Ok so the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a bit of an anomaly in Hollywood at the moment.
Marvel Studios have somehow managed to craft 34 projects that all interconnect with each
other and due to telling this ongoing story they've managed to craft a massive franchise
that delivers success after success.
Once the MCU started to take off a lot of other studios tried to get in on it too but
where Feige succeeded, they all failed.
This has happened every single time with us constantly seeing studios announce that they
have a shared universe on the way that ultimately ends up never getting off the ground.
But why is it so difficult to do.
Even DC who have a similar structure and character roster as Marvel do have found it difficult
to catch up to them and there's way more dead universes right now than there are live ones.
Well throughout this video we're gonna be taking a deep dive on the strategies and successes
that Marvel used and also going over why so many other studios don't understand the key
fundamentals.
This video was inspired by the Warner Brothers Discovery Investor call last week in which
David Zaslav talked about how DC are putting a ten year plan in place that will mimic Marvel
studios.
It's something that the studio has tried to do before and I'm actually really surprised
that they're going this route.
Both The Batman and Joker were released to both critical and financial success and with
them being standalone I thought they'd try and focus on something like that. It seems
like the studio is not learning from the lessons of the past and though I don't wanna just
s**t all over the company this video I think it is interesting to study why Feige succeeded
where so many have failed.
I think there's gonna be a lot of opinions over this so if you agree with us then please
hit the thumbs up button and the down if you don't. There's also the comments too if you
wanna leave your thoughts and with that out the way, lets' get into it.
Now in order to talk about this we first have to go back to what things were like in 2008.
Everytime I've talked about this on a video I've always had some fifteen year old either
say I'm talking s**t or completely rewrite history to make things up.
But I was there.
I was there 1000 years ago.
Now Iron Man believe it or not was a c list character back in 2008 that no one really
expected to do that well. Sure they thought the movie would come out and be ok but absolutely
no one expected a multi billion franchise to be launched off the shoulders of Tony Stark.
I think that this is the first major thing that a lot of studios forget when launching
their own universes and it's ultimately why they also panic and fail. During the 90s Marvel
sold off their most popular characters and because of this they lost the movie rights
for the X-men, Spider-man, Fantastic Four, Hulk and more.
They were pretty much left with the characters that no one wanted and because of this there
was absolutely no real pressure on any of their stuff performing well. If Iron Man did
more than ok it would be seen as a big success because there was no belief by the mainstream
in the film.
This is the complete opposite to how things are with DC. Because Batman, Superman and
Wonder Woman are all household names, it instantly becomes a problem if they underperform even
slightly. We saw it in the case of Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman where having these
characters not completely break the bank made the execs panic and we all know how Josstice
league turned out.
Marvel slowly started to put the pieces in place to build to the Avengers and they helped
out on Universal's Incredible Hulk, dropped Iron Man 2, Thor and then Captain America.
Because they hadn't invented the shared movie universe yet there was no pressure on them
to connect stuff so when stuff wasn't a massive success it didn't matter all that much. If
you look at the box offices for these films they're all pretty modest in comparison to
what would come down the line and this lack of expectations meant that Feige and Co didn't
s**t the bed and divert from their overall plan.
Nowadays studios announce their entire ten year plan before they've even made the first
movie so they put the pressure on themselves that if one fails then their entire universe
is f**ked. Marvel didn't do this from the outset and though we had teases of the Avengers
coming they could've easily have just kept giving us solo movies for as long as they
wanted but we didn't expect a team-up to be coming by a certain date.
Movies involving characters like Batman also come with big investors behind them so if
one even performs in the mid range then it's gonna make the studio panic because he's such
a big name. Though people say that Marvel had to work with the c team, this was actually
an advantage to them because there wasn't the mindset that these guys should be pulling
in billions every movie. For example, say DC launched a new universe with the Teen Titans,
do you think that people are gonna view it as a failure if it doesn't bring in billions
in ticket sales. No, probably not, because there's no expectation for these characters
to completely kill it.
Now on the opposite side of this, the idea of panic also massively plays into the overall
slate as well and Studios will change direction in a second if things don't immediately go
to plan.
If we look at the rotten tomatoes scores for films like Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk
and Thor, they're all good but not absolutely amazing.
These are three films that released back to back and they're ones that often rank lower
down the list when people are picking out their favourite movies from the franchise.
No studio is willing to sit through back to back movies like this that score in the 60s
to 70s on Rotten Tomatoes because they immediately expect everyone to love their franchise, buy
all the toys and take it to the next level.
Building a fanbase takes time and we've seen in the case of the Snyder Verse how people
slowly started to come around to it rather than everyone being onboard with it from day
one.
Every studio is so fixated on getting to be at the point where they're at where Kevin
Feige is now rather than where he was.
They don't understand the building blocks and slow build that it took to get there because
Marvel is such a staple now that everyone expects to be able to copy them and instantly
gain the results that they have.
Feige took several risks early on with characters that weren't expected to do well and he waited
it out whilst they got mediocre reviews and money because he understood the foundation
that these films would build. Every release had it's own fan base that gravitated towards
it and though they necessarily didn't connect with everyone, there was enough in each individual
movie to pull people in. Thus when Avengers launched, this fan base that was spread across
multiple projects all came together because they all had a vested interest in what was
going on.
So I think in the end that studios need to do the following if they want to succeed.
Firstly, don't announce a massive universe because it puts pressure on you to have everything
together and it leaves no room for mistakes from the off. I think that Matt Reeve's Batman
was clever because they distanced themselves from the main DCEU and because of this there
was no expectation on it to build things up. Hearing now that we're getting a sequel and
some spin off shows is more of a nice surprise rather than it being something that we had
to get.
Point two, don't expect everything to be a hit and if it's not that doesn't mean that
the universe won't work in the long run.
Iron Man 2, Incredible Hulk, Thor and even Captain America all did ok but what they did
was get those characters to become familiar so that we cared about them. Marvel took their
time, didn't put any pressure on themselves and because of public perception these characters
also weren't expected to do wild numbers.
This should be the same in the case of all that comes as part of DC's ten year plan.
10 years is a long time and you need to build towards that rather than expecting all the
movies to be hits from day one. There will be stumbles, falls and even some that don't
necessarily work but give them room to breathe, let people come to appreciate them and don't
change direction just because they don't completely hit a home run.
Thats why it annoys me when studios say 'we will just copy Kevin Feige.' The man is the
blue print but he's shown time and time again that it's difficult to replicate his strategy
because no one has the patience or foresight to pull off what he did.
They all want instant results, won't wait it out and there in lies their downfall.
As much as I want this new 10 year DC plan to do well, the cynical side of me thinks
about how we've heard this all before and so far I think that DC have rolled out this
type of strategy three times in total.
That takes me to my final point.
Stick to the plan.
In the call Zaslav said that if they think a movie is crap then they wont release it.
However this doesn't work with shared movie universes if they're to build towards something.
For example, if you take Thor the Dark world out of the MCU then a lof ot eh other movies
won't make sense. They will waste countless millions creating movies to shelve them if
they go with that ideology. They'll have to force the character development from said
movie into other ones and it just won't work. Not even marvel get every single film in their
shared universe spot on and unfortunately you will have to put out crap but in the long
run it will all connect and make sense. I really dont think that a shared universe and
this idea of cancelling things works which is why I'd rather they go with standalone
movies if that's their mindstate.
I'm begging you guys to just take it easy, let things underperform and have confidence
that you guys are worth sifting through the mud with so that we can get to the good stuff
down the line.
Now obviously I'd love to hear all your guys thoughts on this video and whether you agree
or not.
Comment below and let me know.
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If you want something else to watch then make sure you check out our breakdown of perfect
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With that out the way thank you for sitting through the video, I’ve been Paul and I’ll
see you next time. Take care, Peace