Podcast: Marvel Extravaganza! Ms Marvel, Thor: Love & Thunder, Our MCU Top Ten(s), and The Ultimate MCU Top Ten

Greetings, programs, and welcome to our one year anniversary! It’s hard to believe we relaunched the podcast a year ago to the day but here we are a year later. We are so grateful for all of you, for your listening and engagement, and for the community that we’re starting to build.

It’s fitting that this week saw the release of two new Marvel Cinematic Universe entries because that’s how the show began. Last year we covered the Disney+ series Loki and the film Black Widow. We decided to make an event of it, so this is a super-sized episode –nearly 2 hours long. Not only do we discuss the new Disney+ series Ms Marvel and the new film Thor: Love & Thunder, but we also break down both Simon and my MCU top ten lists, and then we asked over fifty of our friends to contribute to a consensus top ten list. That’s right, the top ten MCU entries as decided by over fifty people.

Below are streaming links powered by JustWatch for both of the new entries we discussed, a breakdown of the methodology used to determine the consensus top ten, an embedded player for the episode, and a complete listing of over 30 podcast networks you can find us on.

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Ms Marvel

Streaming Links

Matt’s Rating

Rating: 4/5

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Simon’s Rating

Rating: 5/5

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Thor: Love & Thunder

Streaming Links

Matt’s Rating

Rating: 4/5

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Simon’s Rating

Rating: 2/5

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Marvel Rankings

I put together a composite top ten list for this episode for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Partly this is because we thought it would be interesting to see the consensus, and partly because I thought it would be a bit of fun.

To create the list, we invited friends to submit their own top ten lists, drawing from all 36 current entries in the MCU. I used the points scheme from Formula 1 racing. Movies ranked in 1st place received 25 points, 2nd place 18, 3rd place 15, and so on. Each person was also asked what percentage of the MCU they had seen, and their points were weighted accordingly. Here is a complete breakdown.

Once each film had a base score, they were also given 0.1 points for each appearance. This was for tie-breaking purposes. For example, a film ranked 1st twice would have 50.2 points, but if that same film was rated 2nd once, 4th once, and 5th twice, it would end up with 50.4 points. The thinking is that more appearances overall slightly outweighs fewer. There were still some ties even with this, so films ranked 1st received an additional 0.1 points, movies ranked 2nd received an additional 0.09, 3rd received an additional 0.08, and so on.

This led to a list with no ties. Here’s a look at the appearances and scores of the final top ten, but you’ll have to listen to the show to hear the titles 🙂