So far, we had two good financial hits in Iron Man and Iron Man 2. And we had three modest successes in The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. Marvel was not attempting to do something fairly unprecedented: bring them all together into one movie.
Cinematic universes are not new. Universal did this with its stable of movie monsters back in the day. But Marvel had a lot more challenges.
-Different Studios: Because Marvel had licensed its properties to other studios, using their own characters became complicated. The could not use Spider-Man who was with Sony, nor any of the X-Men, who are licensed to Fox. Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, were all distributed by Paramount. The Incredible Hulk was produced by Universal. And now, The Avengers was being made by Buena Vista (Disney). This created legal and financial complications like no other.
-Balancing the Characters: Story-wise, this movie has a gigantic logistical challenge. Each of the four main heroes are the stars of their own franchise. That meant that each of the main characters could not be reduced to a supporting character. This isn't just a narrative necessity, but going forward, each of these heroes needed to still carry their own film. Reducing them in any way would damage future films.
-Sum Greater than Parts: In order for this grand experiment to work, The Avengers couldn't just be equal to the previous hits. It had to greatly surpass them. The risk was high. If The Avengers bombed or even became a modest hit, it would have derailed the entire franchise. And Marvel had everything riding on this. They took out a gigantic loan to finance their studio. If they failed, they would lose the rights to their biggest characters like the Avengers, including Captain America.
Marvel gets a lot of flack for not taking chances. I've even hit them on this point. But when you take a big risk that turns out to be a big hit, you often forget what a risk it was. And Marvel took a big risk by turning the writing and directing duties over to Joss Whedon.
Whedon had a lot of credibility in the geek culture and fan base because of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. But in terms of bankable movie credentials, Whedon was a big risk. He had only directed one other movie:, Serenity, which did not even make back its modest $39 million budget. But they gave him the keys to the kingdom and he delivered.
For more detail, you can see my original film review here or my reflection its rank of super hero movies. But suffice it to say that Avengers was a gigantic it. It's domestic take was double of Iron Man, and worldwide it made a total of $1.5 billion.
In fact, after Ant-Man, no Marvel movie has made less than $200 million at the box office. That is an incredible track record. Avengers: Age of Ultron did not make as much money as the original, but there were many factors as to why. Whedon stepped away. So who would replace him? Marvel chose the Russo Brothers.
We will examine Infinity War and beyond in our next post.
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