Sunday Best: The Rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Part II - Avengers to Civil War

In my last post on this subject, we examined the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe until right before The Avengers.

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. 

But the real test was to see if this success would translate into bigger box office for the individual franchises or if it was only the Avengers movies that would be hits.  The first post-Avengers movie was Iron Man 3.  This one was the most successful Iron Man film, making nearly $100 million more than the other two.  Thor: The Dark World made about $25 million more and Captain America: The Winter Soldier made about $85 million more than the original. 

This is exactly what Marvel needed.  Now Marvel looked forward to see if they could launch new franchises.  Their first attempt was Guardians of the Galaxy.  This was another gigantic risk.  In fact, from what I've gathered, Marvel was worried that writer/director James Gunn had done something too strange that wouldn't connect with audiences.  I think is evidenced by Marvel pressuring Edgar Wright into dropping his stylistic vision of Ant-Man and in the studio movie Guardians to August where box office expectations are not high.  But the bet paid off and Guardians of the Galaxy was the biggest hit of the summer.  When Ant-Man was released, it didn't resonate as well and became one of the lowest grossing films, but still ranking around the original Thor and Captain America films.


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.

When the Russo brothers took over the Captain America films, they not only raised the box office, they made Captain America the heart of the MCU.  For the third film, the Russos basically made Avengers 2.5, by incorporating the entire Avengers cast but making Captain America the main focus.  This third Captain America film made $230 million more than the first one.  They proved they could handle the large cast successfully.  So they prepped for Infinity War.

Marvel's film release schedule is also part of their plan.  The timing is important to build up interest in their franchise.  It was during this time that Marvel produced their highest domestic grossing film: Black Panther.  But the challenge of bringing all of their expanded franchises together again into one film was an even bigger logistical challenge than the original Avengers.

We will examine Infinity War and beyond in our next post.