What Rules of the Game Built the Marvel Universe, the Most Successful Movie Product in History?

It isn't just the world-ending spectacle and the comic-book fans.

Only someone who knows nothing about Marvel would be surprised by the presale records Avengers: Endgame has set.

The U.S. online ticketing site Fandango says the film needed just six hours to beat the single-day presale record set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens. AMC's servers went down on the first day of presales, hit by ten times their normal traffic. Even so, its presales in that single day ran more than 50% ahead of The Force Awakens. In China, its presale box office had passed 500 million yuan by April 21. Before the film had even opened, it already ranked among the top 180 in Chinese box-office history — and that number would keep climbing.

The record for the highest global box office of all time still belongs to Avatar, from 2010, but most people believe Avengers: Endgame will break that $2.788 billion mark in the end. If it doesn't, no matter. The past decade has already shown that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to which Avengers: Endgame belongs, is the most successful kind of movie product of the 21st century.

Counting from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in March 2019, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has released 21 films that have taken $18.5 billion worldwide. Adjusted for inflation, the North American total for those 21 films has passed old franchises like Star Wars and the James Bond films — making it, in ten years flat, the most profitable movie product there is.

The earliest media record that can be verified shows the idea of a cinematic universe was in circulation by 2006 at the latest. Marvel's proposal: shoot a run of standalone hero films first, build some recognition among people who weren't Marvel fans, then shoot an Avengers film that brought those heroes together. A 2007 New York Times story soon showed that although Marvel had announced only Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk at that point, more than ten films were already on its project list.

Almost nobody realized then that the Marvel Cinematic Universe would change the direction of the Hollywood film industry. In 2007 the Spider-Man trilogy wrapped up, the Harry Potter series reached its sixth film, Pirates of the Caribbean put out another sequel, and Transformers made its debut. Even The New York Times took the Marvel Cinematic Universe for one more mega-blockbuster franchise like the rest.

Four or five years ago, the power of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still read mostly as a gift of IP. That abbreviation, from "intellectual property," describes roughly this: create a figure like Mickey Mouse, win it a following, then develop it into films, television, theme parks, toys and merchandise.

Only now, with Avengers: Endgame about to arrive, are people realizing that the blockbusters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe don't come entirely from the mega-blockbuster franchise, and don't come from IP either. As a peculiar movie product that nobody has yet managed to copy, the Marvel Cinematic Universe differs from what came before in at least the following ways.

First, it has one complete, coherent story. That story is not simply, as described above, a matter of using several films to introduce each superhero and then gathering them into the Avengers. Starting with Thor in 2011, a thread about the Infinity Stones began to tie all the films together, and it arrived in Avengers: Infinity War as the story of how the villain Thanos collects all six stones and uses them to wipe out half the population of the universe.

Avengers: Endgame is the finale of that story — how the superheroes turn things around from a hopeless position. In this sense the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe is a television series that has run on the big screen for ten years, pulling audiences back again and again to buy a ticket and catch up.

No earlier mega-blockbuster franchise managed that. In the James Bond films, Bond saves the world over and over. In Transformers, humans fall out with the Cybertronians. But within each series, the individual films are linked only by chronology and by their recurring characters, not by plot. Harry Potter and the Bourne films did have a through-line like Marvel's, but both were bounded by the size of the novels behind them and lost the room to stretch further.

Second, the Marvel Cinematic Universe controls quality tightly, turning out films that resemble one another but stay above a certain line. The pattern has grown clearer since Ant-Man in 2014, to the point that in both Thor: Ragnarok and the rebooted Spider-Man the hero is taunted with nearly the same line: if you're nothing without the suit, you shouldn't have it.

Audiences can barely remember who directed which Marvel film now. Taika Waititi of Thor: Ragnarok, and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck of Captain Marvel, do not seem to have registered much with viewers. Even Ryan Coogler, who made his big push with Black Panther, can hardly be said to have built a name of his own out of it. What they get is a world away from Michael Bay of Transformers, or Sam Mendes, who made his reputation on a James Bond film.

Behind this assembly-line filmmaking is Marvel taking the producer-centered system to its limit. Since Thor, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had one man at the wheel and no other: Kevin Feige, now president of Marvel Studios. He sets the rough plot and the style for every film, then finds a director to suit. The visual effects in Doctor Strange that imitate Inception, for instance, came out of Feige's direction.

Third, the Marvel Cinematic Universe leans hard on the persona of each individual hero. The best comparison is Marvel's old rival DC. In 2016, after Man of Steel, DC put out Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, hoping two superhero stars would win an audience over fast. But it had laid no groundwork for either character, and a film that had stressed drama and conflict from the development stage drew mostly complaints about its plot.

Marvel, by contrast, puts the characters first. Outside factors played a part: in 2008 its most popular heroes — Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk — were not in Marvel's own hands, so it had to tell audiences who Iron Man and Thor were. But the reverse also holds. Establish a superhero with real charm and you have established an idol for a new era, one that draws fans in without pause.

Because the Marvel Cinematic Universe differs from the traditional mega-blockbuster franchise in all these ways, as a commercial product it is now something else entirely — and only a mechanism unlike anything before it could keep a cinematic universe running.

For many years Hollywood ran on greenlight committees. A producer would typically find a script, develop it into a project, and then have it reviewed and passed by a greenlight committee of studio executives. That happened more than once: from development through the final script, the committee stepped in at several stages. Under this system the last word usually belonged to the executives, not to the producer developing the project.

Disney has a similar mechanism. But alongside the Disney CEO and the two heads of its film division, Feige himself carries enormous weight on Marvel's films. With power enough in hand, he can plan for the long term across every series.

From the outside, Feige's power looks wide. On the creative side he works with directors such as the Russo brothers and James Gunn. On the production side he has Louis D'Esposito and Victoria Alonso as deputies. For each film they find the cast and the director once the script is done. In this process, "while Feige does have to report to Horn and Disney, it's clear that the scope of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its creative decisions, remain within his personal control."

Feige did not hold all the power from the start. The early films carry other producers' names. And before 2015 Marvel had an internal committee of six, Feige among them, that guided all the films together. Then, after a power struggle, Feige won the right to report straight to Disney film chief Alan Horn, and the committee was left with nothing.

Since then, nearly every Marvel Cinematic Universe film has carried Feige alone as producer. The few exceptions include Ant-Man and the Wasp and Spider-Man, the latter mainly because it required working with Sony, which holds the rights — hence the credit for Amy Pascal, former head of Sony Pictures' film division.

Set against the mega-blockbuster franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe lives much longer. Twenty-one films in, it can still deliver a box-office peak like Avengers: Endgame. The traditional mega-blockbuster franchise usually starts to sag around its fifth installment.

Marvel's box office is also steadier. Leave out the Avengers films and the rest still average $750 million worldwide, a figure most mega-blockbuster franchises never reach. The Marvel Cinematic Universe brings studios richer and safer returns; it is the surest movie product in Hollywood today.

In this sense, the move from the mega-blockbuster franchise to the Marvel Cinematic Universe counts as an evolution in the kind of movie product Hollywood puts out — an evolution along a commercial axis. And the force behind it is the one Richard Maltby, author of Hollywood Cinema, identified when he traced Hollywood's commercial development: Hollywood has always been a strict economy, and film is merely its tool for pursuing the largest possible profit.

Throughout its history Hollywood has hunted for a formula like the Marvel Cinematic Universe to guarantee its returns, and the shape that formula takes in front of audiences is usually a product of where Hollywood stands at that moment.

In the 1920s, Hollywood took shape in Southern California. In that golden age it held the whole chain, from production to distribution to exhibition. Entertainment was scarce besides, and a cinema was the only place people could buy a brief escape from their lives. So Hollywood faced little competition; all it had to satisfy was an audience's taste for something new.

The studio system came out of that. Hollywood put up enormous soundstages and began turning out films as if on a line. All they usually had to do was settle on a genre: screenwriters knocked out a script, the director drew up a shooting plan from it, and the studio's own actors, art department, camera crew and lighting crew each took their places.

In that era a studio could turn out more than 500 films a year; in 2018 the most prolific of the six majors, Warner Bros., made 34. That many films needed a selling point too, and the selling point settled on was the Hollywood star. Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Humphrey Bogart were products of that time.

Those were Hollywood's most carefree years. But over the near-century since, Hollywood has been worn down at the distribution and exhibition end. First came the Paramount Decree of 1948, which cut the theaters loose from the studio system. From the 1950s on, its distribution business was hit step by step by television, videotape, DVDs, and now the internet.

Studios could no longer make films on a line the way they had in the 1930s and 1940s. They had to find a way to lower risk and raise profit, and out of that came the evolution of Hollywood's movie products.

In the 1960s, Hollywood went in for new technology, using widescreen formats and lavish sets to chase visual effects that the young medium of television could not match. In the 1970s, model effects and computer effects both matured, and Jaws and Star Wars gave people their first idea of what a blockbuster was. In the 1990s, computer effects grew cheap, and studios came to lean on the effects blockbuster. Around 2000, to lower the barrier for audiences further, adaptations of novels and comics and remakes of existing films gave birth to the concept of IP. The logic ran: audiences love The Lord of the Rings, so they will pay to watch the story of the Ring once more on a big screen.

From assembly-line films sold on their stars, to effects blockbusters built with computers, to adaptations of every sort of IP, the films audiences get to see have kept evolving along this commercial logic — and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is only its latest product.

Naturally, the Marvel Cinematic Universe combines the strengths of every earlier type of movie product. The effects-blockbuster part needs no explaining: superheroes are super precisely because they can end the world more thoroughly than the likes of Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Marvel is itself a huge IP, and the core audience for any comic adaptation will always be comic fans. Marvel has no objection to those fans using decades of accumulated comic material to explain the thing to non-fans. In China and abroad alike, plenty of people compare what is on screen with the comics and guess at where the plot goes next. Without their explaining, in fact, ordinary viewers would find the Marvel Cinematic Universe even harder to get into.

Less discussed is the relationship between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its stars. Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are certainly stars, but they hold the position they hold because they played Iron Man and Captain America. The characters gave the actors their personas, rather than films being built around a star's existing persona, as under the old star system. The stars that really belong to Marvel are characters like Iron Man and Captain America, not the actors.

Just as several different characters have taken up the Captain America identity in the comics, the actors in the Marvel Cinematic Universe can be swapped while the characters go on. Thanos was recast once, from Damion Poitier to Josh Brolin, and the Red Skull in Avengers: Infinity War is not the Red Skull from Captain America.

If Robert Downey Jr. stopped playing Iron Man, the character might lose some of his appeal, but Iron Man's story would continue. This is one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's large advantages over the old star system: it can make better use of its characters without worrying that they will lose value when an actor leaves or lands in the news for the wrong reasons.

Put this together with the other two traits mentioned earlier — one coherent story across the whole thing, and tighter control of quality — and the Marvel Cinematic Universe can pull its audience inside its own product system.

After Marvel's success, plenty of other studios wanted to copy it. But Marvel is still the only cinematic universe that has worked, because the others did not evolve the way Marvel did and went on relying heavily on classical methods.

In May 2017, Universal Pictures announced the Dark Universe, gathering up the mummy, vampires, Frankenstein's monster and the rest. A month later the Dark Universe's first film opened: The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise turned out to be a bad choice. Famous since the 1990s, Cruise is one of the last stars Hollywood has in the traditional sense. He built his own persona and he intervenes heavily in the shooting of his films. Besides bringing his regular writer-director Christopher McQuarrie onto The Mummy, a Variety report noted, he had unusual control over the whole production and pushed hard on the script, the director and post-production.

The finished film became Tom Cruise's personal show and drew no end of bad reviews. What made the star system work was that in the 1940s Hollywood controlled a powerful distribution and exhibition system, which is what allowed a star to be a selling point at all. That distribution system has collapsed. No single star can carry a box office alone now, let alone a cinematic universe that has to be planned as a whole.

Warner Bros.' DC Extended Universe came to grief another way. Early on, Zack Snyder was at the wheel. Taken for a director with an authorial voice, he laid out the plots for Batman, Superman and the later Justice League according to his own understanding of that world.

Putting the director's creation at the center was, in a way, closer to the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Back then the studios' own creative output had gone slack, while directors with some authorial standing carried real pull at the market, so the studios handed them enormous say. But audiences today want a film to entertain them; a director's authorial expression wins no credit, and a studio chasing profit can strip a director of creative control whenever it likes. After several films stumbled, Warner Bros. duly stripped Zack Snyder of his power and sent him into exile.

In this sense, only the Marvel Cinematic Universe has caught hold of some of the core of contemporary entertainment.

Audiences want strong entertainment, so Marvel uses a strict assembly line to mass-produce films above a certain standard. Audiences do not easily hold their attention or interest over the long run, so Marvel uses a fairly complete story line with something still hanging to tell them that this film connects to the next.

The Iron Man and Captain America personas the Marvel Cinematic Universe built have become spiritual idols for today's fans. To a degree it also caters to demand thrown up by subcultures: after the character Loki proved a huge success, Marvel strengthened the line of brotherly feeling between Thor and Loki.

All of these things together are what make the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the reason the star system, the effects blockbuster, IP and the hero team-up cannot fully explain its success.

None of which means the thing is foolproof. Every attempt to find a formula for a successful entertainment product runs into one basic contradiction: audiences change far faster than any plan made in advance.

Looking at Hollywood over the past two years, thrillers and horror films have been turning into the newly popular genre in the market. As for Marvel, the North American box office of newer heroes like Ant-Man and Doctor Strange has not matched that of the veterans, Iron Man and Captain America.

With Avengers: Endgame in theaters, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has reached its first real test. If this film amounts to the curtain falling on the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first season, then the obvious question comes next: will it go the way of so many television series canceled after a few seasons, into a cycle of rise and decline?

Graphics / Zheng Shuya

Cover image / Avengers: Endgame