Ranking the Marvel Disney Plus Shows

Since Disney Plus launched there have been a slew of Marvel shows that have added to the ongoing saga that is the Marvel cinematic Universe. Some of them have been great, and some less so. In this list we’ll rank all the Marvel Disney Plus shows from Worst to best!

I Am Groot

These are funny little shorts, but my overriding thought of them was why do these exist? The answer is obvious – now they can continue to sell Baby Groot figures.

As part of the official MCU, these really add nothing to the ongoing story or development of the Groot character. It was like the Marvel CGI guys wanted to get in on the Pixar short films, or those occasional Maggie Simpson short cartoons. In fact, with these featuring Baby Groot, that is exactly what they are like.

These are harmless and completely skippable,  except for the idea these add to which is that some MCU stuff is skippable.

Moon Knight

I didn’t know Moon Knight before I saw the show, and to be honest, I’m still not sure I do. I found this show hard to get into and not always easy to follow. I’m sure many followed it just fine, but in my case I felt my attention was drifting away from it and so didn’t really stay on board with all the time jumps and multiple personalities and weird Hippo people who may have been in a dream or afterlife or something…I kinda don’t remember…or didn’t understand. Shouldn’t Moon Knight be a werewolf?

Ms Marvel

This show warmed up the longer it went on, but lacked action for the first couple of episodes. There is good humour throughout and everyone gives their best performance wise, but having a superhero show where the only action in the first two episodes is catching people who fall off of things was quite a let down. 

That said, things really did pick up from episode three and kept exciting for the rest of the run, although still felt a slightly weaker show. As Marvel develop their next batch of Avengers, this show along with Moon Knight lacked familiar stars or characters to help the process. 

What If?

What If can be a bit hit and miss as some episodes are great and some others are fairly poor. The visuals are mostly great, although maybe a tiny bit too stylised for my liking. Captain Carter was overly huge which Haley Atwell couldn’t possibly live up to when she then played Captain Carter in live action. 

Also seeing Thanos reduced to a big bumbling Baloo the bear type of character in the episode where T’Challa is Starlord was a mistake that weakened audience perception of  a villain they spent ten years building up as unstoppable. And don’t even get me started on how What If diminished Tony Stark’s death by killing him more times than South Park killed Kenny.

Negative points aside, the show is fun and enjoyable and allows us to go back to scenes and characters from past movies which wouldn’t be possible in live action. The show gave us the first bite of Marvel Zombies which was great, and the reveal that the episodes aren’t all standalone and it was building to an Avengers worthy two part finale was great. Genuinely the first part of the finale is up there as good as the actual Avengers movies (part two not so much) and really made Ultron the threat he should have been in the Avengers Age of Ultron movie.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a great continuation of the Captain America story. With action and a tone that continues things where Captain America: The Winter Soldier left off, this is the biggest budget feeling action fest which is what you’d expect from the MCU.

Of all the shows on this list, it’s certainly got the biggest players from the MCU involved – literally The Winter Soldier is the only character in a Disney Plus show whose name has been in the title of one of the MCU movies, and Falcon has been a main Avenger for many years now, and will be the title character of the next Captain America film.

The action is great, and the character development for Sam Wilson and Bucky is also done very well here, but if there is one criticism it’s that like many other Marvel Disney shows, they hold off on bringing in the main bad guy until the end. It’s a weird trend, but it’s what they keep doing.

Hawkeye

Hawkeye may not have had a stand-alone movie like all of the other original Avengers (minus Nick Fury who was always positioned as the leader from the back rather than the front line) but he did eventually get this series. 

People often compared it to Die Hard as a action story set at Christmas, and it does occasionally have that vibe. The series sees Clint Barton training up a new Hawkeye in Kate Bishop whom he had once saved during the events of the first Avengers film. There is also a lot of mystery going around as to who can be trusted or not.

The show ups the ante with the arrival of Yelena who is the sister of Black Widow who was first seen in the Black Widow movie. With her there set to kill Hawkeye whilst he is also trying to escape his past as Ronin, the show has a great balance of action and character stuff. The introduction of Kingpin from the Netflix Daredevil show was super exciting for fans of that show and was a big deal at the time as it opened the doors for more cross overs and definitively made the Netflix shows part of the larger MCU.

Loki

The concept of this show really opened things up in the MCU to have actors and characters from outside the main Marvel Cinematic Universe cross over into the MCU. The idea of a time police and sacred timelines and variants may have been hinted at previously, but this is the show that drilled these ideas into our heads as a big warning to expect the unexpected from now on.

It was also great to see Loki humbled and basically become a version of Doctor Who who along with Sylvie who is a female variant of himself and Owen Wilson who does typical Owen Wilson stuff as companions.

Seeing different versions of Loki including one who is female, one who is black, one who is a child, one who is an alligator and one who is Richard E Grant in classic comic Loki pyjamas is so much fun. We also got a moment of Throg who is a Thor variant who is a frog. Mad show and so much fun throughout. 

WandaVision

Apparently the first MCU Disney Plus show was at one stage going to be Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but the pandemic caused havoc with that and we got WandaVision first. I think this was actually the better way around. 

As the first MCU show it couldn’t have started things off in a more unexpected way. Episodes varied in length and other than a couple of “ooh I wonder what that means?” moments, the first two episodes were pretty spot on black and white 1960s sitcom episodes. 

Episode by episode things evolved into being references to different sitcoms of the past and it was just a crazy concept that people were glued to. As the mystery unfolded we learned the Wanda was suffering after the loss of the Vision in the Avengers End Game and had created a fantasy world for herself that was also keeping a ton of people hostage as her puppets to help get her through her grief.

And although I’ve said that Loki was the show that really pushed the MCU into the multiverse, it was this show that had the first cross over with Evan Peters from the X-Men films reprising his role as Quicksilver, who was up to this point the only character who has been in both the MCU and another Marvel series of films at the same time…but played by different actors. He had been played by Aaron Taylor Johnson in the MCU before this.

The show lead things into what would happen in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and is the best example to date of a Disney Plus show connecting back into the movies.

So that’s our list! Do you agree with it? Think another show should have topped the list? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to share the article!

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