Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27907741-20160307095931/@comment-61022-20160307164307

Hi Daniel,

The answer to your question is simply marketing.

I think for years Marvel had done somewhat well in marketing their products outside of comic books, but their biggest obstacles in the past was the perception that comic books were for kids. There was also a social "stigma" around what is now referred to as "nerd culture".

The roots of the contemporary super-hero movie actually has it's roots in the 1970s. That started when DC Comics was acquired by Warner Brothers 1969. They had moderate success with films based on their characters in the 70s and 80s. It petered out in the late 1990s after box office flops like Batman & Robin. This cooled Hollywood's interest for super-heroes.

Marvel could be considered responsible for breathing new life into the genre of super-hero films. However that did not begin with 2007's Iron Man, in fact, Iron Man is the direct result of the role Marvel was playing. The current popularity of super-hero movies actually started years earlier in 1998 when Marvel and New Line Cinema released the first Blade film.

During more turbulent financial times in the 90s, Marvel sold off film rights to some of their licensed characters: namely the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man as well as some of their less popular characters: The Punisher, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, and so on.

Blade was a success, so it led to the next big gamble in 2000 when Marvel and 20th Century Fox released the first X-Men movie. This got the ball rolling and subsequent Marvel films that were released were critically acclaimed (Spider-Man) and others panned (Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Ghost Rider)

But the fact of the matter is, good or bad, these films were generating a lot of revenue and instead of Marvel shopping out their properties to other film companies they decided to start off their own series of films based on the Avengers. It was quite the gambit, particularly with the level of story telling they were planning on giving.

What helped Marvel get the much needed boost was their acquisition by Disney. Disney has perfected marketing and packaging culture for the masses. It has only helped boost Marvel's ability to promote themselves. It also gives them a lot more access to other avenues of revenue: through clothing, toys, video games, animation... While Marvel was no stranger to any of these marking streams, being associated with the Disney brand gives them access to better resources. Their association with Disney as a company -- already there are cross marketing promotions with Marvel characters and Disney characters -- it is making an already visible and recognisable franchise and glomming it to an even more massive promotional machine.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe films have had an impact on the industry in a number of ways:

For those who still hold rights to Marvel properties (Such as 20th Century Fox) it has forced them to either work on a more collaborative level with Marvel or try to produce films on their own. Sony in particular seeing the cash cow the Avengers are have decided to make deals with Marvel Studios for the film rights of Spider-Man -- particularly after the last three films in the franchise flopped. Fox on the other hand as a thriving X-Men franchise that they can run without any further deals with Marvel other than the original licensing deal.

Marvel has also more cut throat in their marketing of characters that are licensed out to other movie studios. The marketing for an X-Men film and cross promotion -- be it action figures, comic books and the like -- has taken a nose dive in the 16 years since the first X-Men film.

Whenever possible Marvel has also quashed titles that would boost or promote an upcoming film project. For example, following the disastrous and widely panned Fantastic Four film, Marvel has since cancelled their Fantastic Four run, split up the characters and utilized them in other ways.

The second thing it has caused, is kick started the competition -- DC Comics in this case -- to try and emulate the success of Marvel's cinematic films. However at a much accelerated rate, whereas Marvel has had a good 9 year head start formulating their universe, DC Comics has lagged heavily behind and is in dire need to catch up.

The third impact of these films is that Hollywood is trying to adopt the Marvel story telling method -- in a series of films as opposed to one offs and vaguely related sequels -- in making massive epics. This was somewhat the status quo since New Line adapted the Lord of the Rings, however the desire to adapt so many literary works into multi-film epics has become more common place since the MCU began. Studios are also looking at existing franchises and determining how they could be rebooted and retold in similar fashions. One such example was there was some chatter about Universal Pictures reviving their classic Universal Monsters into a franchise similar to super-hero movies in which these classic creatures share the same universe and interact with one another.