How Intricate Can Marvel’s Storyworld Become on Film?

In an otherwise dismissive review of Thor, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott makes a perceptive connection between how the producers at Marvel Studios are making their current set of films and how the publisher has been making comics for decades:

A postcredits teaser gives viewers who have lingered in the theater a taste of “The Avengers,” which at some future date will braid together the “Iron Man,” “Incredible Hulk” and “Thor” franchises under the eye-patched aegis of Samuel L. Jackson. Or something. This is franchise building of the kind that has long been practiced by comic book publishers to keep their long-running serials fresh and their readership hooked (“Have Golden Locks, Seeking Hammer“, The New York Times, 5 May 2011).

For Scott, the Marvel strategy is purely a commercial maneuver, one that he likens to a Ponzi Scheme, where each new film is always designed to get viewers to go to the next one and the final payoff is always deferred.

Scott isn’t so much wrong as he is reductive. In seeing the interlinking of films as nothing more than a commercial gambit, his analysis brushes past the more interesting questions it raises about narrative and form, and how film and comics work in ways that are both distinct and parallel to each other.

Movie series are nothing new; rarely does a month go by in the US without a new installment in some franchise opening at the multiplex. However, typically, movie franchises are self-contained titles, which is to say James Bond films relate to other James Bond films, and not to Jason Bourne movies. As Scott notes, however, the current Marvel films are designed to direct audiences not so much towards other movies that feature the character or characters you just watched, but to other Marvel films, that may or may not center on the same cast. So, for example, Iron Man 2 (2010) ultimately points to Thor rather than to another Iron Man film. The first Iron Man (2008) seeded The Avengers (2012) and subsequent movies, including The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Thor, have also worked the ground for that film.

What producers at Marvel are attempting to do is create a film analog to the Marvel Universe that knits together the publisher’s mainline titles.

Marvel characters do not exist in isolation from each other, like James Bond is to Jason Bourne, but share a common storyworld. This common structure means that characters can appear across titles. It also means that stories can be written that have meta-narrative implications, that is, stories that relate to the universe as a whole and not just to individual titles and casts of characters.

Comics offers certain advantages in building a narrative architecture that provides an overarching structure for a large set of properties/characters that simultaneously exist on their own and in relationship to each other.

Individual titles are published monthly, but meta-narrative stories, or “crossovers”, can be told in weekly installments. This frequency of publication allows for the development of dense strands of interconnection between characters and different “regions” of the Marvel Universe. Print also provides readers with ready reference materials to ongoing stories and narrative construction.

The higher costs and organizational and promotional demands of filmmaking do not allow for the production of more than few films a year, and each of those is likely to be an unique title. The opportunities for making connections, for generating interest in other characters and other titles, are fewer in movies than in comics. As a result, Marvel has largely relied on cameos, such as Jeremy Renner’s appearance as Hawkeye in Thor, and “stingers”, the postcredits sequences cited by Scott, to make clear connections between current and upcoming films.

As a matter of subtext, though, each film has introduced a new dimension to the Marvel Universe in the movies. Up until Thor, for example, the world was largely based on science fiction premises. After Thor the world also has elements of magic or of the supernatural.

The question, one hinted at by Scott, is whether moviegoing audiences will invest, both financially and affectively, in a common universe, not just for a single recognizable cast of characters, but for a bevy of characters, characters who sometimes appear in their own films and sometimes in “team” movies, or in films headlined by different characters. If I’m a James Bond fan, all I have to do is look for the next Bond film. Marvel producers are anticipating that people will become not just fans of particular characters, but of Marvel.

In comics, the extent to which Marvel has become not just a publisher’s catalog, but also a common storytelling universe is both a source of pleasure for readers and a cause for frustration. While there are those who are deeply invested in the deep histories and networks of interconnection between characters, and individuals who obsess over and value “continuity” above all else, other readers have a more ambivalent relationship to the publisher’s narrative strategy.

The conceit of having different characters and distinct titles exist in a common storyworld creates both opportunities and constraints for creators and readers. On the one hand, it opens up possibilities for interesting story turns and relationships; in a very real sense the entirety of the known universe is available for editors, writers, and artists to draw on when making comics for Marvel. In addition, by definition, placing individual books in a larger narrative context implies a significance to characters and events that is not limited to the scale of those books.

On the other hand, that same sense of there always being something bigger can undermine the value of the individual title, which readers are presumably picking up because they have at least as much investment in the particular cast of characters as they do in the Marvel Universe as a whole.

Open-Endedness Is OK, Providing There’s a Promise of Resolution

Over time, the same depth that allows for richness in storytelling can also become infertile ground. To paraphrase Karl Marx, “comics creators make their own history, but not in conditions of their own making”. Individual titles and characters can and do get trapped by or sublimated to the universe, to the Marvel brand, writ large. Given that few people can afford the time or money, or have an interest in following every book that the publisher puts out, there comes a time when even devoted readers will find themselves making a choice of whether to keep pulling a title or not because of where and how it is made to fit into the bigger picture.

Taken to extremes, attention to history, to continuity, can become more important than character development and strong storytelling. After X-Men: First Class, for example, more than one would-be reader has reacted in frustration at how difficult it is to find an entry point into the comics (see the discussion at, Johanna Draper Carlson, “The Movie to Comic Problem Again – What X-Men Do I Read?“, Comics Worth Reading, 5 June 2011). When experienced comics readers find it difficult to read your books, there are legitimate questions to be asked about how you tell stories.

One question relevant to the cinematic incarnation of the Marvel Universe is if, where, and when will the line between possibility and encumbrance be crossed?

As of the moment, all films, aside from those in the X-Men franchise, are pointing towards The Avengers. Maybe that movie will provide audiences with a sense of fulfillment, or maybe Scott will be proved right, and even that film will just be another payment in Marvel’s narrative Ponzi Scheme. Marvel is currently building the first generation of its cinematic storyworld. The Joss Whedon written and directed Avengers will clearly mark a break between generations, but what kind of break won’t be known until the producers at Marvel want it to be known.

If the producers cut a similar path to that for the comics, then any sense of finality or closure from The Avengers is likely to be limited or short-lived. Scott is not wrong when he implies that there is a never-ending quality to the storytelling in Marvel’s comics. At its worst, this is turned into the cynical play for consumer dollars that the film critic assumes it is for the movies. At its best, it makes for a kind of narrative realism in the sense that the world is always bigger than any one character or event, that life goes on, and actions have consequences.

American moviegoers are accustomed to a certain open-endedness in planned series, such as Star Wars and The Matrix, or adapted works like Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings, but always with the promise of eventual resolution and a tying off of loose ends. When a series is not planned with an end in mind, characters recur but, more often than not, each film stands alone in terms of story. Even in heavily serialized television, the structure provided by “the season” leads creators to build in moments of closure that are often lacking in the mainstream of Marvel’s publishing universe.

When I read a monthly comic, especially from a publisher like Marvel, I expect to have to wait until the following month to see what happens next. On the other hand, film audiences are accustomed to narrative finality or satisfaction, at some point. Movies that blatantly bid for sequels without guarantee risk alienating audiences who have learned to expect fulfillment from film narratives.

Watching a film is an intensive experience, in that one’s primary investment is for the two or so hours of the film, whereas reading Marvel comics is more of an extensive experience, in that it is ongoing. Whether and how far movies can be made into an extensive experience is what Marvel Studios is putting to the test.

One factor that may limit how deep the Marvel Universe can go on film is the aging of actors. In print, there are any number of devices, drugs, mutations, time travel, that can be used to keep characters from aging in a “normal” way, but in live action films, those devices, not being real, cannot keep Robert Downey, Junior, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Evans from getting too old to effectively play their characters.

One well-used comics tradition that Marvel has already employed in their films is the reboot, a move that entails resetting or, more commonly, reintroducing characters. Marvel’s Ultimate line of comics is a full reset, an alternate history with unique origins and webs of connection for characters. More common, is taking a character and resituating them within the storyworld so as to offer a new starting point, but not with an entirely new history, although a reboot may often entail adding new details to existing histories.

This strategy has been employed with the movie versions of the X-Men, The Hulk, and Spider-Man, and offers a way to address the problem of aging or unavailable actors. However, as a way of structuring or restructuring he Marvel storyworld it suggests a very different approach from the comics, less linear, and more character than plot driven. It’s a strategy that cannot be sustained by the kinds of forward moving, cross-title stinging and teasing that Marvel producers have been using to direct audiences to their films. It’s suggestive of a traditional movie franchise or limited series wherein films are primarily independent, and self-referential, rather than located within an ever-expanding field of titles.

Whether, and to what extent, the complexity of the Marvel Universe is responsible for declining comics readership is subject to debate. And yet there clearly are points where the commercial value of telling ongoing, interrelated stories is undermined when it comes to inviting new readers, something that the publishers at DC Comics appear to have concluded in announcing the restructuring and relaunch of their entire catalog. Right now, in the build-up to The Avengers, Marvel’s film universe is still manageable in scope, and appears to be drawing in and holding onto audiences. How intricate and ongoing that universe can, will, and should become are the most interesting questions raised by the films being made by Marvel Studios.