The road to Infin­i­ty is paved with good storytelling

Like it or not, Mar­vel Stu­dios has pro­found­ly altered our expec­ta­tions and under­stand­ing of mod­ern block­buster cin­e­ma, from cameos and post-cred­it scenes to slow build ser­i­al sto­ry­telling. Super­hero movies are their own genre with their own unique visu­al lan­guage – and it’s a house Mar­vel built from the ground up.

Cre­ative inge­nu­ity relies as much on struc­ture as raw tal­ent, but in the case of the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse it’s hard to wrap your head around the num­bers, let alone the hype. As the high­est gross­ing cin­e­mat­ic fran­chise of all time ($15 bil­lion and count­ing) gears up for Avengers: Infin­i­ty War, there appears to be no end in sight to this con­tem­po­rary pop cul­ture phe­nom­e­non. Yet even now it’s easy to over­look just how care­ful­ly and pre­cise­ly Marvel’s grand vision for a 20-year, 40-film mega-fran­chise has been imple­ment­ed. You need only look as far as the DCEU and Dark Uni­verse to appre­ci­ate what the stu­dio has man­aged to achieve thus far.

Infin­i­ty War is film 19 in the series, with a fur­ther 14 in devel­op­ment or pro­duc­tion, along­side 14 asso­ci­at­ed tele­vi­sion series, two web-series, five shorts and 29 tie-in graph­ic nov­els. The awe­some scale of plan­ning hasn’t gone unno­ticed aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, and in 2015 the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bal­ti­more pilot­ed a media course in a study of the MCU led by Dr Arnold T Blum­berg. The focus of the course was the study of the inter­con­nect­ed Mar­vel sto­ry­world, but upon reflec­tion Blum­berg observes that his analy­sis relates as much to soci­ety as it does the media: ​“The vast and sprawl­ing inter­con­nect­ed nar­ra­tive of the MCU makes for a per­fect envi­ron­ment in which to explore all the issues that make for a rich and var­ied aca­d­e­m­ic expe­ri­ence. These films are a micro­cosm of our entire cul­ture, and a time cap­sule of the era in which they exist.”

Such is the scope of the MCU that direct ana­lyt­i­cal engage­ment stands to chal­lenge stu­dents on mul­ti­ple lev­els. Beyond the finances and busi­ness plan is an ocean of gen­der, race, cast­ing and adap­ta­tion debate.

In order to build a com­plex and acces­si­ble mul­ti-plat­form fran­chise, Mar­vel had to wed cre­ativ­i­ty and econ­o­my, a process that began with Iron Man back in 2008. It’s easy to for­get Robert Downey Jr was a left-field choice to front an ambi­tious series from an untried stu­dio. Mar­vel under­stood that the bril­liant but flawed Stark was the per­fect entry point for what was to come, and direc­tor Jon Favreau knew that Downey Jr embod­ied the human ele­ments of the char­ac­ter. “[Robert] under­stood what makes the char­ac­ter tick. He found a lot of his own life expe­ri­ence in Tony Stark.”

Fast for­ward 10 years and we’re set to wel­come Josh Brolin’s big bad Thanos to the fight, a nihilis­tic alien god who is a far cry from Stark’s bil­lion­aire play­boy. Yet audi­ences are now con­di­tioned to the required sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief with regards to the intro­duc­tion of these new char­ac­ters. As Blum­berg notes, the deci­sion to start with Iron Man enabled the growth that fol­lowed: ​“Mar­vel had a bril­liant strat­e­gy. First, intro­duce your audi­ence to a sin­gle char­ac­ter in an oth­er­wise real­is­tic world, and see the impact of that char­ac­ter on that world when he exhibits extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ties. In addi­tion, [Tony Stark] con­tin­ues to serve as the audience’s way in to that world as it begins to evolve. Then intro­duce oth­ers indi­vid­u­al­ly, and even­tu­al­ly bring them all togeth­er in a world for­ev­er changed by their pres­ence and their unity.”

It was an approach built out of patience which Marvel’s com­peti­tors failed to grasp, says Blum­berg: ​“You need­ed time to train the audi­ence, to devel­op emo­tion­al bonds between them and the char­ac­ters. DC did a very bizarre, deeply prob­lem­at­ic take on Super­man, dropped in a Bat­man… did one good film with a ful­ly realised char­ac­ter in Won­der Woman, then said, ​‘All right, let’s go right to the Jus­tice League and add a few more in.’”

The notion of train­ing audi­ences to read the films is per­haps the most impor­tant work across the MCU. If you’ve ever read a com­ic, you’ll under­stand that a splash page of one whole reveal­ing pan­el is often on the fifth page of the block. If the big reveal hap­pens on the right your eye-line will stray – you keep it sep­a­rate. Mar­vel applied this same process in their films, not jump­ing straight to the Avengers reveal but build­ing over four films of grad­ual sto­ry­telling. A world the casu­al, non comics fan could recog­nise was estab­lished before explor­ing the impossible.

As Blum­berg puts it, ​“By the time we vis­it­ed Asgard exten­sive­ly, or trav­eled into space with the Guardians of the Galaxy, you had an audi­ence of mil­lions that had become com­fort­able with the world of the Mar­vel Comics char­ac­ters. If they had start­ed with the Guardians, or Odin pon­tif­i­cat­ing from the throne, you would have lost those peo­ple in a heart­beat.” Now Asgar­dian pon­tif­i­ca­tion and weird alien worlds are famil­iar, Mar­vel can enter a true unknown, be it dark dimen­sions, quan­tum realms or across the mul­ti­verse. Thanks to metic­u­lous­ly struc­tured sto­ry­telling and patient plan­ning, it now appears there is nowhere the MCU could go where their loy­al fan­base wouldn’t follow.