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The Marvel film universe does not work as do most movie franchises. Of his first five images, only one, Iron Man 2 was strictly a sequel. The Incredible Hulk, Thor Captain America: The First Avenger and Iron Man all work as stand-alone films, at the origin of their heroes. They are related, but as productions, through marketing and implicitly. Then, Avengers Assemble is the sequel of all, simultaneously.
It is this initial ability to go it alone that often wounds the MCU as a film franchise, with The Avengers (and its own subsequent sequels) badogous to a season finale. If the first films of MCU were television, they would constitute an anthology, of the kind of those who do not make finales and which connect each story of the week in a coherent whole.
The reason the MCU tells stories in a unique cinematic way is simple: it really works like comic book superheroes do. In the course of decades, form has developed its own particular dramaturgy, which in part derives from the commercial needs of the medium. The publishers want to sell as many copies as possible of his monthly comics. At a time when most comics are sold in specialty stores, rather than in traditional pharmacies and supermarkets, you often have to sell more comic books to the same number of customers, not the same number of comics to more customers.
One way to do this is to use crossovers. This is not just the simple version of the character A that appears in the comic strip of character B, which has been around since the 1940s and has long been involved in linking the world of comics, but also stories in several parts in which the episodes are spread over different titles.
Suppose you only buy that Thor but a month later you discover that the story that begins in Thor continues in the edition this week of Spider-Man . the next issue of Hulk with a special comic the following week to complete the story. You are suddenly more likely to buy comics than you would normally do.
Avengers' first film captured the many overlapping audiences for the five characters he performed and brought over $ 1 billion to the box office. In addition, he sent – for example – Iron Man viewers who had not imagined a film Thor for DVDs. While the images were isolated, it was interesting to see them all – and after discovering Chris Hemsworth's Thor, well, they wanted to see him more.
This being realized, the second and third phases of the MCU were more interconnected than the first: there were more plot points and shared characters, in lead roles and cameos, and more of the feeling of being there. a story in progress. It started to look like you should see them all. This gives the "television" impression that some critics have detected.
Yet, over time, the distinctions between MCU sub-brands fade and some of them have stopped working in series. The three films Iron Man work reasonably well as a "trilogy" and tell a unified story about Tony Stark. But Captain America: Civil War corresponds at least as much to "The Avengers 2.5" as to "Captain America 3". Although this is in principle the end of Captain America's trilogy, it was sold as such on Blu-ray – it starts more stories in progress than it does. in the end. It's just that they are solved in movies of which Captain America is not the main character.
The same goes for Thor's "trilogy". The third is very different in tone and content from the first two and leads directly to Avengers: Infinity War . It is telling that the Trilogies of Captain America and Thor are equally distributed between the first three phases of the MCU, while Iron Man was completed in the first film of Phase Two. Watching the MCU evolve for a decade has been like watching the comics development of superheroes, but on a thicker serum.
The same goes for the indispensable price of ticketing at the box office, then? Well no. Even now, more than twenty films, Marvel still shoot casual movies that can serve as entry points for new audiences. Infinity War is positioned as carefully as the sequel to Black Panther – broadcast several weeks before, with great success – as for any Avengers film, thus attracting the underserved audience in the new film. The same goes for Captain Marvel of February who used his post credits scene to make it clear that she will appear in Endgame less than two months later – the dramatic and commercial logic of comics of superheroes translated into traditional cinema. What is remarkable is the trust required to do it. Infinity War a film worth 400 million dollars, relied on Black Panther of a size as large as Black Panther this that no one could guarantee.
The fact is that it is not necessarily completely cynical to do so: this is how these characters are supposed to work. The late Stan Lee, co-creator of most, if not most, of the Marvel Universe and the holder of his most recognizable author voice, felt that this interrelation, the feeling of being in the world, was the only one in the world. a shared universe, was a creative key, as well as an excellent sell more comics. You must believe on the whole to believe it. And the audience now feels capable of playing with a film without recognizable stars or famous lead character: nobody would have bet on The Guardians of the Galaxy on the basis of these factors, but the public does not it's not rushed. ]
It seems likely that some of the "original" Avengers, that is, those who put forward an MCU film released between 2007 and 2012, will retire in Endgame . Strangely, this could work in favor of the MCU, as the series is about to start touching one of the weaknesses of any ongoing film series, aging and wage inflation of the major players.
Stan Lee believed that the very essence of the superhero comic book was "The Illusion of Change": the story is really about how one comes back to the status quo. One of the more extreme versions of this saying is that the main character of a comic changes: Iron Man always talks about Iron Man, but Iron Man is no longer Tony Stark, for example. This could help Marvel more easily pursue the process of diversifying his film series, with a greater proportion of main characters portrayed by female and / or non-white actors.
So you can make a film Captain America starring, for example, Sophie Okonedo, because even though Steve Rogers is a white man, Captain America is an idea – or, more prosaically, a job. Someone else can brandish the shield, take the coat, be badigned the code name.
We have already seen some sort of variation on this subject. Although it seems that Carol Danvers is Captain Marvel's original comic book, she is only the newest of the heroes to bear this name. (Danvers herself is a creation of the sixties and has spent several decades under the name of Mrs. Marvel.) The film series has simply decided to start with the later version and to melt a woman.
Similarly, the entire distribution of Endgame presents more than one character, all male but some non-white, who were at one point Captain America in the comics . There is no reason why one or more of them should not be. There is an (excellent) recent period of Thor comic book where Jane Foster, the character of Natalie Portman of the first two films Thor brandishes the mystic hammer of Thor and becomes, for all purposes useful, Thor himself. If Portman is interested, there is no reason for her not to play the lead role in a full trilogy of Thor movies.
Marvel is unlikely to run out of options. There are possibilities of adaptation, for example, to Thor's comic periods where Thor is a horse from the extraterrestrial space. Or a frog. No, really, look. That's what superhero comics look like. Increased interrelation Theme and variation. The illusion of change.
Something to ponder while waiting for Endgame .
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