One ofthe biggest complaints everyone has with the Marvel Cinematic Universeconcerns their costume designs. Indeed, Marvel Studios has aterrible tendency of completely overdesigning their costumes. They often include unnecessary lines, odd color segmentations, and absolutely useless inclusions that do nothing for the overall design other than make it visually busy and, occasionally, flat-out off-putting.
What makes this tendency even worse is that characters start their Marvel Cinematic Universe tenure with a great costume, only to have it completely ruined in their next appearance. It makes their costumes look confusing, over-populated, and hard to look at, to the point where it’s often hard to understand how official concept art can even look better than the final product.These are the most over-designed costumes in the MCU, ranked by how unappealing they are, especially compared to what came before.
10The Vision Suit
Vision (Paul Bettany)
While, at first look, Vision may not seem very overdesigned, when taking a more critical look at his suit,there’s a lot happening here that is a bit too much.If one takes a look atthe comic book Vision design, he’s primarily green and yellow, with the red color in his design living primarily on his chest and face. While being comic-accurate doesn’t make a movie suit necessarily good and isn’t needed at all, being comic-accurate would have helped the Vision design in the Marvel Cinematic Universe quite a bit.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe Vision finds itselffeeling somehow both empty and overdesigned at the same time.There’s not much happening on the front of the costume, and due to this, Marvel Studios added a lot of unnecessary red blotches on the arms and down the sides of the costume. While it would look more empty without these lines, there are better ways to fix that issue.
9The Stark Suit
Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland)
The Stark Suit introduced inCaptain America: Civil Waris pretty much theperfect base example of the many issues with Marvel Studios costumes. While the color segmentation is pretty good, for the most part, if one looks closer, they can find dozens of lines within the blue of the suit that add absolutely nothing.
Comparing this suit to the likes ofTobey Maguire’sandAndrew Garfield’s, in which the blue is solid,the suit looks clustered and jarring. The Stark Suit is still good-looking, as the colors are bright and popping, but the useless lines can be distracting, making Spidey look a bit like a circus performer. It also adds fuel to the theory that Marvel Studios is just scared of segments of solid colors.
Captain America: Civil War
8Black Widow’s Endgame Suit
Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson)
The suit Black Widow wore inAvengers: Endgamemay look like any of her other suits if one squints, but upon closer inspection, it’s filled with absolutely pointless design inclusions. In the past, her suits have typically been solid black with small red accents, like the symbol on her belt. However, theEndgamesuit decided to throw those perfectly fine design philosophies away.
Much like the Stark Suit, rather than a solid color,the suit is filled with pointless lines that add nothing. While it’s not terribly distracting, thanks to the lines also being a shade of black, they’re still present andmake it look cluttered for no reason. It, again, alludes to Marvel Studios being resistant to solid colors. Her previous outfits, like the ones seen inIron Man 2andThe Avengers, are pretty much perfect.
Avengers: Endgame
7Taskmaster’s First Suit
Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko)
Fans were pretty excited when it was revealed that Taskmaster was going to be one of the villains inBlack Widow. Alas, general opinion wavered a little bit when she was first shown in the trailers because, well, the suit didn’t look great. There are a lot of elements that go into this suit being overdesigned, and it’s not just the typical useless lines.
For starters,Taskmaster has a random hoodfor some reason. The hood seemingly has no purpose and doesn’t ever be shown to be useful in the film itself. Hoods are cool, yes. But characters with them, like Green Arrow, use them to hide their identity. Taskmaster doesn’t need to do that. So what’s the point?It’s textbook overdesign, and in the worst possible way, too.
Black Widow
6The ’90s Suit
Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson)
While her suit in her recent film,The Marvels, is much better, Captain Marvel’s first film features her in an outfit that is very cluttered. Something that’s fixed later on is the placement of blue, red and gold lines, dots and segments of color on both the torso and legs. In recent films, they’ve cut those out completely.
The transition of her suit fromCaptain MarveltoThe Marvelsis a huge, surprising improvement for Marvel Studios. But it doesn’t fix the rough, borderline hard-to-look-at suit in the first film. The cluttered gold and red bits scattered across the hero’s blue torso make itfeel like they splattered paint on the comic designand took inspiration from that.
Captain Marvel
5The Integrated Suit
Somehow,the Integrated Suit from the end ofSpider-Man: No Way Homeis a good-looking suit while still being very overdesgined. Surprisingly, the giant gold spider in the middle of the red torso works and doesn’t kill the suit as it does for another (more on that later). The real killer of the Integrated Suit is the aspects found in the black segments.
Within the black torso segments of the suit, there are random red lines alongside black lines, all of which add nothing to the suit andmake the black segment feel divided. Looking down at the legs, there are black lines like there are on the Stark Suit, but thankfully, they’re far less noticeable here. The kneecaps, though, have strange red and gold lining in a row that just look clumped together.
Spider-Man: No Way Home
4Kamala’s Updated Suit
Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani)
Kamala Khan actually had a great suit inher debut Disney+ series,Ms. Marvel. It was simple, had great colors, and while it still wasn’t a stranger to useless lines, it was overall pretty solid. It wasn’t untilThe Marvelsthat the suit was taken and muddled with. Unfortunately, when Marvel Studios decided to update her suit for the film, they made changes that not only were unnecessary but didn’t look great as a whole.
Bluntly put:Kamala’s suit inThe Marvelsis a cluttered mess. The suit now has a large red segment cutting through the torso, random gold shoulders, red segments and gold lines on the legs, a blue line cutting through her gold symbol and the once primarily red arms are now scattered with blue and red blotches. There’s not much else to say about the new Ms. Marvel design besides the word of the day: overdesigned.
The Marvels
3The Iron Spider
The friendly neighborhood has had a rough go when it comes to having overdesigned costumes.The worst-looking of all his suitsis also one of the most overdesigned in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ever since it was revealed, the Iron Spider has received pretty much nothing but hate, and it is completely warranted. Although it was a gift fromthe usually suit-oriented Iron Man(Robert Downey Jr.), the Iron Spider is objectively a mess, and there’s no denying it.
The biggest problem the Iron Spider has isthe large spider symbol covering pretty much the suit’s entire torso, a fully blue symbol with gold outlining. With how big the spider is, it makes the torso look incredibly over-populated. The blue on the suit also struggles with the same thing the Stark Suit does, having random lines that add nothing to the design. Butthe true killer of this suit is its use of gold accents all over. It could have worked but failed in execution.
2The Quantumania Suit
Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd)
The suit Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) (and honestly everyone) is wearing inAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumaniais obscenely overdesigned.If one were to look at the third filmsuit and compare it to the one inAnt-Man, they’d probably be horrified. The suit in the first film is actually very good: it’s simple, sleek and it’s practical.
Alas, the third suit is plain bad. The amount of lines and random black and silver segments is ridiculous.The suit is a wild and jarring messthat is just a strain to look at for anyone who enjoys costuming. The additions to the suit do nothing for Ant-Man’s actual abilities and are simply cosmetic. There is nothing wrong with purely cosmetic changes,but when there’s this much going on, and there’s no practical use for it, it’s hard to excusethe mess.
Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania
1The Gold and Blue Suit
‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ (2022)
Many people already have a lot of issues withThor: Love and Thunder, but as if it couldn’t get worse, the suitThor (Chris Hemsworth)uses throughout the film isthe most overdesigned in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. The worst part about it is the fact that at the beginning of the film (after his soiree with the Guardians), he’s wearing a genuinely excellent suit with fur on his cape.
It’s hard to put into words exactly why this suit is as much of a mess as it is. There is no explanation behind why the gold and blue segments and lines are the way they are.It looks like a bunch of lines drawn onto the suit for no apparent reason.To make matters worse, the helmet is utterly horrendous, with the blue segments on the top and the small, barely noticeable lines surrounding the eyes.
