Duncan McLean
Abstract: The superhero movie is undoubtedly the dominant blockbuster movie form of the first two decades of the 21st century, with Marvel Studios leading the way over the last decade with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). A key factor that has enabled Marvel Studios to achieve and sustain a level of commercial and critical success that has largely eluded its competitors in the superhero film space is an approach to genre that involves blending the superhero form with a variety of other more established cinematic genres. This paper shall explore how this is achieved at both the level of individual films through the borrowing of iconographic and thematic conventional markers, and across the MCU as a whole through a heightened melodrama coming from the hybridizing of episodic and serial storytelling.
The superhero movie has undoubtedly been the dominant blockbuster form of the first two decades of the 21st century, accounting for twenty-seven of the top one hundred grossing films worldwide since 2000,[1] with this commercial dominance only escalating in recent years. While Fox has recently combined commercial and critical success with Deadpool (Miller 2016) and Logan (Mangold 2017), as has Warner Brothers with Wonder Woman (Jenkins 2017), for the last decade it has been Marvel Studios leading this boom in superhero moviemaking. Across twenty-one films, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has grossed a combined US$18.18 billion worldwide while also earning the genre’s first Best Picture Oscar nomination for Black Panther (Coogler 2018). But what has set them apart? How is it that Marvel Studios have managed to achieve a level of critical and commercial success that has largely eluded their primary competitors in the superhero film space, Warner Brothers and Fox? At a textual level, one of the features which has differentiated Marvel’s films from those of their competitors is an approach to genre which involves blending the superhero form with other more established cinematic genres. This generic blending can be seen to occur both within the MCU, at the level of the individual texts, and across the MCU as a whole. This paper shall examine how Marvel Studios has employed the conventional markers, both iconographic and thematic, of different film genres, combining them with the superhero film in order to create variety within their MCU product, allowing for multiple avenues of viewer engagement. It shall then examine the way that the MCU as a whole, through its hybridisation of episodic and serial storytelling, infuses the superhero movie genre with heightened character and relationship melodrama, and engages in more complex character and narrative arcs to heighten audience investment and raise emotional stakes in its genre narratives.
A Question of Genre
Before exploring Marvel Studios’ approach to genre, however, the broader issue of the generic categorisation of the superhero movie needs to be addressed. Is it appropriate to talk of the superhero movie as a film genre in the same way we do the western, the gangster film or the war film? While preferring to use the label ‘comic book movie,’ Liam Burke suggests that there is industrial recognition of a generic form evidenced by its presence in the ‘inter-textual relay,’ a term devised by Gregory Lukow and Steven Ricci to refer to the discourses that surround a film, (Comic Book Film 87). The willingness of filmmakers, distributors, publicists, reviewers and audiences to use ‘comic book movie’ as a label seemingly validates it as a generic category, though the question still remains what the characteristics and conventions of the texts are to which it refers.
In his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, Peter Coogan mounted his case for the superhero story to be considered a distinct literary genre, separate from science fiction. He argued that the superhero story was an identifiable form defined by its central character, the superhero, who is in turn defined by three elements: a prosocial and selfless mission to fight against evil, the presence of superhuman powers or abilities, and a codename or identity that is often iconically represented in the form of a costume (Coogan 30-33). Extrapolating his working definition from the introduction of Superman in Action Comics 1 (Siegel and Shuster 1938), Richard Reynolds is similarly focused on the superpowered qualities of the protagonist, while also specifying a contrast between the extraordinary hero and their ordinary, real world surroundings (12-16). For Reynolds, “far from being as ‘escapist’ as is claimed, most superhero comics are intensely grounded in the normal and everyday,” so as to use the perspective of this remarkable outsider to examine contemporary society (74).
However, as Rick Altman asserts, “Even when a genre already exists in another media, the film genre of the same name cannot simply be borrowed from non-film sources, it must be recreated” (35). As such, when it comes to the cinematic form more specifically, things have not been as clearly defined. Critics like Yvonne Tasker have preferred to understand the superhero film as a narrative form within the action-adventure genre. With their emphasis on spectacular set design, visual effects and action sequences that stage the extraordinary exploits of the superhero, these films, she suggests, “effectively couple the comic book universe – with its backstories, evolving characterisation and bold design – with conventions and styles that have evolved through the Hollywood action cinema over decades” (Tasker 179-180). While currently enjoying a period of ubiquity, superhero movies are not a recent phenomenon, and Tasker’s categorical approach has particular merit when considering those superhero films of the latter 20th century. As John Cawelti noted, “a formulaic pattern will be in existence for a considerable period of time before it is conceived of by its creators and audiences as a genre” (8). In the later decades of the 20th century, Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) were both commercially successful comic book adaptations, landmark blockbusters that not only gave rise to a number of sequels, but an increased number of other, albeit less critically and commercially successful superhero movies including Darkman (Raimi 1990), The Rocketeer (Johnston 1991) and Spawn (Dippe 1997). While we may now look back at these films and understand them in the context of the more recent superhero movies, it is more appropriate to think of them as precursors to the form we now recognise. At the time there was not yet an established formula, so these films were not yet generic. Until there existed a sufficient body of films recognisable as separate and distinct for audiences the superhero film could not be considered a genre in its own right (Roberts 50). However, a reasonable case can be made that such a body of films has presented itself in the first two decades of the 21st century, and that this corpus of texts not only demonstrates a consistent set of generic characteristics – conventions of character, narrative, iconography and style – but also an evolving and developing genre form.
For Steve Neale, genres are best understood as processes, which, while “dominated by repetition […] are also marked fundamentally by difference, variation, and change” (“Questions”56). Key to the historical development of a genre is the emergence of distinctive and focused cycles. Sparked by a successful prototype, a cycle is a collection of genre films linked by a dominant trend in their use of the genre’s conventions which becomes the basis of a formula that is replicated with variation across the industry (Grindon 44). While the later decades of the twentieth century saw a number of noteworthy prototypes and precursors to the contemporary superhero movie, it has been in the first two decades of the 21st century that the form has established itself. A cursory look at the films produced in that period reveal the emergence of three quite distinct cycles of superhero movies. From 2000 to 2007, the initial X-Men trilogy (Singer 2000, 2003; Ratner 2006) and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007) established a cycle of blockbuster superhero films with a focus on simple morality tales and serial allegories built around spectacle and special effects. These originary films were followed by the likes of Daredevil (Johnson 2003), Hulk (Lee 2003), The Fantastic Four (Story 2005) and its sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Story 2007), and Superman Returns (Singer 2006). The second cycle, from 2005 to approximately 2013, was prompted by the critical and commercial success of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (2005, 2008, 2012) and included films like V for Vendetta (McTeigue 2006), Watchmen (Snyder 2009), Kick-Ass (Vaughn 2010), Hancock (Berg 2008) and Man of Steel (Snyder 2013). This second cycle of superhero films were “darker” and often more violent, with a focus on exploring, in different ways, how these characters and narratives would function in a more “real world” context. The most recent cycle, which we are still in the midst of, started in 2008 and has been spurred on by the success of the MCU. Including all of the Marvel Studios films, plus films like X-Men: First Class (Vaughn 2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer 2014) and X:Men: Apocalypse (Singer 2016), Deadpool, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder 2016), Suicide Squad (Ayer 2016) and Justice League (Snyder 2017), this cycle is focused on more closely replicating the narrative pleasures of the comic book by expanding beyond singular narratives through larger, interconnected cinematic universes. Potential for a fourth cycle lies either in the success of R-rated superhero movies Deadpool and Logan, or in the push towards increasing diversity of representation in the likes of Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Aquaman (Wan 2018)and Captain Marvel (Boden and Fleck 2019).
Cawelti and Thomas Schatz propose similar models of how a pattern of genre development can be seen through such a progression of cycles. For Cawelti, it is a three-stage process of articulation and discovery, conscious self-awareness, and tired predictability (200). For Schatz, it is an experimental period, a classical period, a self-aware or self-reflexive period, and finally a period of parody or revisionism (37-38). Both Burke and Jeffrey Brown have successfully mapped these cycles of superhero movies – while simplifying the above proposed cycles by combining the first and second – against Cawelti and Schatz’s models to demonstrate generic progress, with Burke going further by proposing an additional model, the ‘bacterial growth model,’ which accounts not only for generic progression but for the increase in production numbers (Comic Book Film 107-115).
Brown does make the observation that the superhero movie’s progression through these stages is complicated by the audience and industry having a pre-existing understanding of the basic principles of the superhero narrative from its comic book history (7). This has resulted in anomalies such as the 1999 release of generic parody Mystery Men (Usher) before the arrival of the key films which helped to the formalize the genre, and the adaptation of Alan Moore’s revisionist graphic novel Watchmen early in that “classical” phase, which potentially contributed to the underperformance of both films at the box office.
The presence of these distinct cycles, and the fact that they can be mapped against accepted models of generic development, suggests that it is not unreasonable to think about the superhero film as an emerging film genre, using Tasker’s own description that a genre, in the most conventional sense of the term, refers to “a recognisable form of cinema that accrues depth and meaning through the repetition and variation of conventions” (20). This paper shall, therefore, proceed under the assumption that while the superhero or comic book movie might at this point in its history, as Scott Bukatman puts it, be “something of a provisional genre, still very much in a state of becoming” (118), it is nonetheless appropriate to talk about it in terms of being a genre in its own right.
Genre blending within the Marvel Cinematic Universe
When Marvel Entertainment made the decision in 2005 to transform their film division, Marvel Studios, from a licensor of products to an independent production house it represented a unique experiment in media convergence: an independent film company built on expertise in a different media industry, comics (Johnson 1). It was also a major independent film studio which primarily dealt in a single product: blockbuster films based on comic book superheroes. As such, the ongoing viability of Marvel Studios was highly dependent on the continued popularity of this product.
In a 2014 Executive Roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, Alan Horn, chairman of Disney Studios, whose company had by that stage bought Marvel Entertainment, was asked if Marvel Studios was worried about superhero overload. With a further twelve MCU films scheduled for release between then and the culmination of Phase 3 with Avengers: Endgame (Russo and Russo 2019), and studio president Kevin Feige indicating that Marvel possessed an internal MCU roadmap that extended to 2028 (Leonard), it was a pertinent question. Horn’s response confirmed what many critics and fans had already observed about Marvel’s approach, stating, “The term ‘superhero’ has become sort of all-inclusive. But, in fact, I think there are delineations. Captain America [The Winter Soldier] is a spy movie to us, in many respects. Thor is a Shakespearean drama in some respects” (McClintock and Masters). A significant part of Marvel’s strategy for avoiding superhero fatigue and audience burnout is generic variety.
This generic variety is, in the first instance, encouraged by the diverse characters and products upon which these films are based, with different characters inviting different generic treatments. Phase One of the MCU introduced audiences to four distinct heroes: Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) – an egomaniac billionaire who builds himself a mechanical super-suit; Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Edward Norton) – a scientist who, through a laboratory accident, is turned into a rage-filled monster; Thor (Chris Hemsworth) – a Norse god who is technically an alien; and Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) – a wartime patriot who volunteers to become a genetically engineered super-soldier to fight the Nazis. Rather than seeking a uniform, homogenised approach to these characters, Marvel Studios embraced and even encouraged this variety. From the very outset, the films of the MCU engage with the conventions of the film genres best suited to telling the stories of the respective characters.
In their book The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe, Andrew Livingstone, Martin Flanagan and Mike McKenney address this genre blending in the MCU by proposing the concept of the “genre fractal.” Just as a fractal is a miniaturised replica of something, repeated in a scaled down form, they suggest that the genre fractal sees the content of one genre reduced and sitting within the territory of another genre. They find this Russian doll-like pattern of genres a useful way of describing how, following Tasker’s lead, they see the superhero film as a narrative form that exists within the action-adventure genre, with other genres such as the war film, the fantasy film and the conspiracy thriller then being “sampled” within the individual MCU texts (Livingstone et al. 88). While Livingstone, Flanagan and McKenney’s concept of the “genre fractal” is an interesting framework, the notion of a miniaturised version of one genre sitting within another, naturally implies a hierarchy, a primary and secondary genre. However, the MCU evidences what would more appropriately be described as concurrent or overlapping genres. With its star-spangled patriotism, World War 2 iconography and brassy military march theme tune, Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston 2011) is as much a war film as it is a superhero movie. Even as Captain America, Steve Rogers is still a soldier who understands himself as part of an army and subject to a chain of command. Rather than a sidekick, he has a team, the Howling Commandos, which brings a men-on-a-mission element to the narrative. These are key structural elements of Captain America, not merely generic window dressing. Reviews of the film in both The Hollywood Reporter (Honeycutt) and Variety (Debruge) drew comparisons between Captain America and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) as alternative, fictionalised World War II narratives.
This simultaneous engagement of genres promotes alternative avenues for viewer engagement by engaging multiple regimes of generic verisimilitude, the genre specific systems of rules, norms and laws that provide the frameworks of plausibility, motivation, justification and belief which inform an audience’s expectations and hypotheses (Neale, “Questions”46-7). It also adds depth to the discussion for critics and cinephiles by providing access to established ideas and dialogues from other genres. This is reflected in the popular critical press who can be seen to engage the language and reference points of these other genres in their descriptions of the MCU films. With its mediaeval iconography and focus on sibling rivalry and succession tension in a mythical kingdom, Thor (Branagh 2011)was written about as a fantasy and Shakespearean drama (Lehmann). Reviewers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo and Russo 2014) noted the significant casting of Three Days of the Condor (Pollack 1975) star Robert Redford in describing the film as a 1970s-style paranoid conspiracy thriller (McCarthy, “Captain America”). Ant-Man (Reed 2015), with its methodical planning and execution of a high stakes burglary, was described as a heist movie akin to Ocean’s Eleven (Soderbergh 2001) (Chang), while also the latest in a tradition of family friendly science fiction films about shrinking people that included Innerspace (Dante 1987) and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (Johnston 1989) (McCarthy, “Ant-Man”). The decision to focus on a high school aged Peter Parker (Tom Holland) for Spider-Man: Homecoming (Watts 2017) saw critics using the teen movie, particularly those of John Hughes, as a key referent (Cavna).
While the examples discussed thus far are among the more obvious of genre blending within the MCU, this adoption of the conventions and forms of other genres can be seen occurring in more subtle ways in some of the franchise’s more seemingly straight-forward superhero films. When considering films with multiple generic allegiances, Thomas Leitch notes that some allegiances override others. Despite the potential for audiences to gravitate to different generic readings, the generic claim of the “stronger” genre will tend overcome those of the weaker genres and be recognised by the audience (Leitch 8-9). In this instance, the costumed hero with extraordinary abilities serves as such a strong generic identifier for the superhero movie that the presence of this character tends to overshadow the other generic elements that exist within a film. However, if we put the figure of the superhero to one side, the narratives of these films invite alternate generic readings. Iron Man (Favreau 2008) is the story of the brash CEO of an American weapons manufacturer who is kidnapped in Afghanistan by a terrorist cell that are using his company’s technology. After escaping, he returns to the US determined to discover how his technology has fallen into the wrong hands only to find that it is his second-in-command who is overseeing these secret deals. If we ignore the fact that Tony Stark uses a high-tech suit to become a superhero, Iron Man can be read as a corporate conspiracy film. As that series progresses, this alternate generic reading persists, with the antagonists pulling the strings in each subsequent film being business rivals of Stark’s: Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2 (Favreau 2010) and Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3 (Black 2013). Similarly, The Incredible Hulk (Leterrier 2008) is the story of a scientist who is on the run from the military having stolen dangerous technology he unknowingly helped to develop, intent on finding a way to neutralise it before the military can weaponise it. If we ignore the fact that Bruce Banner is, himself, that volatile scientific discovery, The Incredible Hulk can be understood as a man-on-the-run thriller akin to The Fugitive (Davis 1993).
This notion of films blending multiple genres is, of course, hardly ground-breaking. Janet Staiger argued against the idea of the purity thesis, stating that in generic terms “Hollywood films have never been pure” (6) but rather “were perceived by the producers and audiences to belong potentially to several categories” (15). While Staiger was talking about the genre films of the studio era, her point is still entirely relevant, particularly when considering the superhero film which, as discussed earlier, is generically complicated – Chris Murray described the superhero as “a blend of influences from the start” (12), while for Chris Gavaler they are “the ultimate amalgams, all-swallowing uber-characters that consume other genres like black holes” (3). At a fundamental level these films can be classified simultaneously as superhero films, action-adventure films, science fiction films and either crime films or disaster movies depending on the nature of the threat faced by the hero. What makes Marvel Studios’ strategy noteworthy is the generic diversity evident within the one franchise. The MCU embraces textual diversity while maintaining narrative connectedness. Rather than the studio having lighter and darker franchises which are kept entirely separate, the comedic and family oriented Ant-Man and forboding and paranoid Captain America: The Winter Soldier exist in the same cinematic space despite their tonal disparity.
For a major studio, this sort of genre blending represents a commercially safe strategy for keeping their genre product fresh. As Steve Neale first noted, the continued popularity of genre films is reliant on a balance between familiarity and novelty (Genre 48). Each new genre film must possess enough familiar elements to be recognisable as the thing which audiences like, while possessing sufficient novel elements for those audiences to not feel that they have seen this film before. While Braudy suggests the very notion of “originality” is fraught as “all art must exist in some relation to the forms of the past, whether in contrast or continuation” (107), Marvel’s genre blending approach gives each film a sense of novelty without the risk that is inherent in unproven experimentation. In this case the novel elements of the film are actually familiar elements from a different generic context which engage a different regime of generic verisimilitude to provide the audience with a different framework of “plausibility, motivation, justification and belief” (Neale, ‘Questions’46) with which to navigate the narrative.
Genre blending across the Marvel Cinematic Universe
While generic blending is evident at the level of individual films, arguably Marvel’s most interesting generic blending, and that which has most impacted the wider cinematic superhero genre, occurs across the MCU as a whole.
In 2008, before the release of Iron Man, Marvel Chairman and CEO David Maisel said, “We are emphasising the films individually but also how they all come from the Marvel universe and sometimes characters pop over from one movie to another… We want them to feel like you’re watching a story that’s evolving over time in addition to separate films” (Fernandez 12). From the very outset, Marvel Studios were committed to the idea that their films, though tonally and generically quite disparate, would exist in the same narrative space. While not necessarily functioning as direct sequels, being in the same cinematic universe allows for clear pathways and points of crossover between films and enables characters from one story to have knowledge of the characters and events of another.
The first evidence of this approach occurs in the post-credit sequence of Iron Man in which Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), director of S.H.I.E.L.D., addresses Tony Stark: “You think you’re the only superhero in the world? Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.” A post-credit sequence in The Incredible Hulk sees Stark telling General Ross (William Hurt) about a “team” that is being put together. In Iron Man 2,Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) notices a prototype of Captain America’s shield in Stark’s workshop, and later in a post-credit sequence arrives at the New Mexican desert site where Thor’s hammer has been discovered. Scenes such as these are representative of the approach in Phase One of the MCU, in which the links between films come in the form of isolated scenes and moments that function more like Easter eggs for knowledgeable fans than furthering the narrative at hand. Derek Johnson describes these moments as offering an “excisable seriality” to a collection of otherwise self-contained films (7). Prior to The Avengers (Whedon 2012), the films of Phase One are connected without being interwoven. While there is a sense of limited serial progression, one does not need to have seen Iron Man to understand Thor. While the MCU’s approach to interconnectedness would evolve in Phase Two, it is notable that when the franchise reached its second wave of origin stories – Ant-Man, Doctor Strange (Derrickson 2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther and Captain Marvel –it would largely revert to this model.
After the success of the crossover film The Avengers,Phase Two of the MCU saw these films becoming more genuinely interwoven, with more substantial narrative threads running across films. Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World (Taylor 2013) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier act as sequels to The Avengers, continuing that narrative in addition to those of their respective series. By Phase Two, these films were more clearly being presented as tonally and generically distinct episodes of a larger, ongoing narrative.
When Marvel representatives have discussed the interwoven nature of the MCU, they have spoken in terms of its similarity to the world of comic books: “We’re mimicking what comic book publishers have been doing for years” (Feige qtd. in Alter). The interwoven nature of the MCU is an important tool in drawing the cinematic superhero genre closer to its comic book predecessor in terms of the specific narrative pleasure it offers. In his article ‘Why I Hate Superhero Movies,’ Scott Bukatman complained, “The superhero film genre in the first decade of the twenty-first century yielded a glut of nearly identical films featuring dumbed-down versions of characters that were still appearing, to better effect, in the comics” (119). That the cinematic representations of these characters lacked the nuance of their comic book equivalents is hardly surprising. Superman and Batman had expansive mythologies developed over 40 and 50 years’ worth of comic books respectively before being given the blockbuster cinematic treatment. Trying to distil that level of established mythology into a two-hour film, particularly one that needs to appeal to the uninitiated, is near impossible. Brown notes that one of the key differences between the superhero comic book and film is that while the comic books are typically directed towards a niche audience who is well versed in the genre, the large production budgets necessitate the superhero film targets a wider, non-specialist audience (3). However, the integrated narratives of the MCU are taking steps towards being able to build the depth and nuance of the cinematic genre.
While the comic book influence is obvious, Marvel’s films are also being released into a screen entertainment market characterized by the prevalence of complex, long-form television series like Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss 2011-19), Breaking Bad (Gilligan 2008-2013) and Orange is the New Black (Kohan 2013-19). In addition to mimicking the narrative form of comic books, as pieces of audio-visual entertainment the expansive, interwoven narratives of the MCU operate in a similar fashion to the long-form narratives being produced by networks and content providers like HBO, AMC and Netflix. In his discussion of Marvel Studios’ transmedia storytelling, Burke points to Kevin Feige’s role at Marvel, with its combination of storytelling oversight and management responsibilities, as having parallels not only to the comic book editors, but with the television showrunner (“Bigger Universe”40).
Both Jeffrey Sconce in his writing on “cumulative narrative,” a term he borrowed from Horace Newcomb, and Jason Mittell in his writing on “complex television” agree that at the most basic level, the dominant form of quality television today is defined by its hybridising of episodic and serial narrative structures. Sconce saw cumulative narrative as combining episodic genre narratives with serial relationship melodrama (97), while Mittell suggests that the more sophisticated shows foreground plot developments in their serial narratives, allowing relationship and character drama to emerge from it, rather than the other way around (32). This series-serial hybridity offers the ability for casual viewers to enjoy individual episodes and still experience satisfying narrative resolution, while committed viewership is rewarded with deeper, cumulative insight into the characters.
In seeking to replicate the interwoven nature of the comic book narratives, the MCU evidences a similar series-serial hybridity. MCU films are simultaneously individual texts with complete and satisfying narratives and episodes of longer, overarching narratives that describe the formulation of the Avengers Initiative, the demise of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its aftermath, and the gathering of the Infinity Stones in the lead-up to Avengers: Infinity War (Russo and Russo 2018). While the films can be enjoyed on a singular basis, knowledge of these overarching narratives gives a contextual significance to the immediate narratives of the individual films.
The MCU is, of course, the centerpiece of a transmedia storytelling project which includes, among other things, serialized television programmes, starting with ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Tancharoen, Whedon and Whedon 2013-present) and Agent Carter (Markus and McFeely 2015-2016), and then a series of interconnected Netflix original series – Daredevil (Goddard 2015-2018), Jessica Jones (Rosenberg 2015-2019), Luke Cage (Coker 2016-2018), Iron Fist (Buck 2017-2018), and The Defenders (Petrie and Ramirez 2017). This idea of value adding for the dedicated fans is evident in the relationship between the films, the driving platform of the transmedia franchise, and the television narratives. Consider the franchise journey of Agent Phil Coulson. Having appeared in a supporting capacity in four of the first six MCU films, Coulson is killed in The Avengers. While the character was then brought back to life to headline six seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., he remains, for all intents and purposes, dead in the films, his only reappearance in the MCU being in Captain Marvel, enabled by that film being set earlier than the previous films. There is a clear hierarchy in which the cinematic narratives are positioned above the television narratives. While narrative information can flow down from the films, with plots in the television shows impacted by the events of the films, it cannot flow up. Where a transmedia fan who also engages with the Marvel television shows can know that Coulson is alive, a fan who chooses only to engage with the films can continue to operate on the understanding that Coulson is dead. Much as the films of the MCU can still be enjoyed in isolation rather than requiring knowledge of the wider MCU to decipher them, so the cinematic universe can be engaged with in isolation without requiring knowledge of Marvel’s transmedia offerings. But in both instances the more engaged fan is rewarded with greater narrative insight.
At a generic level, the seriality of the MCU infuses the superhero genre with a greater degree of character and relationship melodrama. With arcs extending over multiple films, characters become more layered. Across eight films so far (nine if you include his cameo in The Incredible Hulk), audiences have watched Tony Stark process feelings of guilt and culpability while his efforts to redeem himself are undone by his ego, invariably creating further catastrophes. Similarly, across six films Steve Rogers has gone through a process of adapting to a morally ambiguous new world in which he struggles with who he can trust and what it means to do the right thing when there are no moral absolutes. The evolutionary paths characters are on are informed by the narratives of the individual films, which in turn exploit who that character is at that particular point in their journey.
In addition to more complex and layered characters, greater seriality allows for more characters. Complex genre television programs like The Wire (Simon 2002-2008), The Sopranos (Chase 1999-2007) and Deadwood (Milch 2004-2006) stood apart from their cinematic equivalents in part because they engaged with larger networks of complex characters rather than being restricted to the narrative arc of a single protagonist (Tait 52). While the individual films of the MCU are more tied to single protagonists than these television series, across its first 21 films the MCU already has 78 characters who have appeared in more than one film. Of these 78 characters, 53 have crossed between the individual series within the MCU. For example, Howard Stark (John Slattery/Dominic Cooper) has appeared in the Iron Man, Captain America and Ant-Man series, as well as the Agent Carter television series. This larger network of continuing characters provides audiences with a greater number of points of identification which, in turn, allows for more multifaceted narratives.
The influence of this serialised melodrama on the superhero film can be seen in the importance of relationship drama in the MCU. A large network of recurring characters appearing in different combinations in different films means that there are numerous individual relationships and dynamics which possess their own developing arcs across the franchise.For example, Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow has four key relationships which evolve across different films: with Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon 2015), Captain America: Civil War (Russo and Russo 2016), and Avengers: Infinity War; with Steve Rogers in the three Avengers films and the second and third Captain America films; with Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) in the first two Avengers films and Civil War; and with Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) in the three Avengers films. These relationships all evolve in different ways as her character’s story intersects with theirs at different points in their respective arcs, and each relationship is used to illuminate different aspects of the respective characters. The raised nuance of character and relationship that this greater degree of serial melodrama brings translates into heightened audience investment in the characters which can then be used to raise the emotional stakes in their episodic superhero genre narratives. This can be seen most clearly in Captain America: Civil War.
While Avengers: Infinity War was an unprecedented blockbuster event which brought the entire MCU together, Civil War remains the most sophisticated realisation thus far of the narrative potential of the MCU concept. The film brings together twelve established MCU characters, but where The Avengers brought together established characters for a standalone story, the narrative of Civil War is drawn from their respective series. A United Nations edict in response to the catastrophic events of The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron creates an ideological division between these characters about the appropriateness of the Avengers’ unilateral power. Steve Rogers and Tony Stark lead the two factions, with both making valid arguments and neither clearly in the right or the wrong. Pre-existing investment in both characters and their relationship challenges the viewer who doesn’t wish to see either defeated. Similar established relationship dynamics are engaged with the other characters who find themselves on opposing sides. It is the established emotional investment viewers have in these characters that provides the emotional stakes this narrative requires to be effective, and accounts in part for the wildly different reception of this film and the similarly themed Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which also concerned an ideological conflict between two famous heroes, but used new iterations of these characters with whom audiences had minimal connection.
The popular and critical success of the MCU has prompted a distinct cycle in the cinematic superhero genre, as evidenced by the rush from other studios to institute their own cinematic universes: Warner Brothers with their DC Extended Universe, 20th Century Fox with their expanding X-Men universe, and Sony Pictures in development on a Valiant Comics cinematic universe. These other cinematic universes have thus far enjoyed at best middling commercial and critical reactions, prompting Toby Emmerich to announce Warner Brother’s intention to revert to a focus on stand-alone films rather than a shared universe (McClintock). It is notable, though, that the three recent non-Marvel Studios superhero films which have enjoyed the most enthusiastic critical responses, Tim Miller’s Deadpool, James Mangold’s Logan, and Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, are the three which, thus far, seem to have embraced this notion of actively blending the superhero form with more established film genres – Deadpool with the R-rated comedy, Logan with the contemporary western, and Wonder Woman with the war movie and the mythological fantasy. It is through engaging the language and thematic concerns of other genres that the MCU has not only sought to guard itself against audience superhero fatigue but to broaden the scope of the superhero genre, engaging in more sophisticated storytelling than the cinematic genre’s prototypes, and drawing it closer to its comic book predecessor.
Notes
[1] All box office figures taken from www.boxofficemojo.com and correct as of 28 March, 2019.
Works Cited
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Biographical notes:
Duncan McLean received his doctoral degree in Film Studies from Macquarie University in 2013. He is a lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School where he teaches Screen Studies and Film History across undergraduate and postgraduate courses. His primary research currently focuses on the function and effective integration of film theory and history in the practical education of screen storytellers. He also has an interest in genre and evolving concepts of national cinema.