What is the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Two things happened around the same time recently. Marvel displayed a greater willingness to make fun of itself than ever before, with the robot K.E.V.I.N., in the brilliant She-Hulk first-season finale, which felt kind of like a flex: we're successful enough to mock our own storytelling formulas. And meanwhile, the new owners of Warner Brothers Discovery announced they were hunting for a Kevin of their own (who might or might not be robotic.) There's never been anything in Hollywood quite like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has been just ridonkulously profitable — so you can see why the owners of DC Entertainment want their own version.
Full disclosure: I'm currently writing a comic for Marvel, New Mutants, and have done a fair amount of work for Disney in general.
A lot of other entertainment companies have already tried, and mostly failed, to create their own "cinematic universes," including stuff like the Hasbro Cinematic Universe, and the Universal Monsters, and so on. For a while there, properties that had nothing to do with superheroes were still getting shunted into shared universes. DC first tried to create a shared universe around their 2011 Green Lantern film, and then tried again with the DCEU, starting with 2013's Man of Steel — but some of their most successful films of the past few years (e.g. Joker and The Batman) do not take place in the DCEU, unless the multiverse gets extremely multi. So now DC is ramping up to try again: call it Phase Three, I guess.
So at this point, it's worth asking: what is the Marvel Cinematic Universe? (Other than a license to print money, that is.)
Media coverage of the MCU tends to focus on the idea that it's all about clues, easter eggs, and post-credits sequences, which draw links between all these different properties. This is in part because a lot of entertainment journalists and bloggers spend most of their time on the Internet, where a very vocal subset of fans loves to obsess about the fact that there was, for example, a mysterious-looking gauntlet in a vault on Asgard. Plus, that kind of stuff is fun and easy to write about, because it lends itself to explainers and deep dives into the complexities of the comics backstory. In general, a lot of the story of the past fifteen years in entertainment has been about people taking vocal fans a bit too seriously, leading to money being poured into projects that six thousand people in Hall H cheered for, but which ordinary moviegoers were largely unaware of.
But — and I am far from being the first to say this — focusing on the "it's all connected" aspects of the MCU is basically like obsessing about the tiny sprig of parsley on the side of the plate, instead of the actual meal. Most easter eggs and hints, by their very nature, are designed to be ignorable, and a decent film is one where you can follow the plot without having read 300 issues of Lee and Kirby. (And I know from being in the audience at many MCU films that most people get up to pee without seeing the mid-credits and post-credits scenes.)
So I honestly don't believe that the main point of the MCU is to be a sprawling tapestry, in which everything matters and every story is connected to every other story. Or at least, that the tiny bits of connective tissue and continuity are that important to the success of the MCU as a whole.
Another thing happened on She-Hulk that really drove this point home: the Sokovia accords, which required superheroes to register with the United Nations, were repealed. These new rules for superheroing were billed as a huge big deal back in Captain America: Civil War, but they were revoked off-camera. With no fanfare. We found out this had happened in a throwaway line of dialogue that felt as if it was tossed in to satisfy the five fans who remembered this plot point from 2015. This drove home quite how much the continuity is there to support the stories, rather than the other way around — which is honestly how it should be.
So if the MCU isn't a grand tapestry in which every thread is connected to every other thread and it's all vitally important, what is it?
I'd argue that the MCU is a brand, first and foremost. And a collection of characters that people really love.
The brand thing is important, because it's how Marvel got audiences to go see films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man, which are two properties that — to put it mildly — would not have seemed like mainstream entertainment, coming from any other company. The power of the Marvel brand is what separates Ant-Man from Shazam: both terrific, wonderfully entertaining films. But Ant-Man made $154 million more than Shazam, largely based on the level of trust and appreciation, the Marvel brand has managed to inspire.
If you think of the MCU primarily as a brand rather than as a universe, then all of those Easter eggs and cameos and shout outs serve to remind you — not that everything is connected, but more that everything is part of the same entity that you know and trust. Ironically, those formulas that She-Hulk was (pretty gently) poking fun at are a big part of why people are willing to give something new from the MCU a chance. You might not have heard of Peter Quill or Scott Lang, but you know at least somewhat what you're going to get out of one of these movies.
Meanwhile, people always say "characters matter," and it's one of those anodyne things that starts to sound like background noise after a while. But characters actually do matter, and even though I'm always here for explosions and mid-air rocket fights, I tend to get bored unless I care about these people and what happens to them. So the reason why The Avengers made all the money ten years ago is because they had liked Iron Man, Captain America and Thor in their own movies, and wanted to see them hanging out together. (Plus Loki!) Nobody went to see that movie because they were obsessed with the Tesseract, or because they wanted to see if some other easter egg paid off.
A while ago, some guy live tweeted showing the original Star Wars to his kid for the first time ever, and the kid became fixated on the stolen Death Star plans — as if the Death Star plans were the protagonist of the film, and all the human and droid characters were just there to move them from place to place. Which is... not a totally invalid reading of the movie, to be fair. But that's how I sometimes feel when I hear people talk about the success of Marvel's big crossover films being due to audiences being invested in this or that widget, or the resolution of a minor plot point from a movie three years ago.
As I said in another newsletter recently, the current vogue for multiverses in superhero movies is rendering the "cinematic universe" pretty irrelevant, because now nothing matters. Did Tony Stark die in Avengers: Endgame? Just go grab one of the infinite number of other Tony Starks from some other universe. But in any case, my gut feeling is that Marvel was lucky as well as careful, and the window to copy Marvel's success closed a long time ago. A lot has changed in the movie business since 2008, even before covid, and building a brand that people trust the way they do Marvel requires a degree of patience that might be much harder to manage now. (I also feel like the best DC shared universe already existed, and it was called the Arrowverse.)
In any case, once you start thinking of the MCU as more of a brand than a shared continuity, there's no reason why the next MCU needs to emphasize that everybody lives in the same world. Why not have Robert Pattinson's Batman and Henry Cavill's Superman exist in separate realities? They can still be part of the same brand. The art of building a brand is more about setting audience expectations and giving them identifiable characters — rather than sending them scurrying to Wikipedia to find out what the latest confusing end-credits tag meant.
Music I Love Right Now
Posthumous albums can be a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes an artist left some sketchy recordings and some outtakes laying around, and record companies decide to release them after the fact as a final attempt to cash in on their legacy. So I was pleasantly surprised by Things Happen That Way by the late great Dr. John, which came out recently. It's a solid album, with a heavy focus on country music, including a guest spot by Willie Nelson. Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John, was clearly facing down death and dealing with health issues as he recorded this album, and it sort of reminds me of the last couple of Warren Zevon albums: an artist offering a valediction but also giving the grim reaper one last middle finger. There's sort of a meditative feeling to it. Since the album came out, I've read interviews with producer Shane Theriot, who is apparently upset at changes that Rebennack's daughter and Rounder Records made to the album after he handed it in. But I still think it sounds terrific, and it's made me want to go back and listen to Dr. John's back catalog all over again.
My Stuff
Here's just a reminder that I wrote a young adult trilogy, and you can get the first two books right now: Victories Greater Than Death and Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak. It's a gonzo ridiculous space opera, full of all of the silliest ideas I could come up with. A group of teenagers leaves Earth and goes on a huge adventure in space, led by Tina, who's the secret clone of an alien superhero named Captain Thaoh Argentian. The third book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, comes out April 11, and you can pre-order it now. I can safely promise that it's the most bonkers of the three, with the weirdest ideas. I talked to two linguists about alien languages! If you want me to be able to keep nattering to you about random crap on here, then I'd be super grateful if you could pre-order Promises.
Also! I am writing some issues of the New Mutants comic, as I mentioned above. And my debut issue comes out on Wednesday. New Mutants 31 features Escapade and Morgan, the trans mutant characters I helped to create in Marvel's Pride issue back in June. And their pet flying turtle, Hibbert! The art by Alberto Alberquerque et al. (see below) is just utterly gorgeous and wondrous. The deadline to pre-order this comic book passed ages ago, but your local comic book store would still be delighted to put a copy aside for you if you ask them. And if you're in San Francisco, I'll be signing copies at Comix Experience on Divisadero St. on Thursday from 4:20 to 6 PM. Come hang out with me at the best comic book store in the universe!
