Has the MCU Become Nothing More Than an Overpriced Trailer Strategy?

It's the one complaint every Brand New Day review keeps arriving at from a different direction. RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico calls it “one of the biggest problems of late-stage MCU: the feeling that it's just preparation for more movies,” and says the action itself is “surprisingly light on... set pieces that anyone will remember” by the time Avengers: Doomsday lands. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw describes the connective-tissue stretches as “generic deja vu overfamiliarity.” That's two independent critics, writing for very different outlets, landing on the same word: setup.

So is that fair, or is it just the review that gets written about every mid-cycle Marvel movie now, regardless of what's actually on screen?

The Case That This Is a Real Problem, Not Critic Fatigue

The specific evidence is what makes this complaint land harder than the usual “superhero movies are all the same” grumbling. Tallerico's review isn't vague about it — he points at Mark Ruffalo's Hulk cameo directly, calling it “needlessly and superfluously stuffed into the yarn almost purely for the trailer sizzle.” That's a critic identifying a specific scene he believes exists for marketing reasons rather than story reasons, in a review that otherwise praises the film's character work in detail. When the same critic who calls Tom Holland's performance “easily his best in this series” also names a scene as filler, that's not reflexive franchise cynicism — that's a specific diagnosis.

And it isn't isolated to one review. Across the wider critical response, the film is sitting at a strong 90–91% on Rotten Tomatoes but a noticeably cooler 71 on Metacritic — the gap between a scored-thumbs-up count and a weighted-quality read is exactly where a “good performances, thin structure” movie tends to land.

The Case That This Critique Gets Aimed at Every Marvel Movie Now

Here's the counterpoint: virtually every interconnected franchise movie since the Infinity Saga has drawn some version of this complaint, including entries that turned out to work fine as their own thing. The MCU's whole structural bet, since 2008, has been that a movie can plant seeds for the future and still resolve on its own terms — Iron Man did it, Captain America: The Winter Soldier did it. “This sets things up for later” isn't automatically a flaw; it only becomes one when the present-tense story doesn't hold up without the future payoff attached.

It's also worth noting what the reviews aren't saying. None of the four we've tracked call Brand New Day incoherent or unfinished — Den of Geek's David Crow gave it four stars, calling Holland's performance a career best. A movie that's “transitional” and still earns that kind of praise for its lead performance isn't the same thing as a movie that's just a placeholder.

Where MarvelGossips Lands

Read all four reviews side by side and the pattern isn't “this movie is only setup” — it's “this movie had a complete story and let franchise business elbow into the runtime anyway.” Peter's isolation, MJ and Ned's memory gap, the man-versus-spider transformation Marvel's own official synopsis centers the whole film on — that's a self-contained arc. The Hulk cameo Tallerico flags isn't part of that arc. It's the part that exists because Avengers: Doomsday is five months away and Marvel wanted it in the trailer.