly beloved Captain Picard visiting the past and the future, solving a mystery that spanned decades and giving the audience a chance to revisit where that series had started and where it could go in the future, while also putting a nice little bow on the journey of Picard and his cohort? Going into Endgame, I had the same feeling, and as it turns out, this was intentional, going as far back as last March, when Marvel Films bigwig Kevin Feige cited “All Good Things … ” as an influence on this latest (last?) Avengers picture. So for once, I’m not just inserting a Star Trek reference where it doesn’t belong; it’s relevant.

Here there by spoilers! You have been warned! There’s virtually no way to talk about this movie without them, so saddle up buckaroos.

The film opens exactly as Infinity War ends, with Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) at a family picnic teaching his daughter archery. He turns his back for a moment and looks back, only to find that his entire family has been raptured turned to ash as part of Thanos (Josh Brolin)’s stupid, stupid plan to end scarcity across the universe by killing half of all living things. (This is also the plan of Kodos the Executioner from the classic Star Trek episode “The Conscience of the King,” because you should know by now that you can’t trust me not to insert Star Trek references were they don’t belong from time to time as well.) Three weeks later, the devastated remains of the team, Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and War Machine/Rhodey (Don Cheadle) are joined by the only surviving Guardian of the Galaxy, Rocket (Bradley Cooper) in their existential depression. Luckily, Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and his companion Nebula (Karen Gillan) are found in deep space by Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) just in time to prevent their suffocation, and she brings the two back to earth. With Nebula’s help, they locate Thanos’s little retirement farm and head straight there to retrieve the Infinity Stones and bring back everyone who was raptured dusted. When they get there, however, they learn that Thanos has already destroyed the Stones to prevent exactly this thing; Thor beheads the mad titan unceremoniously.

Five years later, people are still struggling. Struggling with depression, struggling with moving on. Cap goes to group counseling meetings. Natasha keeps the mechanisms of the Avengers in place, coordinating efforts to keep the peace, overseeing outreach and relief. Captain Marvel’s in deep space, helping the planets that don’t have the benefit of superheroes looking after them. Banner has managed to reconcile his two selves and lives full time as an intelligent Hulk. Tony has retired to a lakehouse with wife Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) and adorable daughter Morgan. And Ant-Man/Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is still stuck in the Phantom Zone Quantum Realm until his equipment is accidentally reactivated, popping him back out into the regular world so that he can have a tearful reunion with now-teenage daughter Cassie (Emma Fuhrmann) and heads to Avengers headquarters, where he tells Cap and Natasha that it’s only been five hours for him, not years. With help from a hesitant Tony, the team works out how to use the Ant-Man equipment to stage an elaborate “time heist,” plucking the Infinity Stones out of time to recreate Thanos’s gauntlet and undo the damage he wrought. It’s “All Good Things … ”! But Marvel! And I cried! I really did!

You don’t need the ins and outs of how all this shakes out. There’s that Marvel house style of comedy that you’ve come to know and (probably) love, coupled with the emotional devastation that you would expect in a world where half of the population has disappeared. Clint’s taken on the Ronin persona from the comics (although this codename is never used on screen), tracking down and murdering criminals as the result of having no moral tether after the loss of his family. Scott’s headlong run across San Francisco to try and find his daughter only to discover a memorial to the lost, which he searches frantically in the hopes that her name won’t be there. Natasha puts on a brave face, but you can tell that she counts every life lost as red in her ledger (she clears every crimson drop by the end of the movie, and then some). An unnamed grief-stricken man in Cap’s support group recounts a first date with another man; they both break down in tears over the course of the evening, but this is the status quo now, so they’re seeing each other again (so, you know, the post-snap world isn’t all bad).

The time travel premise lets us revisit past events from new perspectives, which makes for a lot of fun to counterbalance all that drear. This includes contemporary smart Hulk having to act like his brutish past self, much to his embarrassment and consternation. Tony’s interactions with his daughter are adorable, and went a long way toward making him more relatable and likable, especially after I’ve been pretty anti-Iron Man for a while. One of the most moving parts of the movie also comes as a result of its comedic elements; we learn that the remaining refugees from Asgard have set up a “New Asgard,” where a broken Thor has retired and let himself go (he’s got pretty standard dad-bod, but the internet has reacted as if he looks like Pearl from Blade, just in case you were wondering if bodyshaming was still a thing). Once the heist kicks off, this means that Thor and Rocket have to travel to the time of Thor: The Dark World to get the Aether from Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), giving our favorite Asgardian hunk a chance to have an affirming heart-to-heart with his departed mother Frigga (Rene Russo), retroactively adding more depth to her character in a lovely way.

I’m burying the lede, though, since what really matters about all these time travel shenanigans is that we get to see Peggy (Hayley Atwell) again. PEGGY! As soon as there was a wrinkle in the time plan and they mentioned having to go back to the seventies, I knew where we were headed and could barely contain my excitement. If I remember nothing else from this movie on my deathbed, I will remember the thrill of seeing Peggy one last time (and then again). That doesn’t even include the fact that Tony gets to have a nice moment with his father (John Slattery), too, and that there are appearances from every character.

Look, this is the perfect capstone for this franchise. If there were never another MCU film, it would be totally fine, because as a finale, this is pitch perfect. Every important and semi-important character (other than Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, because she was presumably busy shooting Us) gets a moment to shine, as the Snap is undone (come on, you knew it would be). There’s even a moment where every living lady hero from the entire MCU is onscreen at once, and it is delightful, although I’m sure the internet is already full of comments about how it was “forced” or “cheesy,” but I don’t feed trolls and I try not to cross the bridges that they live under, so I wouldn’t know. But, as the people behind the MCU have noted, this is a finale, not the finale. We get to say our goodbyes to many of our favorites, but the future is in good hands with Falcon/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) taking up the mantle and shield of Captain America, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) taking her place as the new leader of the Asgardians in diaspora, and the possibility of future adventures of Pepper Potts as the heir apparent to Iron Man. The future is now, and it couldn’t be brighter.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond