Something occurred to me today about the current formula of Marvel Studio’s films, and it actually came from a strange place. I was reading a story about how yet another YA movie adaptation was taking the now tired road of splitting one of its interpretations of a novel into multiple films. The last book in the Divergent series, Allegiant, is going to be split in two much like Harry Potter, The Twilight Saga, and the Hunger Games. Obviously there is an argument for and against this, but whether you agree that the last book in a series deserves this treatment (while the others do not?) or whether you think it’s unnecessary, we can all pretty much agree it accomplishes one thing: it gets movie studios the chance to milk another few hundred million out of the fans.
In other words, it does what studios have been trying to do for a hundred years now; it puts butts in the seats.
While thinking about this I couldn’t help but have a slew of stupid memes run through my head about Hydra, which lead me to thinking about the latest Captain America movie and its tie in to the Agents of Shield series. Maybe it was the character treatment itself, of the Captain America superhero, but suddenly it dawned on me what Marvel is actually doing. The fact that we are getting two or three of these films a year along with a television tie-in, all sharing continuity, is something quite different than studios just cranking out sequels and reboots every few years. It’s actually much like an idea they started using at the dawn of cinema.
Serials may have started back as far as 1911 and continued on into the 1950’s. They were sometimes westerns, and sometime superhero tales, that ran in episodic format. Each week, theater goers would have to return in order to catch the next installment of an ongoing story. Audiences of the time didn’t have television sets, and this was a way to see their heroes in live action or animation instead of listening to them on the radio. It was also a way to see news headlines during the war. Even Captain America had a very bad interpretation of its own in this form.
This is very similar, even though it’s not on a weekly basis, to Marvel’s current model. Because they are not just sequels, but a continuation of a much larger story, Cap and Thor and Ironman’s movies are getting us back into the theaters to find out what happens next. By doing this, Marvel Studios is at this point at least guaranteeing themselves a return on every film they crank out; good or bad. It might be an ancient formula, but it’s brilliant.
What’s extremely satisfying about their efforts? Well, in order for their audience to keep up on the story and the resulting social conversation about it, we’ll go see whatever crap they put out. The bonus for us, so far, is that these films are smartly made. They are genuinely well written, well-acted and with very high production value on the effects. It’s very neat knowing at this point, what I believe is the ninth installment so far, didn’t have to be one of the best comic based films of all time, but it was.
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