However, it lacks the chops to achieve its vision, resulting in very long, boring episodes interspersed with a handful of jarringly overblown set-pieces. It seems fairly apparent that it had its heart set on being a complex, mature thriller. That said, it doesn’t help that Secret Invasion is also pretty terrible. The Marvel fatigue was real long before Secret Invasion came along. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law ended up as an aimless, technically inept mess. Moon Knight was weirdly boring for a show that featured a talking hippopotamus as a character. None of the shows that preceded Secret Invasion were particularly great. When even the producers are announcing that there are too many bad-quality Marvel shows on Disney+, it doesn’t exactly make you want to watch the latest one.Įspecially because they clearly have a point. Like the last few DC movies, which all suffered from the knowledge that they were the last few unloveable stragglers before film-maker James Gunn swept in and tidied house, Secret Invasion now stands as a totem of MCU rot. This leaves Secret Invasion in a very bad place. “Frankly, it diluted focus and attention,” he said this month.

As far back as February, Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, was telling people: “It is harder to hit the zeitgeist when there’s so much product out there,” and “The pace at which we’re putting out the Disney+ shows will change.” More recently, Bob Iger, managing director of Disney, seconded Feige’s statement by claiming that the root of the MCU’s decline is its non-stop output of television programmes. The dip in quality has been so pronounced, in fact, that the people at the head of the table have been forced to rush in and publicly course correct, and shows such as Secret Invasion have been the target. Meanwhile, former stars such as Elizabeth Olsen, Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr are becoming increasingly public in their misgivings about their roles. In return, the visual artists who work on the film complain about being overworked and overstretched in the service of film-makers who don’t seem to know what they want. Its CGI looks so bad that directors actively mock it in promotional videos, as Taika Waititi did for Thor: Love and Thunder. For some time now, the entire MCU has been on the skids. To be clear, this isn’t entirely Secret Invasion’s fault. Yet it ended up being parped out on Disney+ as a series, and nobody on earth cared about it. Secret Invasion is one of THE big comic events, an opportunity for Marvel to match the breathless superhero orgy of Infinity War and Endgame. Look at the dearth of reaction it generated. Look at its comprehensive lack of impact.

If you want a sign of how far the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has fallen, look no further than this week’s Secret Invasion finale.

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