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 had planted them across the movies that followed.

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 merger remedy that sounds significant and one that actually changes corporate behavior.

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 problems surrounding scoop culture, access journalism and the artificial scarcity of information around major franchises.

The issue isn’t whether insiders sometimes get things right. It’s what journalists are willing to do with the power that access gives them.

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 eighth automatic qualifier for the Best of the Year tournament is officially locked.

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 creates a different kind of risk that leagues and players' unions may increasingly have to confront.

The question isn't whether football can ever be completely safe; it's which foreseeable risks the NFL accepts responsibility for creating or amplifying.

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 making the character fit naturally into the MCU’s modern timeline.

It would also give Black Panther 3 a powerful conflict: a new T’Challa forced to answer for Wakanda’s decision to remain hidden while atrocities unfolded beyond its borders.

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 Ultron returning.

Marvel’s post-Doomsday future is finally starting to take shape.

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 death, and what does “we don't trade lives” actually mean when the fate of half the universe is at stake?

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 reconstruction of The Odyssey as a story about ambition, destruction and the world one generation leaves behind for the next.

Full spoilers throughout.

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 Shakespearean succession tragedy, why its self-contained story is a strength, and the one CGI-heavy misstep that keeps the climax from matching everything around it