Since Iron Man started the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008, the MCU has continued to grow in scope—and profitability. According to Statista, as of November 2020, the MCU film franchise has earned a total worldwide box office revenue of 22.56 billion U.S. dollars with 23 films. And with the MCU continuing to branch out into new territory, such as the well-received Disney+ streaming series WandaVision (and half a dozen others now in production), the franchise will only grow in value.
Industry observers attribute the MCU’s success to its shared universe, which allows characters or events from one film to cross over into the plots of other movies and TV shows. This allows Marvel to introduce and get audiences emotionally invested in new superheroes and plotlines before developing them further in new films. Audiences follow this new content, eagerly consuming the new material since it all relates to a greater overall narrative.
However, while Marvel has built a complex and lucrative shared universe over the last decade, other companies are having a harder time competing with their own. Warner Bros, in particular, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into its DC Extended Universe, but has not enjoyed the critical or commercial success of Marvel’s films, earning just over $5.6 billion U.S. dollars with nine films.
What accounts for this difference in audience response? According to Jeff Gomez, CEO of transmedia production company Starlight Runner Entertainment, “A primary driver for the success of shared universes is master conductor, a producer who understands how to unfold a massive narrative through smaller, self-contained stories. While this conductor offers some creative freedom to the filmmakers producing the individual stories, the conductor enforces the universe’s narrative integrity and ultimately directs how the tales move toward periodic climactic events that tie them all together.”
According to Gomez, who has worked with Disney, 20th Century Fox, and other studios, many companies still opt for a more individualized “auteur” approach, resulting in shared universes with disjointed overall narratives, various inconsistencies in characterization and the “rules” of the story world, and a lack of overall narrative momentum. These can yield colossal hits, like Warner Bros. The Dark Knight or 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool, but also in box office failures such as WB’s Birds of Prey and Fox’s Dark Phoenix.
Let’s take a closer look at how the MCU built its grand narrative over the last decade—and how studios can benefit from these factors when creating, revising or sustaining a multi-movie or transmedia entertainment franchise.
How Marvel Comics Pulled Ahead of DC Comics in the 1960s
In terms of intellectual property, both Marvel and DC boast some of the most well-known characters and stories in entertainment history. DC owns both Superman, the original modern superhero, and Batman, whose long list of media adaptations makes him a very marketable character. Yet somehow, Marvel is still able to take its most obscure superheroes—such as the Guardians of the Galaxy—and turn them into billion-dollar film series.
The key, Gomez states, lies not in how valuable these properties are individually, but how well they’re used in tandem with each other.
This was actually established decades earlier in the comic book industry long before the MCU was a reality. During the 1950s and early ‘60s, DC Comics dominated the comic book market and consistently outsold Marvel (then called “Atlas”). Notably, DC was using a type of shared universe at this point by having Superman, Batman, and other characters guest star in one another’s comics. However, continuity was loose and events in certain plotlines were not always referenced or acknowledged in other books.
In 1961, however, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby launched The Fantastic Four and began laying the groundwork for a more coherent shared universe where major events, from the wedding of the series’ main heroes to the coming of the planet-destroying demigod Galactus, were referenced and affected the plotlines of other Marvel comic book series. As Lee was the main writer for most the titles, maintaining continuity was more feasible.
“But what was especially interesting in Stan Lee’s case, was that he wanted to do this,” says Gomez. “By creating a tighter continuity between the titles, as well as taking a deeper and more human approach to characterization, Lee appealed to a slightly more mature sensibility in his readers. He created a more realistic shared universe, one that started to unfold like a giant narrative tapestry. As his audience aged, they were noticing these subtleties in the comics and stayed with them longer.”
Readers responded positively, and according to Marvel’s house ad for retailers in the 1960s, Marvel sales consistently rose, allowing their books to sell 18,700,000 copies in 1961 and 27,709,000 copies by 1964 after heroes like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Daredevil made their debuts. By 1967, Marvel sales overtook DC sales. Eventually, DC copied Marvel’s formula for their own books but couldn’t keep up with Marvel’s success.
Marvel’s winning formula lay in the fact that each creative team worked on an individual title, yet guided their characters’ lives in a direction determined by an editorial team with a clear vision for what major events would shape the greater universe. Those events might be the Secret Wars, where multiple characters were abducted to fight on an alien planet, or the Infinity Gauntlet Saga, where the villain Thanos became a god-like being and erased half the universe’s population.
Regardless, the fallout from the big events often affected how creators shaped their smaller stories, as they showed how the heroes dealt with the changes these catastrophes made in their lives. Spider-Man gained an alien costume during his Secret Wars adventures that influenced his day-to-day crimefighting and later created his enemy Venom. Superheroes on Earth had to deal with earthquakes and disasters Thanos’ actions were causing from across the universe.
“This created the sense of shared reality that kept comic book readers invested in the books,” says Gomez. “Many fans would buy multiple titles just so they could see how the big events were affecting the smaller stories, which boosted the sales of weaker series. They’d speculate with other fans on how these events would affect the comic books moving forward, making consuming more Marvel content a communal experience—and a top priority.
Kevin Feige Emulated Marvel Visionaries Stan Lee and Jim Shooter
A Marvel Comics fan from youth, Kevin Feige intrinsically understood Stan Lee’s approach (and those of successors like Jim Shooter, who leveled up massive superhero cross-over events in the 1980s), and would have assuredly wanted to apply these techniques to the X-Men films during his tenure as a young producer at 20th Century Fox. But likely, studio politics and an emphasis on directorial power prevented him from doing so.
“Instead of a shared transmedia universe, what we got with Fox’s X-Men franchise was more akin to Japanese media mix,” observes Gomez. “The characterizations, storylines, the rules of the universe, even cast members shifted wildly from one movie to the next, one TV series to the next. At first fans attempted to make sense of it all, weaving theories that somehow placed the stories into some kind of continuum. But by the time we got to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, fans just threw up their hands. At Starlight Runner, we call this a fractured shared universe. The producers don’t care about the consistency of the narratives, so fans stop caring as well. As a result, you have these wide fluctuations in film quality and box office.”
Liberated from the Fox studio culture, Feige would quickly become the equivalent of a comic book editor-in-chief to guide the Marvel films, first independently and then with the Walt Disney Company after their acquisition of Marvel Entertainment.
Under Feige’s guidance, the MCU was able to tell self-contained stories that would entertain casual viewers while also using them as creative building blocks for an interconnected universe that engaged serous fans.
Thus, Phase One of the MCU introduced many of the primary superheroes in Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America: The First Avenger, and Thor before having them all team up in the crossover film The Avengers. With Phase Two, fully under the Disney banner, Feige continued developing the story arcs of these characters while also introducing other heroes in Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man who would become key players in the massive Phase Three crossover event Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, two of the most successful global blockbusters of all time.
Compare this with Warner Bros. Pictures approach to the DC Comics universe. Initially intent on parsing out the likes of Batman and Superman to top film directors for their unique takes on the characters, WB altered course when they recognized the value of the MCU’s singular vision. But the studio struggled with centralizing creative power.
“Initially, Zack Snyder was handed the reigns over the films, but his approach was heavily derived from late-1980s graphic novels like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, these somber Teutonic deconstructions of the characters that signified the end of the Bronze Age of comics and started the grim and gritty trend,” says Gomez. “There’s a hardcore fan base for those kinds of films, and there was an aesthetic precedent because of the studio’s success with the Dark Knight films, but the darkness of those themes and tones are not really for kids or older adults. They don’t serve well as the basis for a four-quadrant global franchise that also generates hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing and merchandising.”
Behind the scenes, Warner Bros. Pictures was also running through a carousel of executives overseeing the DCEU. As opposed to Disney, which had reorganized its franchise management to grant individuals extraordinary creative influence, WB maintained a complex bureaucracy that divided power over the DC films between executives who answered to different superiors. In 2017, after the box office failure of Justice League, DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson said, “Our intention, certainly, moving forward is using the continuity to help make sure nothing is diverging in a way that doesn’t make sense, but there’s no insistence upon an overall storyline or interconnectivity in that universe. Moving forward, you’ll see the DC movie universe being a universe, but one that comes from the heart of the filmmaker who’s creating them.”
Nelson resigned the following year, and franchise execs Geoff Johns, Jon Berg, and Greg Silverman have all since departed. Walter Hamada, current president of DC Films, has stated that the DC live action films will now be part of a cinematic multiverse—arguably more complex than a single shared universe—where characters will exist in separate cinematic worlds but also have the option of crossing over into other movie universes. This means that Robert Pattinson will star as his own version of Batman in the upcoming The Batman while two other Batmen, portrayed by Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton, will cross over into a different cinematic universe for 2022’s The Flash.
Such a strategy shows that Warner Bros. is still interested in competing with Disney-Marvel by establishing multiple cinematic universes, each with its own continuity. However, without a master conductor organizing the direction of all the disparate story worlds, the studio runs the risk of confusing audiences and further reducing their engagement with the characters.
The Shared Universe Secret Sauce: Systemic Narrative Design (and Charm)
Back on the Disney side, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was not without its challenges. Foundational agreements and corporate structure held Kevin Feige at a distance when it came to the network television and streaming. Disconnected from the movies, often suffering from limited budgets and slow pacing, shows like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC-TV), Iron Fist (Netflix) and Runaways (Hulu) could not gain a foothold on their platforms and faltered.
“The shows were undercut by political conflicts within Marvel, but more so by essential incongruities,” says Gomez. “Nearly all of them strayed much further from the source material than the movies did. The Netflix heroes avoided using their powers or wearing costumes, as if the producers were ashamed of the genre. Characters like Iron Fist or the Inhumans were nearly unrecognizable from the comics, and to boot, they weren’t particularly likeable.”
Small wonder when Feige reached the apex of Phase Three, he leveraged his success to take creative control over all of Marvel to realize his ultimate fanboy dream: to wipe the streaming and network slate clean and produce a complete and entirely cohesive transmedia Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With the emphasis Warner Bros. now places on its directors’ individual visions, one might suspect that storytellers building a shared universe may need to abandon their own individuality to follow the producer’s vision. However, following a Feige’s vision for the MCU did not mean sacrificing all of a visionary filmmaker’s creativity. In fact, even when a film did not succeed with all audiences due to creative choices, it can still hold great value for what if offers to the larger narrative.
MCU’s Thor films are a good example of this. Thor: The Dark World is considered one of the weaker entries in the MCU franchise. Critics have cited a lack of chemistry between Thor and his romantic lead Jane Foster as well as a forgettable villain as reasons for why the film did not appeal to many audiences.
However, Gomez points out that Thor: The Dark World introduced a good deal of lore into the franchise, including an array of “Easter eggs,” elements that seemed like background content but would become important in later films, such as the Reality Stone, one of the key Infinity Stones necessary to the greater MCU narrative. The Avengers had to literally travel back in time to the events of this movie in Avengers: Endgame to retrieve the stone, strengthening the film’s importance. As a result, fans were incentivized to watch and re-watch this film on streaming services as it has become a necessary entry in the overall story.
“There will never be a reason to go back and watch Birds of Prey, Suicide Squad or even Wonder Woman 1984, because they were subpar entries and they were not designed to fit into a greater narrative. They instantly become catalog content,” says Gomez. “Thor 2 may have sucked, but fans flocked back to it searching for clues about the Infinity Stones. Because of WandaVision on Disney+, fans are at it again, rushing back to the weakest film of the Avengers series, Age of Ultron, parsing every scene for clues—and finding them, because the filmmakers had the temerity and foresight to put them there.”
The third Thor film, Thor: Ragnarök, also shows how shared universe films can take creative risks without sacrificing their place in the grand narrative. Directed by Taika Waititi, the film moved Thor away from his usual mythological roots by having him fight on an alien planet against the Incredible Hulk. The film also allowed Thor actor Chris Hemsworth to showcase his comedic talents, greatly shifting the way the Thunder God was portrayed onscreen.
But Thor: Ragnarök still continued Thor’s story arc of loss and pain. Audiences saw Thor lose his father Odin as well as his entire home world of Asgard. These events were pivotal in establishing Thor’s later depressed state in Avengers: Endgame, making Thor: Ragnarök an important creative building block in the shared universe, and showing how individual and shared visions can work together successfully.
“Sure, writers, directors, actors, and all kinds of unforeseen circumstances can change things along the way, but that’s the jazz, the spontaneity of creating epic narrative. Because Feige’s team has a strong sense of the grand design, they can take advantage of brilliant ideas and shift course, and they can circumnavigate any sudden whirlpools,” says Gomez.
“A shared universe is not a series of linear narratives, it is a narrative system,” he states. “Imagine a web of narrative threads connecting each of these to several others. Imagine them moving and rotating and evolving over the course of space and time, like a nebula in space. Now imagine a number of these elements converging into a giant flashpoint—a major event, the culmination of years of storylines. That takes orchestration. That takes four-dimensional thinking. But you get Avengers out of it. You get Avengers: Endgame. Billions of dollars in global box office, licensing, and merchandising. That’s systematic shared universe design in a nutshell.”
The DC Animated Universe
Ironically, while DC’s live-action movies have struggled to establish a coherent shared universe, the best possible approach had been long established at Warner Bros. Animation. During the early 1990s, while Marvel was still trying to establish its film and TV properties, WB actually succeeded in creating a wildly popular shared universe through its animation properties by using similar strategies to the MCU.
Dubbed the DC Animated Universe, DCAU, or “Timmverse” by fans, this shared universe was helmed by producer and character designer Bruce Timm who co-created and produced many of the animated shows that made up the shared universe. These included Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited.
Like the MCU, characters in the DCAU could venture into other show settings (as when Superman visited Gotham City to work with Batman) or reference plot elements from separate series (as when a Justice League plotline showed the government building a defense against superheroes in response to the actions of a mind-controlled Superman in the final episode of Superman: The Animated Series). Much like the MCU, the DCAU allowed for an ever-expanding and diverse cast of characters that delighted fans. Even today, Warner Bros’ new DC Universe Animated Original Movies follow a similar pattern that allows multiple films to share the same fictional space.
Most importantly, the fact that most of the DCAU series were co-created by Bruce Timm allowed the showrunner’s influence and narrative design sensibilities to establish a coherent continuity throughout the individual series. Together with writers like Paul Dini who wrote many episodes for multiple series, the creators built an interconnected story world with plotlines fans could follow from one series to another. Although the logistics of creating animated series are different from producing multi-million-dollar live action films, the DCAU’s success ultimately lay in creators following a shared vision.
The Mandalorian, Cobra Kai & How to Produce Successful Shared Universes
Can the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe truly be ported to other entertainment franchises? Gomez believes this is in the process of happening right now with Disney’s own Star Wars. Under Kathleen Kennedy, the post-George Lucas films were indeed driven by an auteur approach. Directors such as J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson were given a relatively free hand at shaping the canon of the Skywalker saga one film at a time.
“Kennedy’s mandate was to move fast, and her background was in placing strong visionary directors in the driver’s seat,” says Gomez. “In terms of narrative design, you can get away with that under Lucas himself, because he had a powerful sense of the essence of his creation and a kind of head canon for where it needed to go, even if he hadn’t written it all out ahead of time. This clearly wasn’t the case for the first several Disney films, and so the franchise started to falter. The seams were showing, the story was being made up as they went along, and this was quite noticeable to the fans.”
Interestingly, as opposed to Warner Bros., Disney did eventually turn to its animation wing to successfully tap the talent and design sensibilities of supervising director and executive producer Dave Filoni. Just as with Bruce Timm and the DC Animated Universe, Filoni’s had a deep understanding of Star Wars lore and an understanding of Lucas’ deeper philosophy and genre influences. But unlike Timm, Filoni was recruited to work in live-action by director Jon Favreau. Together they worked on The Mandalorian for Disney+, yielding a series that fans saw as truer to the franchise than any of the recent features.
It is said that Kevin Feige himself has been consulting for Lucasfilm in an effort to convert all of Star Wars into a cohesive transmedia universe.
“With this immense canvas, we’re going to see a reiteration of the fractal systemic design approach that Feige applied to the MCU,” says Gomez. “Clusters of streaming series set in a similar time period will introduce a number of key characters and escalating events. These will lead to a major theatrical or streaming feature that unites these characters in a climactic galaxy-shaking game-changing event. The offshoot characters and influence of this event will plant narrative seeds that will grow into their own in other series, but also in comic books, novels, video games, theme park attractions, and other content.
But the technique doesn’t require Feige’s presence, nor does it need billion-dollar slate budgets. Gomez often cites his 10 Commandments of 21st Century Franchise Production as the roadmap to follow. A combination of intrinsic understanding of the property and its lore, centralizing to one or a few visionaries, and respect for fan participation, the list was written over a decade ago, but still holds up. In fact, many of these rules are being observed by a surprising franchise upstart—Cobra Kai, currently airing on Netflix.
A low-budget martial arts comedy-drama created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Scholossberg, Cobra Kai holds the first four Karate Kid feature films as canon, and explores the impact of the events of those films on the lives of their various characters, their families, and their students. But what could have been a goofy nostalgia one-off has become a worldwide streaming phenomenon.
“Cobra Kai pulls off the central magic trick of shared universes by shifting out of the singular hero’s journey model of storytelling, and into Collective Journey modality,” says Gomez, referring to a more novelistic multi-perspective kind of narrative he has been observing in contemporary pop culture and social media. “The series suggests that maybe Daniel LaRusso was not purely the hero of those films, and that Johnny Lawrence was not all bad. In Cobra Kai, we have the contemporary sense that everyone has valid reasons for behaving the way they do, even as it maintains the drama of the conflicts we can have with one another. The audience loves all of the characters, but it’s fun to watch them fight!”
Per Gomez’s Commandments, the producers understand and respect the underlying philosophy of the franchise originated by creator Robert Mark Kamen, who consults on the show. A strong effort has been made to bring back actors from the original films and take them seriously as characters. Fans are convinced that there is an overall schematic to the series’ multiple seasons, leading to major turning points each year. And the visionaries have even hinted at the fact that the Miyagi-verse (as the shared universe is called) will be due for expansion into multiple series or features in years to come.
The results are remarkable: Cobra Kai has ranked as the #1 streaming series in 28 countries, its third season drawing over 41 million Netflix member households within its first month. Perhaps even more valuable (and unlike most Netflix content), the series has drawn an ardent fan base.
“The term badass has reentered the global lexicon! It’s a real meme-generator,” jokes Gomez. “But what the series and its shared universe—because everyone is going back to watch those old Karate Kid movies—has truly accomplished is that it has become resonant with the times. The Miyagi-verse tells us that there are no absolutes, and that we can transcend deeply ingrained differences. There are viable third solutions to our polarized problems. The franchise is great fun, but it’s also a valid and even artful creative expression.”
To be sure, shared universes are not the only way film franchises can succeed. Individual stand-alone movies and film series still have their place in the entertainment industry and continue to draw their own types of audiences.
But the massive profits generated by a properly executed shared transmedia universe cannot be ignored either. And with more production companies interested in taking the rich source material of comic book and dormant intellectual property narratives and adapting them to the screen, a shift in moviemaking style is becoming more essential.
Film studios and entertainment companies that want to build a shared universe need to invest in a producer capable of constructing an epic narrative told through individual stories. This producer needs to not only be familiar with the source material but also sensitive to fan sensibilities and desires. Most important, that producer needs to be able to work with other storytellers, granting them the freedom to develop the fictional landscape while moving their narratives in directions that build the master plot.
It’s a complex task, and one that even seasoned production companies are struggling to master. Yet done correctly, a shared universe creates a brand loyalty beyond what many companies can hope to achieve. Like the comic book worlds before them, shared cinematic universes that successfully mesh individual visions to serve a greater whole offer their audiences story worlds they will engage in for generations.
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This is the third installment in a transmedia storytelling series being written in tandem with Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment, one of the industry’s foremost transmedia producers. Starlight Runner consults with multiple companies from Disney to Sony to Coca-Cola to help establish their story worlds and produces transmedia content including graphic novels, videos, books, animated series, and web sites. Learn how your company can use them to produce your own full transmedia story world through narrative design, content production, licensing, merchandising, and fan cultivation.
The Transmedia Storytelling Series:
#1: How Disney+ Uses Star Wars to Dominate Digital Entertainment
#2: Ultraman: Translating a Multi-Billion Dollar Japanese Superhero Franchise for American Media
#3: Disney Marvel vs Warner Bros. DC: How Do Shared Universes Succeed or Fail?
