﻿While ‘Infinity War’ cleans up at the box office and breaks a zillion records,
Hollywood execs are bashing their heads against a wall trying to replicate the phenomenon.
This world never belonged to us. It belonged to them.
But the funny thing is, Marvel didn’t do anything new.
They just built on traditions that go all the way back to ancient times.
I’m Moose,
and today, I want to show you how Marvel followed, and perfected,
The Blueprint for a Shared Universe
The concept of a shared fictional universe begins, well… the same place fiction did.
Mythology.
Fables and folklore were the popular entertainment of their era,
and as far back as Sumeria and Ancient Greece,
authors were casting existing gods and heroes into blockbuster epics.
I mean, if you think The Avengers are stacked,
Just look at the Argonauts,
you’ve got Theseus, Orpheus, and Hercules all on the same boat.
I’d like to see Thanos try and stop them from getting the Golden Fleece.
The entire time I knew him. He only even had one goal.
Now this was before the concepts of ‘ownership,’ ‘copyright,’ and ‘licensing deals’ reared their ugly heads.
But even in the age of commerce,
the crossover was king, and it started with
The Printed Page
During the 19th century,
authors like Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas began to use recurring characters throughout their works,
creating a shared universe within their own books.
One early example of an American spun-off side character is Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain introduced him in 1876’s ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’
and Huck’s popularity led him to get his own book ten years later.
Today, he's probably more well known that the book that spawned him,
and also led him to getting top billing in the '90s 'Tom and Huck' movie starring J.T.T. and Brad Renfro?
Heartthrobs!
Hey Becky.
Hey!
Now, a writer reusing his creations in a sequel is one thing,
but what about different authors using each other's characters?
That’s probably older than you think, too.
H.P. Lovecraft was an early innovator,
he allowed his friends to incorporate elements of his Cthulhu mythos into their own work, for free.
Cthulhu! Dude! Over here!
It helped keep his legacy alive longer than the problematic man who created it,
but it wasn’t exactly profitable.
If you really want to know how the MCU became possible,
we need to look at dime novels, penny dreadfuls and pulp magazines.
When the editors of cheap, disposable serial fiction landed on a popular character like Sexton Blake or Nick Carter,
no relation to the Backstreet Boy,
they would flood the market with stories.
And when the demand became too much for a single author,
the magazines took over and hired whoever could bang them out the cheapest.
This led to crossovers between characters in mags like ‘Wild West Weekly,’
but more importantly, it changed the way we thought about ownership.
The tradition was that a creation belonged to the author,
Conan the Barbarian belonged to Robert E. Howard, and Arthur Conan Doyle owned Sherlock Holmes.
but now, corporations had full control of the characters within their pages,
and their own fictional universes to milk for all they were worth.
All they needed was a some spandex and a splash of color,
which brings us to
Comics
Just like their prose predecessors,
the new corporate model was pretty unfair to individual comics creators.
But for all the ugly aspects of the business,
the colorful, commercialized characters also paved the way for crossovers.
In 1940, Marvel was the first company to have two of their heroes face off in battle,
when the Human Torch battled Namor through the skies of New York City.
Just a few months later, DC one-upped their competition by introducing the Justice Society of America,
the first comic book superteam.
At first, it was just a frame story where the heroes sat around and told each other solo stories,
but they were soon fighting crime together,
alongside the World’s Finest pairing of Batman and Superman.
Always have to be the hero, don't you?
Right back at you.
During the Silver Age, DC revitalized their team concept with the Justice League,
but Marvel deserves the credit for creating a living, breathing fictional universe.
Johnny Storm of the world famous Fantastic Four!
What on earth are you doing in Queens?
In Marvel’s New York,
Spider-Man tries to pay the bills by auditioning for the Fantastic Four,
the Thing’s date get ruined by soldiers who mistake him for the Hulk,
while Thor and the X-Men bump elbows at Reed and Sue’s wedding.
Marvel was the first to give you the sense that the stories across all of their books were happening in the same world.
DC quickly followed suit,
and by the ‘70s and ‘80s,
the massive, intracompany crossover event had become a summer comics staple.
It took Hollywood way too long to understand the appeal of a consistent interlinked universe,
especially when you consider they were already a success in the ‘40s.
Let’s talk about
The First Cinematic Universe
It's alive, it's alive, I tell you!
Universal Studios’ legendary monster movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s were the equivalent of today’s blockbuster franchises.
Characters like Dracula and the Wolf Man were household names,
and they were merchandised just as much as any superhero.
Merchandizing, merchandizing, merchandizing! Where the real money from the movie is made!
But the real breakout character was Frankenstein’s monster.
He’s like Universal’s Tony Stark,
appearing in eight movies throughout the series and earning today’s equivalent of $100,000,000 in profit.
That's how dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.
He was the lynchpin for their cinematic universe in the same way that RDJ was for Marvel,
although audiences didn’t quite have the same connection,
since the monster was played by three different actors.
Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit! He can rot in hell for all I care!
You think it takes talent to play Frankenstein? It's all makeup and grunting!
After rounding out their roster with the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
Universal had themselves a solid bench of memorable monsters,
the same way Marvel established their heroes in solo movies before throwing them into the Avengers blender.
Unlike Marvel, Universal never really had a plan,
once ticket sales stagnated, they decided to throw two of their characters together and see what happened,
bringing us ‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’ in 1943.
It was enough of a hit that Universal added Count Dracula to the mix for the next two movies, ‘House of Frankenstein’ and ‘House of Dracula,’
and soon they began leaning into the crossover aspect,
and just like Marvel, they were experts at building the hype.
To a new world of gods and monsters!
Now, unlike the Dark Universe, which fizzled out with a Tom Cruise whimper,
their original monster series stayed around long enough to devolve into cheesy comedies.
As far as I know, Abbott and Costello have never met any Avengers,
so I don’t think Marvel has to worry about that.
Especially since they’re taking lessons from the most recent renaissance in popular entertainment,
and creating
TV for Theaters.
The Golden Age of Television that began in the late ‘90s taught Hollywood that they could respect their audience.
TV had been traditionally composed of series with standalone, one-off stories,
But complex shows like ‘The Wire’ and ‘The Sopranos’ proved that viewers had the attention span to devour lengthy, serialized narratives,
without forgetting all the details and characters.
Yo, Omar coming, man! Oh shit!
The TV boom revitalized the sagging medium,
and provided for some pretty incredible crossovers of its own.
Richard Belzer has played the character of Detective John Munch in ten shows on five different networks,
creating a tangled web of relationships that results in ‘Star Trek’ technically occupying the same universe as ‘Supernatural.’
You had one hell of a run, Sgt. Munch.
Did I?
John Munch shows up on 'X-Files,' so now everything that's on 'The X-Files' is canon.
'X-Files' crossed over with 'The Simpsons,' Mulder and Scully were on 'The Simpsons,'
so now 'The X-Files' is in the same universe as 'Homicide: Life on the Street.'
And then, everything 'The Simpsons' crossed over with is also connected into one big beautiful shared universe.
Today’s movie studios have taken the lessons of prestige TV and blew them up to a billion dollar scale.
Just like showrunners and print editors before them, the producers call the shots.
They control the characters,
they create the ten-year plans,
and they hire the best talent available to make sure their IP stays appealing.
It’s not rocket science, but it is business, and so far it’s booming.
A shared universe might not have the surprise, or sheer artistry of a standalone passion project,
but that doesn’t take away from the quality of the final product,
or the decades of development that led us to this point.
‘Infinity War’ is just a Greek tragedy with a GEICO tie-in,
and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is just the simply evolution in epic crossovers.
Marvel didn’t break the mold with the concept of a shared universe,
they just broke the bank.