Brave New World’ Is The Lowest Scoring MCU Movie On Metacritic

While I just published a piece about how Captain America: Brave New World had stumbled into being the third worst-reviewed MCU film on Rotten Tomatoes, I was curious to head over to Metacritic which gets more into specific scores. And what I found is that while some non-MCU moves are lower (Madame Web takes the bottom spot with a 26 score), Captain America: Brave New World is actually the lowest scoring MCU movie of all with a 43/100.

As a reminder of what this means, Rotten Tomatoes scores are calculated simply by whether a critic gives a movie a thumbs up or thumbs down (51% thumbs down for Brave New World), whereas Metacritic is taking into account exact scores (3/5, 4/10, etc.), which yields the number. Here are the bottom ten MCU movies as rated by Metacritic score, in reverse order.

• Captain America: Brave New World – 43
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – 48
• The Marvels – 50
• Eternals – 52
• Thor: The Dark World – 54
• Deadpool and Wolverine – 56
• Iron Man 2 – 57
• Thor: Love and Thunder – 57
• Thor – 57
• Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – 60

That’s brutal. It’s actually a full five points away from the next closest film, and Quantumania, I would argue, is far and away the worst MCU movie (Eternals is over-hated!). The other eight films are all between a 50 and 60.

The only strange standout on the list here is Deadpool and Wolverine, which critics may have thought was too silly, but fans loved it and it has become one of the highest earning MCU movies ever with over a billion at the box office. But the rest? I’m not surprised to see most of them on the list.

Why do these scores matter? Well, at least between Quantumania, Eternals and The Marvels, all three dramatically underperformed at the box office. There are indicators that Captain America: Brave New World is going to have a solid global opening of almost $190 million, but given these new review scores, I think it’s now going to be less that that. And to earn more over the long term, it’s going to need positive word of mouth, which may be a tall order if the film is in fact not great.

This is not usually a critic versus fans thing. Twelve MCU movies have above a 90% from critics, and the majority of the time, critics score MCU movies higher than fans. But this time? Marvel may be in for a disaster, especially as this character is meant to be hugely important for the MCU going forward.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.