Thirty Minute Reviews

Avengers: Endgame still works remarkably well as the conclusion to the Infinity Saga, though maybe it worked too well. With the Encore edition now retroactively adding setup for Doomsday , Adam examines how Endgame functioned as an audience off-ramp, why the MCU struggled to establish a new central narrative afterward and why several of the new scenes would have been far more effective if Marvel h...

A settlement has cleared another major hurdle for the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. combination, with conditions covering news operations, studio structure and annual theatrical output. But how meaningful are those concessions? Adam looks at the requirement to release thirty movies per year, the decision to maintain Paramount and Warner Bros. as separate operations and the difference between a m...

Franchise secrecy has created an entire economy around knowing information before everyone else. But what happens when access to that information becomes leverage over the people being covered? Adam looks at the controversy surrounding Jeff Sneider’s public threat to publish damaging rumors about an actress if her team would not cooperate with him, and uses it to examine the larger ethical problem...

Only two movies made the August field, but one earns its place in the MWPNews Best of the Year tournament. Adam ranks The End of Oak Street and Coyote vs. Acme , revisiting the unused potential of Oak Street 's suburban sci-fi premise and explaining why Coyote vs. Acme becomes even more interesting when viewed alongside the real-world corporate battle that nearly prevented its release. The eig...

The NFL says player safety is a priority, but should that responsibility end when players leave the field? Adam looks at new concerns surrounding CTE, the league's increased enforcement of dangerous tackles and its continuing financial relationship with major sportsbooks. With athletes already reporting harassment tied directly to failed bets and individual player props, sports gambling create...

Denzel Washington has already revealed that he is involved with Black Panther 3 . Marvel has announced most of its new X-Men cast. Magneto remains conspicuously absent. So what if those two things are connected? Adam theorizes that Marvel could introduce a new version of Magneto through Wakanda by shifting his genocide-survivor history to Rwanda, preserving the foundation of his worldview while ma...

D23 2026 delivered far more Marvel news than expected. Adam breaks down the newly completed X-Men cast, including India Navarrette as Rogue, Maya Boyd as Storm, Christopher Abbott as Professor X and Adam Driver as Mister Sinister. Plus, a new Avengers: Doomsday trailer gives Doctor Doom a much clearer role, while Vision Quest offers a new look at Vision’s identity crisis and the possibility of Ult...

On the latest Countdown to Doomsday, Adam revisits Avengers: Infinity War and examines how Marvel introduced an enormous cast, preserved the individual voices of franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy , Thor and Black Panther , and made Thanos the central character holding the entire crossover together. Plus, did the MCU do enough to justify Peter Quill's disastrous reaction to Gamora's d...

The MWPNews Best of the Year Tournament has a new frontrunner. Adam ranks July’s three contenders— Obsession , Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey —and decides which one receives the month’s automatic bid. Along the way, he examines the devastating consequences hiding beneath Obsession ’s supernatural ending, the lived-in street-level MCU of Brand New Day , and Christopher Nolan’s reconstruc...

The countdown reaches the film that earned Marvel its first Best Picture nomination. Adam makes the case that Black Panther is elevated above nearly every other MCU entry by a villain the audience is meant to agree with, Killmonger, whose indictment of Wakanda's isolationism is correct even when his methods are monstrous. Why the hero loses the argument and adopts it, how the film works as a S...

The countdown reaches the film that rescued Thor. Adam makes the case that Thor: Ragnarok is a joyous, gorgeous reinvention, Taika Waititi handed a failing franchise and remaking it in his own voice, and also the film whose relentless comedy comes at a real cost. Why Hela is one of Marvel's most wasted great villains, how the movie laughs its way past Asgard's destruction and Odin's de...

Marvel returned to Hall H, and Adam breaks it down live. Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider, Black Panther 3 dated for December 2028 with a new T'Challa, and the Avengers assembling for Doomsday , but the real story is what the panel signals. Why the missing X-Men reveal is strategic, what Kevin Feige means when he says the MCU is now "streamlined," and why the post- Secret Wars slate point...

The first full Avengers: Doomsday trailer finally dropped, and Adam argues the timing says more than the footage. Why Marvel sat on a strong trailer until the last possible moment, what that hesitation says about the December collision with Dune: Part Three , and why "Dunesday" is not the Barbenheimer repeat everyone's calling it. Plus the real question hanging over the film: were In...

Five movies, the most June had to offer all year, ranked worst to best for a spot in the best-of-the-year tournament. Adam runs them down: a film that's ashamed of itself to an ending that's so deflating the movie is completely forgotten. Which one takes the automatic bid, and where the halfway-point board stands. Please note we repeatedly say that The Devil Wears Prada 2 won the automatic...

The countdown reaches Spider-Man's MCU debut and the first film of the Sony-Marvel deal. Adam digs into why Michael Keaton's Vulture is one of Marvel's best and most sympathetic villains, why that homecoming car ride is one of the great scenes in the Infinity Saga, and the problem underneath it all: Peter Parker never gets to be the hero of his own movie because Tony Stark's shadow...

Twelve state attorneys general have sued to block Paramount's $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, and Adam read the entire complaint. A breakdown of the market-concentration math that makes this deal presumptively illegal, why a single company controlling CBS, CNN, HBO, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network is a blackout waiting to happen, and the receipts on what happened to Fox's...

The countdown reaches the last film James Gunn directed before the firing, and Adam makes the case that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is better than the first, and the entry most burdened by the machine around it. Why nearly every character arc here exists to clear the decks for Infinity War , how the Yondu rehabilitation works despite its setup, why the found-family theme rings hollow for a team...

The countdown reaches the MCU's first real foray into magic. Adam argues that Doctor Strange is one of Marvel's most visually stunning films, the Mirror Dimension, the reverse-destruction climax, a hero who wins by outsmarting rather than outfighting, and also one of its most structurally broken. Why the movie's whole arc about learning humility is undercut by a plot that rewards Stran...

With a new Supergirl in theaters, the revisionist history is coming, and so is the inevitable claim that the 1984 Helen Slater film was secretly great all along. Adam watched it the night after the new release to head that off. Let's look at why the original is a one-star mess of missing urgency and plot-convenience, how its passive, paragon-of-femininity Kara has no agency in her own story, a...

Adam revisits Captain America: Civil War as part of the Countdown to Doomsday and looks at why the movie was such an important turning point for the MCU. The episode covers how Civil War steadied Marvel after a bumpy Phase Two, introduced Black Panther and Spider-Man without derailing the story, and created the fracture that made Infinity War and Endgame possible. Adam also digs into the wider 201...

Adam revisits James Gunn’s Superman one year after its release and looks at how it holds up as DC heads toward Supergirl . We discuss why the movie’s relentlessly positive take on Superman works, why the character needed to be rebuilt before being deconstructed, and how David Corenswet’s Superman fits into a modern, complicated world without losing the “big blue boy scout” core. Adam also talks th...

The countdown closes out Phase Two with the unlikeliest success in the run. Adam makes the case that Ant-Man works for the same reason the best MCU films always do, it follows Stan Lee's old rule and emphasizes the human, grounding a shrinking-suit heist in a father trying to do right by his daughter. Along the way: the eight-year Edgar Wright saga and the Peyton Reed handoff, the Quantum Real...

Adam revisits Lightyear , the 2022 prequel built on a premise it never delivers: that this was the movie a kid in 1995 fell in love with. A look at why the film feels nothing like a mid-90s kids' movie, how Buzz Lightyear of Star Command did the job better twenty years earlier, the Sox problem, and what Lightyear 's absence from the Toy Story 5 trailer tells you. Plus the corporate context...

The countdown reaches the most divisive Avengers title. Adam makes the case that Avengers: Age of Ultron isn't a bad movie so much as a conflicted one, the first Marvel tentpole that put serving the wider universe ahead of being its own thing. Along the way: the tonal whiplash that kills every death scene, the Whedon dialogue problem, and a deep dive into how the Agents of SHIELD and Inhumans...

Two stories, one episode. First let's revisit Toy Story 4 seven years on, the weakest and least memorable entry in the series, and argue its real significance is strategic rather than narrative: this is the film where Pixar figured out it could mandate a sequel and have it work, the opening move in the inoffensive Pixar hit era. Then we turn to this week's box office, where an A24 horror m...