Was nodding along until you brought up Marvel, I’ll never understand how so many people like them. I can’t get past how incredibly cheesy and overly dramatic they are.
I would suggest to watch Logan, its excellent.
In the 00s I really liked the Marvel movies. Then came Marvel Studios to ruin everything. But even in the beginning, the first couple of films were really good: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. But once they started to expand the "MCU" I quickly lost interest in the films. I like character driven stories that focus on the person behind the power. Batman is interesting because of Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is interesting because of Peter Parker etc. When you start doing these big mash-ups and team stories, like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers, you lose focus on the individuals and it becomes lots of long, drawn-out & boring action sequences.
But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.
In any case, I agree. Logan was really good. And it was really good, in my opinion, because it was character-driven and not just 13 hours of drawn out, boring as hell, CGI "porn" action sequences. And I figure it was like that because it wasn't made by Marvel Studio.
To the best of my knowledge the X-Men films made before Disney acquired the X-Men rights in 2019 (along with the rest of Fox) were made in partnership with Marvel Entertainment (the publishing and licensing company) and not Marvel Studios (the Disney "cinematic universe" subsidiary).
Early on they were planning to adapt Inhumans as their replacement for Mutants, but it flopped badly when they finally got around to making something focused exclusively on them (as opposed to when they were just a part of the Agents of SHIELD plots).
A man with the power of... ants. Spider man. A man that wears tight underwear on the outside of his pants... A man that pretends he is a bat.
Compare this with backstories from Japanese manga which clearly some are targeted at more adult levels of intelligence I'm flabbergasted a hollywood exec would decide to pour millions of dollars into some backstory aimed at children from the 1940s.
Which is precisely why they have such a large following. Most people are mentally drained after 40+ hour long work weeks.
Maybe I'm behind on the MCU movies but I don't remember those things happening in the cinematic material!
They know their audience of wannabe eternal children, and so they invest for the only reason they ever do: a fat return on that investment.
I'd also point out that a HUGE amount of anime, manga and ln content is beyond cheesy, it's just cheesy in a different way.
The first Avengers is so perfect that even Marvel had to change their theme after it. What then changed to light-comedy action-led movies.