By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you’re a gamer, you’re likely very familiar with Hideo Kojima, the creative mastermind behind Metal Gear and its many sequels. What you may not know is that the gaming legend is an avid film buff, and he often posts his thoughts on recent movies on social media. Recently, Hideo Kojima took to X (formerly Twitter) to call Marvel out by stating how hard they made it to understand Captain America: Brave New World.
Hideo Kojima Calls Out Marvel
Hideo Kojima cut right to the point, stating that he had trouble remembering earlier Marvel plot points in order to understand the latest film. As he put it, “I vaguely remember Sam receiving the shield in Endgame, but when did he officially become Cap?” He asked if he had missed out on key plot points by not watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and admitted that he was getting some plot points confused with the Thunderbolts trailer and that he didn’t fully understand the Brave New World plotline about getting the Avengers back together.
Now, some of the MCU’s staunchest defenders might say that Hideo Kojima simply needs to pay more attention to what he is watching. That is, he wouldn’t be so confused as to the modern state of Marvel if he had been taking notes. However, in many ways, that’s the problem: the need to take notes. While many Marvel comics have required readers to keep track of different characters and diverging plot points, the MCU became so popular based on a kind of general accessibility that it no longer enjoys.
Another way to look at this is that Hideo Kojima, for all his brilliant accomplishments as a game designer, is a perfect representative of the average Marvel fan, one who doesn’t watch every show and just wants to show up to the theater and have fun. In this sense, he speaks for millions of fans who dislike that the modern MCU feels like a homework assignment. Some defenders like to claim that watching every single Marvel show on Disney+ is optional, but as Kojima points out, missing a single one of these may keep you from understanding one or more future films.
As Hideo Kojima implicitly pointed out, things have gotten so bad with Marvel’s modern films that it’s almost impossible to tell whether a recent film is introducing a new plot point (like rebuilding the Avengers) or building off some earlier work that you simply haven’t seen. In this case, the need to rebuild the Avengers was a new idea presented by Captain America: Brave New World, but the firehose of MCU content has made it hard to keep up. And when major film plot points are indistinguishable from something that might or might not have been slipped into one of the increasingly forgettable TV shows, it’s clear that Marvel has a major storytelling problem.
While some of the Disney+ shows have been good (like WandaVision and Agatha All Along), the existence of all these different series has diluted the core product. In short, a new Marvel movie used to be a major cinematic event. Now, the middling films are often indistinguishable from the middle shows, and it’s tough to muster the passion to keep up with either one. Marvel movies feel like chores more than events, and given the bleak box office for Captain America: Brave New World, all of this may spell disaster for Kevin Feige and company.
We love Hideo Kojima, but he was honestly the last person we expected to call out Marvel in this way. His call-out is perfect, though…rather than being snarky or sarcastic, the gaming legend states in simple terms how and why he was confused when watching the latest film in this cinematic universe. And unless Marvel can address this issue, audiences will realize that the solution to this confusion is simple enough: all they have to do is stop watching these incoherent