The Marvel Cinematic Universe, The MCU, is home to the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy (and the upcoming Eternals) and trademark cameos by Marvel Comic Co-founder Stan Lee. The MCU is produced by Marvel Studios, now under the ownership of Disney. It is an interconnected universe of films, 23 at this time, that began in 2008 with Marvel’s Iron Man. An interconnected narrative of this magnitude was a first in filmmaking.
Of the twenty highest-grossing films of all time, as of the making of this video, the MCU claims 6 and has grossed over $22.5 billion over the course of 23 films.
But why is this significant? We’ve seen interconnected universes in films before with Star Wars and Harry Potter…but never anything like this.
Though many will point to Star Wars, Harry Potter, Jack Ryan and other film franchises, what the MCU did for 11 years and 23 films no other film franchise has ever done before. Not only so many films over such a short period of time but also so many different characters and storylines that have their source material in the Marvel Comics book, what Marvel head Kevin Feige and his team at Marvel were able to do in bringing 11 different storylines together into one cohesive narrative should never be overlooked.
But why does all this matter? Why do people obsess over the Marvel Cinematic Universe? While I understand that many in the film industry would say that Marvel is not cinema, no one can take away the contributions that the MCU has made to the modern cinema over the last decade.
For so long the idea of comic book movies were either huge big-budget blow-up films like the original Superman film or dark noir films like The Dark Knight. While we do see plenty of the stereotypical superhero origin stories and big-budget blockbuster filmmaking in the MCU, especially in the earlier films, as the MCU progressed, there was a shift to genre films.
It all started with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I remember walking into that film opening night thinking that we would get an old fashioned shoot’em up, Captain America saves the day type picture. Instead, we got a very nuanced and intentional political thriller. After The Winter Soldier, the trend would continue with Guardians of the Galaxy as a space opera, Ant-Man being heist films and the magic that happened with Black Panther! The MCU shifted the paradigm of what a superhero movie could be and the rest of the industry is better for it. These are fragments in a larger, busy tapestry, one that often doesn’t work in individual ingredients so much as the way they speak to a larger whole. A true appreciation for Marvel movies involves serious investment in the way in which they’ve been engineered to tell one continuous story. No studio has ever pulled off the same storytelling achievement on that scale.
Marvel does a brilliant job of introducing and uniting its heroes in the first team-up movie. Marvel did a far better job of introducing and uniting its heroes in the first team-up movie. Because Marvel had already introduced their characters, fans had already made connections with them and knew who they were so it was more fun to watch the avengers grow and be able to team up. Watching heroes you’ve already learned about team up and fight together is way more satisfying than watching a bunch of people just thrown together to make a dramatic movie (cough cough…Justice League).
Since we have introduced DC in this article, let’s talk about one very important part of Marvel movies that is better than DC films. Marvel movies are better than DC movies is through comedy. Marvel has certain heroes that produce incredible and memorable one-liners that leave the audience in giggles, while DC movies all have a dark undertone. Certain examples of these Marvel one-liners are in Thor when Thor screams “Another” after downing a cup of coffee, or in Ant-Man when Scott Lang says he is done breaking into places and stealing stuff when Hank Pym then has him break into a place and steal something. DC movies have no such one-liners, or they at least aren’t as good because then I’d be able to call them up from memory as I did with these Marvel one-liners. Marvel has more comedy overall and a lighter mood, with movies littered with hidden comedy, like Thor: Ragnarok, and Avengers: Endgame, while DC movies all have serious tones, with characters trying to get revenge or just stay alive.
Overall, I’ll still go watch any superhero movies because I’m a huge nerd, but I look forward to Marvel movies much more than I look forward to any other superhero movies. While Scorsese may not find much to appreciate about the Marvel storytelling mould, the most appealing aspects of Marvel movies involve their capacity to go beyond the call of duty as it pertains to the soul-sucking blockbuster cliché: Iron Man works not because Tony Stark has a lot of fancy tech, but because the best movies in the series pair those visuals with whip-smart dialogue and gadget-based slapstick that owes more to “Modern Times” than other CGI spectacles. The joy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” stems from dopey chemistry between its space-faring adventurers more than cosmic visuals accompanying them. And that first hour of “Avengers: Endgame” is probably one of the most costly studies of societal grief in Hollywood history.
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