On Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel Comics, and Storytelling in the Internet Era

I’ve got
a review of Guardians of the Galaxy, the latest movie
in the increasingly sprawling Marvel
Cinematic Universe, in this morning’s Washington
Times.

Short version? I liked it a lot.

Slightly longer version: Marvel’s interconnected universe, with
its long-running plotlines and teasers and recurring characters, is
advancing the TVification of movies. 

As television has become more cinematic, thanks to the growing
prominence of shows like “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead,”
movies have become more like television.

Marvel is making a TV series for the multiplex, two hours and
$200 million at a time.

Nowhere is this more true than in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
a sprawling and interconnected series of superhero films existing
in a shared story-world, with multiple overlapping characters and
lengthy plot lines that take years to fully play out.

There’s a visionary who oversees the writers and directors
working on the individual productions, and there are even teasers
at the end of each installment hinting at what’s to come.

Part of what continues to amaze me about Marvel’s success is
that the studio has turned what is essentially a niche product that
for most of its history was aimed largely at young boys into a mass
cultural phenomenon. Yes, the audience is still heavily male, and
it skews young. The larger world of Marvel toys and cartoons and
live-action
arena shows is obviously aimed mostly at school-aged boys. But
you don’t consistently
post Marvel-size box office numbers at home and abroad without
a fair amount of crossover appeal. 

The niche-weirdness of it all is especially on display in
Guardians, which revolves around characters that almost no
one outside the still-fairly-small world of paper-and-ink comic
book fans has ever heard of. And part of what struck me about the
movie is how much it draws from the zany pulp traditions of the
comics—the Nova Corps just sort of shows up without any
explanation, a major sequence takes place in a lawless mining
encampment built to harvest valuable goop from the severed head of
a dead celestial, one of the characters is a talking tree. It’s
just delightfully weird and outlandish. 

And Marvel’s success is not going unnoticed.
Disney, which owns Marvel and its characters, is planning a
similarly sprawling story
universe for its upcoming series of Star Wars films.
Warner Brothers, which owns DC Comics, Marvel’s main competitor in
the comic book world, has a
multi-character Justice League/Batman/Superman movie in
production, featuring such comic-book non-notables as Cyborg. Even
Universal is planning an
expanded movie universe based on its classic movie
monsters.

It’s happening on TV too, with spinoffs of
Walking Dead and
Breaking Bad on the way. There’s even
talk of a second Game of Thrones series. 

Interconnectedness and story sprawl are in. The
proximate cause for the current burst of connected story-worlds is
clear: Marvel, arguably the biggest success in Hollywood over
the last decade, is to credit (or blame).

But I think you can plausibly argue that in the larger sense
this is at least partially a function of the way that the Internet
trains people to think in and about interlinked webs of
information. Which is part of why I sense that not only are movies
and television becoming more like each other, they are also both
becoming more like comic books, which have relied on a combination
of pulpy genre stories and complicated—often contradictory
and borderline incomprehensible—narrative continuity for
decades. It just so happens that the folks at Marvel have been
telling stories in this complex, Internet-friendly way for decades,
so it’s probably no surprise that they were the first to
successfully exploit it on a wider scale.