Marvel can be a precursor as studios increasingly remember sequences, expansions or series complementary to big-budget theatrical films during the green light process to serve large fandoms that can generate streaming subscriptions. Each time the studio sends a streaming series to Disney +, his father is missing out on box office revenue to power his streaming service. But Feige sees potential in using the service to build his films, and vice versa, as the characters will intertwine and leave both. For example, the studio initially made a deal with Jeremy Renner to play his Avengers character, Hawkeye, in a solo movie before directing the project for a Disney + series to be released this year.
WarnerMedia, in order to boost its HBO Max service, made big splashes in that line, supporting the cut of more than $ 70 million from Zack Snyder Justice Leagueundoubtedly the result of fans’ persistent pleas to renew the criticized 2017 film. The studio is also provoking the concept of a multiverse (think: alternative timelines existing in the same plot) to create narrative cohesion for dozens of DC projects. To do so, after 30 years, Michael Keaton will be back as Batman at Warner Bros. ‘ The Flash film, due for release in 2022. DC is also diving into big budget HBO Max series like James Gunn’s Suicide squad by-product Peacemaker, which started shooting on January 15 in Toronto, as well as a Robert Pattinson spinoff Batman theatrical resource.
This approach has the risk that supply will exceed demand. This is a lesson learned the hard way by the comic book industry, which went from boom to collapse in the 1990s, when major publishers planned seemingly endless launches and breakdowns of popular properties, but not entirely unknown to studios; Paramount transformed Star Trek from a successful film and TV franchise in the late 1980s and early 1990s to one considered creatively exhausted, thanks to overexposure and an increasingly generic narrative by everyone except the most dedicated fans. . “Narrative logic is important for people. They want to be surprised and they want it to make sense, ”says Michael Niederman, professor of TV at Columbia College Chicagthe one who studies the fan culture.
The project for interconnected streaming series can be foreshadowed by an experiment on linear TV. Since 2014, the CW has conducted annual crossings between its DC superhero properties, culminating in Crisis on Infinite Earths 2019 – an adaptation of a DC Comics storyline that brings together programs like Supergirl, Bat Woman, The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow which also featured cameos from other DC series and films, including Ezra Miller’s big-screen Flash. “We started with the litmus of, ‘Do we think this is cool?’ But, inevitably, phrases like ‘The fans are going to love this’ and ‘People are going to go crazy’ get into our discussions, ”says writer and producer Marc Guggenheim. “I think the Venn diagram between what we wanted and what the fans wanted is practically a circle.”
It’s a tactic that Sony Pictures is taking inspiration from by extending its Marvel movie series with Jared Leto’s Morbius. The film, dated January 21, 2022, will be the first of the films to make direct reference to Spider-Man and features Keaton, reprising his role as 2017 Vulture Spider-Man: Homecoming, suggesting for the first time that Tom Holland films by Sony and Marvel could connect to the universe of films that Sony is building. It looks like there is indeed a big plan for Sony Pictures’ Marvel Character Universe, the name the studio has given its nascent universe.
Sony is watching for fan reactions to its Marvel spinoffs. After a silent reaction to the first trailer of 2018 Poison, the studio’s marketing group, which monitors fan conversations on social media and makes recommendations from the development of the script to the marketing phase, suggested the beats desired by fans for the next trailer: bold humor and Venom ripping the head off someone. The film outperformed it with $ 856 million globally.
And the Marvel Studios multiverse is growing like Jamie Foxx, who played Spidey’s villain Electro in 2014 the incredible spider-man 2, is returning to the next resource in the Netherlands, as well as Alfred Molina, who starred as the villainous Doctor Octopus in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 in 2004.
Meanwhile, for Universal’s Jurassic World: Domain, the sequel to the 2018 film that grossed $ 1.3 billion Fallen kingdom, the studio returned to its roots by launching Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, all original stars of the Jurassic franchise.
As fans applaud, director Colin Trevorrow notes that it is not enough to put these characters together on the screen. “There is a superficial reason why we are all excited, but the minute we get over it, we will ask the deeper question, why?” says Trevorrow, which has the second season of Netflix Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous on January 22nd. “What will they do to make it absolutely vital that they are part of this film?”
Up to that point, Stan Lee’s protégé Roy Thomas has always told a story that retransmitted a perhaps apocryphal quote from the Marvel Comics brain: no matter what they say, the public doesn’t really want change. Instead, Lee explained, they want “the illusion of change”. The studios will follow this line more and more carefully this year. Says Guggenheim: “I am always writing with the fans in mind, of course, but they are not dictating the creative direction of what I am doing.”
This story first appeared in the January 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.