The MCU Has an Exposition Problem on Catching Up People Who Don’t Watch the Disney+ Shows In Their Movies

The MCU’s been in a hit-and-miss state for a while, with there being some great or enjoyable entries (like Shang-Chi, Guardians Vol. 3, Deadpool and Wolverine, WandaVision, Agatha All Along) amidst a sea of flops (like Eternals, Secret Invasion, Love and Thunder, Quantumania, The Marvels, and Captain America: Brave New World). And just as a heads up, you’re well within your rights to enjoy the entries that didn’t do well.

For a while, it’s been said that you have to keep up with the Disney+ shows in order to understand what happens in the movies. WandaVision leads into Doctor Strange 2, The Falcon and Winter Soldier leads into Brave New World, etc..

And this of course presents a problem as not everyone has Disney+ and can’t have access to the shows. But a big problem though is that the movies will often expect the audience to have seen most of the shows for instance and while they will acknowledge that not everyone has seen these shows, they’ll often have bad exposition to bring up those who didn’t watch the shows up to speed.

Look at something like The Marvels, which mostly relies on the viewer having already watched WandaVision, Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye (and not Secret Invasion because it completely ignores it; the Skrulls already have a planet as opposed to being homeless like on SI). Like when Carol asks Monica how she got her powers, Monica goes “I walked through a witch’s hex”. Now if you’ve seen WV, this makes sense, but it comes off as a very lazy and inorganic way to deliver this information. And obviously if you didn’t see WV, then it makes no sense whatsoever.

Something similar happens in Brave New World, when Joaquin Torres/Falcon is introduced to Isaiah Bradley, and Bradley has a whole expositional line about how he was experimented on in Korea and imprisoned for years. Now not every line of dialogue has to feel realistic but lines like this are especially inorganic and almost feel like the movie’s stopping in its tracks for those who haven’t seen the shows so that everyone’s caught up.

Again, the large amount of shows have played a role in this, and not every movie that follows on from a show has the creative teams from those shows involved in the scripts unfortunately (The script for The Marvels was partly written by a WV writer and BNW had the creator of The Falcon and Winter Soldier involved in the script but regardless).

It’s just a pothole that Marvel’s unfortunately stumbled into and it’s got me worried about if they’ll use more of this kind of bad exposition to explain the presence of more characters from the Disney+ shows.

Any thoughts on this?