MCU Viewing Experiment: Results

Last updated on Nov 6, 2021 3 min read

A while ago, I devised an experimental system for efficiently viewing the Infinity Saga.

I tried to deduce a minimum set of movies to watch from eleven rec lists, using stats.
I set up a novel order for watching them in.

But I never came back to deliver a verdict on this project till now.

So how do I think I did?

I don’t consider the selection quite successful enough to recommend it to future viewers as is.

Mainly, I managed to class as optional some movies that seemingly can’t be skipped.

In general, I don’t think the eleven hand-picked sets I used had similar enough objectives.

I warned in the original that the meaning of the common signal in the recs wasn’t explicit.
Recommendations might be about which movies to watch to understand Endgame.
Or they might be about which movies up to that point were simply the best movies.
What I wanted to get was a signal of the former only, but I couldn’t guarantee it.
I surely underrated how important Ultron is based on data saying it wasn’t that good.

A minor bug affected the rating of Captain Marvel (and Ant-Man and the Wasp) in particular.

My need was for data on which movies had to be seen to get Endgame.
But a small number of the recs were older data, about what to see before Infinity War.
This, uh, obviously penalized entries that debuted after Infinity War did.

Last, I have to deal with having ignored the qualitative info in each set of recommendations.

Just as I didn’t have time for 22 Marvel movies, I didn’t have it for eleven long blog posts.
I ignored everyone’s detailed text in favor of getting only their hard votes.
This is not how the actual reviewers intended for their recommendations to be considered!
The confidence and context of each vote was lost to the method I went with.
Even text-as-data modeling of the 11 posts might have picked out a very different slate.

I found the watch sequence sensible, considering – but it wouldn’t work with better picks.

I didn’t have trouble following Avengers: Infinity War up front.
I watched Marvel movies until I was tired of them, and then I only had Endgame to go.
With a repaired version of the watch set, I would still recommend this ordering scheme.
But a repaired version of the watch set would approach trivially few optional movies.
The scheme depends on a deep set of optional movies for its usefulness.

I’m glad I watched the Infinity Saga, but in the end I can’t say I enjoyed it.

I haven’t worked out a good analysis of why not, and I don’t think I want to.
There were of enjoyable times along the way, but I didn’t find the entire journey justified.

I think that bears on the value of this whole viewing system experiment, too.

I had doubts going in about how much MCU I’d like to watch, which were kinda borne out.
I tried to create a viewing system for someone in my own position.
But wouldn’t you rather guidance from someone who appreciated the whole franchise?
I wonder if that wouldn’t be more useful even for new viewers with the same doubts I had.

Thanks for following along with me if you’ve done so.