It happened quicker than expected, but ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ getting labeled ‘overrated’ was always a bleak inevitability

The Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom can be a fickle bunch at the best of times, so it was always inevitable that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 would undergo a negative reappraisal eventually.

After all, we’ve seen the exact same thing happen with the likes of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in the very recent past, never mind the ongoing bile being spewed in the direction of the critically-acclaimed She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, or Eternals overcoming its reputation as one of the franchise’s worst-reviewed installments to become an enduring favorite.

That being said, James Gunn’s conclusion to the cosmic trilogy has only been streaming on Disney Plus for a couple of weeks, so the sentiment being espoused on Reddit that people are only praising the movie because it’s better than the string of misfires to have largely defined the Multiverse Saga so far has arrived quicker than expected, even though it was always going to happen eventually.

Of course, audiences might tend to disagree seeing as Vol. 3 netted $845 million at the box office, with its Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 81 percent making it one of the best-reviewed features to emerge from the MCU this side of Avengers: Endgame, but saying that the sole reason it was showered in such praise is because it was one of the better entrants in an overall bad bunch doesn’t really hold a great deal of water.

Sure, people can like what they like, but the end of the Guardians saga being damned with the title of not sucking to the same degree as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Secret Invasion makes no sense from a reasonable or objective perspective, and it isn’t even one that’s widely-held among the Marvel-loving masses.