It isn’t any big secret that Marvel movies have been slowly losing their golden touch over the past few years. Whereas a decade ago the MCU had the Midas Touch, now its movies and TV shows have lost the trust of its audience even when an MCU project, such as The Marvels, is actually pretty good. And the woman who has been there since the start of it all, Gwyneth Paltrow, recently talked about how the franchise has grown too big for its own good.

“To be honest, I stopped watching them at some point,” the Iron Man star told a crowd during the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, as transcribed by Deadline. “I’ve never seen Endgame. I can’t keep track of who’s what.”

It’s a sentiment shared by plenty of fans who have watched the MCU’s rise and (presumed) fall since Robert Downey Jr. first put on the suit in 2008. The MCU now has more than 30 movies in 25 years, plus multiple TV shows to complicate matters. For many people, Paltrow included, it is just too much to keep up with.

It isn’t just the volume of films to watch that has put Paltrow off – she points out a key difference in how MCU films were made early on versus how she sees them being made now as the crux of the issue.

“The first film we did was very different from the rest because the studio didn’t think it was going to be a big hit.” She later added, “We improvised almost every scene in that movie. We would write scenes in the morning in Jon [Favreau]’s trailer. It was like doing an independent film. Then the movie was such a huge hit that we didn’t make them like that anymore.”

Perhaps that experimental nature is what made Iron Man such a surprise hit for Marvel and the more structured nature of recent movies has stifled the rebellious energy that helped launch the MCU in the first place. Without that willingness to take risks and push the brand in new directions, Marvel films just haven’t had the magic to them that we’re used to.

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