Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Avengers: Endgame” opened this past weekend and smashed box office records for opening weekend with $1.2 billion dollars spent on tickets. This is almost double the highest opening weekend number by almost double. Second place was last year’s “Avengers: Infinity War.” The hype around superhero films is intense, and despite the title of this most recent film, there is not an end in sight.

There is an end for the Avengers, though. The end of “Avengers: Infinity War” is pretty bleak, with Thanos having gained all of the infinity stones and snapping away half of the universe. The next film has a dark tone. Half of humanity has been extinguished, so if viewers enter this film expecting to leave with a perfectly happy ending, they have not been paying attention.

This film is the end of an era. This is the last movie with all the modern Avengers: Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Thor and Hulk. Therefore, a lot of the characters in this film had to be written off, either through finding a new path or through death. After 11 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), watching beloved characters having their stories end is not something that would be easy to watch.

Showing up to “Avengers: Endgame” with no prior knowledge of previous films is impossible. Unlike seeing any other film with no prior knowledge, the MCU is almost episodic in nature. Viewers could not watch the most recent episode of “Game of Thrones” and expect to know exactly what is going on.

Some of the characters were introduced in their own movies, then “The Avengers” was released. Then a few more solo films with character development and lore-hinting toward “Avengers: Endgame” were released, but then “Avengers: Age of Ultron” came out. Through this format, in order to fully understand the plot and love each character, all of the previous films need to be watched.

The biggest issue with “Avengers: Endgame” was that the creators did not seem to watch the previous movies. Or they thought that, just because Taika Waititi’s movie gave Thor really good character development and allowed for him to be more than his hammer Mjolnir. This means that they did not need to as filmmakers.

The problem with this mindset, besides the obvious ignoring of characterization, is that both Captain America and Iron Man are different characters from film to film. Obviously, they are still played by Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr, respectively, but the way that each writer or director interprets the character dictates how the actor will portray the character in that given film. This discord in characterization was most apparent in “Avengers: Endgame,” as each character was supposed to be given a proper send-off or farewell from the future of the MCU. The send-offs were beautiful and emotional but, for the most part, were completely out of character from the previous interpretations of the characters.

That is not to say that “Avengers: Endgame” was a horrible movie. There was the same witty humor, exciting action and lovable characters. Despite the bleak tone, the film was not sad and anxiety-inducing. The films in the MCU are diverse in tone and themes, which is well captured in “Avengers: Endgame.” However, the different characters and how they would behave was something that could not quite be agreed on.

Photo from Marvel Entertainment