I don't get the MCU Obsession.

 I don't know what else to call this post. Just...something set me off. A straw broke a camels back. Largely another suggestion that what "we" are all "waiting" or "hoping" "for" "is" "another" "MCU". Specifically Youtuber The Little Platoon's review/critique of Super Mario Bros. movie subtitled "Wasted Potential" with the potential, if I'm hearing it right, is Super Mario Bros. is to Iron Man as Super Smash Bros. is to Avengers. But it missed that mark. 

I don't object to the reasons offered. I object to misty eyed nostalgia for when the MCU was supposedly great. What the MCU has become, was entirely predictable from the first post credits cut scene setting up continuity between films, because spoiler alert it already happened in fucking comics.

Batman War Games

I want to stress that this is just my personal experience, but I anticipate other readers of long running serialized comics particularly of DC and Marvel continuities share a similar experience. The year was 2004, Shrek 2 would be the highest grossing film of that year, but Spiderman 2 the one with Doctor Octopus, not the one with Electro had just come out so the MCU was not foretold or foreseen. 

Batman had a title - "Batman: Gotham Knights" (BMGK) that I was interested by. I was interested because interesting things were happening. Specifically, characters I found interesting, were doing interesting things. This intrigue began in BMGK #50, with a new creative team and Edward Nigma, aka the Riddler, crashing through the glass ceiling of a ballroom during an event.

Spoiling Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Batman run "Hush", the Riddler did it, and he played Hush in order to do it. Now Hush was back and pissed at Riddler. Not much interesting there, but between BMGK #50 and BMGK #55 the premise - Hush's back and pissed at Riddler for using him - got utilised to do interesting things. Namely, the Riddler suddenly needs protection and so he cashes in his trump card - which was that he knows who killed the Joker's family, he gives Joker a name in return for protection, tying it back to works like Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" where the Joker is established as an unreliable narrator for his own origin, an idea handled with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer by Nolan in The Dark Knight.

Anyway, Joker and Hush have a confrontation in BMGK #55 after interesting developments in Joker's character happen for the first time in years, and Joker is defeated and driven out of Gotham City. The issue left me with the Joker crawling back to an abandoned circus, the circus hideout/lair from "The Killing Joke" where he is welcomed home by a side-show freak. So we had the deposing of the clown prince of crime, alliances between old school villains against new school villains and the need for the old-school to re-invent or reassert themselves while having new developments or new interpretations of the most iconic villain in all of comics (2 Oscars).

And then! A fucking cross over event. Specifically "Batman: War Games" so it isn't even the most egregious crossover event compared to something like DCs "Crisis on Infinite Earths" "The Final Night" or Marvel's "Civil War II" or "X-Men vs Avengers" etc. etc.

Batman: Gotham Knights, was but one of eight titles sold under the Bat-family brand. War Games was a crossover event, told over 3 issues in each of those titles. So arguably, the plot of War Games is fairly interesting by crossover event standards, but you needed in theory, to buy or otherwise read 24 titles over three months to follow the story - specifically:

hideTitle(s)
Batman #631-634 Batman: The 12 Cent Adventure Batman: Gotham Knights #56-58 Batgirl #55-57 Catwoman (vol. 2) #34-36 Detective Comics #797-800 Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #182-184 Nightwing #96-98 Robin (vol. 2) #129-131

And the total is less than...forget about the fucking sum, it is less than an individual part. 

In Theory...

In theory cross over events should be exciting. Not for the reasons popular intuition might suggest, pages in a comic book and screen time in a movie is pie. The more characters the less screen time, panels per character. 

Adding characters means more time for a character you like iff they are the character added to the title. Right, so it might be more entertaining for you if Leatherface showed up at the end of Little Women, but it's less entertaining for you if the Little Women show up in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then again maybe not, if you viscerally hate Civil-War era teenage girls. 

It's more that taking disparate ideas, "what if?" scenarios can work. Remixing, reworking and re-whatevering existing intellectual products can yield interesting outcomes.

Now there is nothing inherently bad about the idea of a crossover, in theory. In practice however, this isn't an extremely skilled writer or editor going 'I've got this wild idea that might be interesting...' An example of that might be Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" the template for "Batman v Superman" where the final act is Batman v Superman. The difference being that Miller had the clout to create an isolated title liberated from the rest of DC continuity. Other examples being Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a Victorian literary crossover event, and of course Watchmen, or Warren Ellis' Planetary series. 

In 2000AD comic series "Trifecta" was a surprise crossover between three seemingly independent titles. 

Here is the basic foundations on which a crossover "event" can be successful:

First, someone has to want to do it, at the creative level. Someone needs to have an idea of a story to tell, and that pushes the project.

Second, it helps to do meta-commentary or using euphamistic characters than a story that effects a canonical comic universe. For example, Watchmen and Planetary.

Third, it helps to remove the crossover event from main-title continuity. "Justice League: New Frontier" is a good example.

Fourth, a crossover event that can be kept relatively local, or to a subset of the comic universe will work better than "Everybody vs Galactic Genghis Kahn and his Omega Device." For example, Batman and it's spinoffs are more popular than most of the rest of the DC Justice League titles, so Bat-Family crossovers tend to be better stories than Justice League events. Similarly, Spiderman's popularity is such that there's a Spiderman for girls, and a Spiderman for African Americans, and even earlier a Spiderman manga serialization. However, I don't really know of any Spiderverse crossover events that I could compare to Marvel events.

Importantly though, the four things, though I'm sure non-exhaustive, are mutually exclusive to the main reason crossover events are done. That reason being $$$.

The Economics of Crossover Events

Once a month you release a Batman comic, and Batman is popular, say you sell 100,000 copies a month. It would not be surprising that a second monthly Batman title sells more than the main Superman title. Then you have Aquaman a character so unpopular his name is identified by Google Chrome as a spelling error, it sells maybe 30,000 copies.

So you have a title that sells well. Like Batman, and one that generally sells poorly, like Aquaman. So, what you can do, is begin a story arc in Batman, that ends in Aquaman. You tell the reader if they want to find out who's stealing all the fish in Gotham City Harbour, they need to buy Aquaman #17. 

The publishers leverage popular titles to sell unpopular ones. Crossover events are variations of the upselling sales tactic. "Would you like Aquaman with that?" because selling more to existing nerds is a lot easier and cheaper than attracting new customers to the store with new titles.

The problem is, that crossover events suck. There's a curious incongruity between how excited/nostalgic people are for the MCU Avengers movies, and that super-hero team ups pretty much never make anyone's recommendation lists for comics. Patrick H Willems for example, list of recommended comics to get you into comics contains no collections of crossover events* and Patrick is someone I would guess I subjectively disagree with on most matters, by contrast Chris Piers of Comic Tropes is someone I love, and feel I would subjectively agree with, even defer to, on comic book matters, since around 2017 he has released "top ten" lists for comics that came out in those years with 2019 conspicuously absent, his lists almost never feature cross-over events or super-hero team ups.

I suspect, this general phenomena is because crossover events are sales events, marketing promotions masquerading as stories. Mechanistically speaking, these events are when popular titles get diluted with crap. It is the time of year when Batman is obliged to take Aquaman or Green Arrow along, when Spider Man has to visit the Fantastic Four and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage have to hang out with characters that wear costumes.

There is another economic principle that needs to be addressed in crossover events that relates directly to dilution. That is intermittent reinforcement if you have a story spread across 8 titles, you can't  have the mastermind revealed in every issue, much of it is going to be filler. Smart money is on the big reveals being not in the popular titles, but it can be intermittent.

A good example is in the context of the MCU and what has become a staple of mid-credits cut scenes, which are predictable enough in and of themselves, there will be a mid or post credit cut scene, but what is intermittent is how rewarding that scene will be. Will it involve a popular character like Iron Man or Captain America or will it tease the coming of nobody/s favourites Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch? Will Thanos have a revealing conversation with one of his minions, or will Bucky Barnes be revealed to have been recuperating in a Wakandan hut?

I cannot exclude the possibility, that such nerds exist who will pay money to sit through two hours of a Captain Marvel movie, or Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings just to get the payoff teaser of the cut scene. I mean, it is common enough that trailer's are more entertaining than seeing the whole film.

As Gabor Mate has said of addiction, "it isn't the having it's the getting." Where the best feeling in an addiction cycle isn't the high, but scoring the drug. Anticipatory pleasure. The intermittent rewards are the suggestions that something good is coming/going to happen, there need not be anything substantially good in your hands.

I can nest here, to this last point, a prediction which is that if a post credit scene in a forthcoming MCU movie such as "The Marvels" as at writing, teased the return of Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Tony Stark, nerd-fans will extract more pleasure from the announcement of the return than they did from RDJr's cameos as Iron Man in the Tom Holland Spiderman movies, or his last performances as a lead character in End Game, Infinity War, Captain America Civil War and Iron Man 3. And almost certainly more excited by the announcement of his return to the role, than to watch a 150 minute film about Iron Man vs Titanium Man, or Fin Fang Foom, or Modok.

Why Crossover Stories Suck

It's relatively simple to come up with a plot that crosses Batman into an unpopular title like Aquaman you know someone's stealing all the fish in Gotham City, Batman hits up usual water-themed suspects Penguin and Killer Croc but they aren't the culprits, the thief is coming from inside the Ocean! Batman needs to enter the jurisdiction of Atlantis.

Whatever. Crossover events suck when DC or Marvel attempt to boost the sales of their entire title range. This is when we get plots that are "Mega-something from dimension 8XKL9 threatens the very existence of the universe as he attempts to assemble xteen artifacts from across the world to create the Omega device."

We could call it the "Drop everything threat" and it needs to exist for logical reasons. You probably can't sell a crossover event which is Spiderman suggests to the Avengers and X-Men that they join a foosball league. (This would probably be far more interesting than an attempt to destroy the multiverse.)

In Gotham city though, it's seemingly every other week that Joker has used his Joker juice to create an army of jokers, or scarecrow has found a way to distribute his fear gas etc. Hence you need to concoct essentially a trolley problem to take Batman away from his usual jurisdiction into outer space or whatever. 

The intuition that massive crossovers of the Avengers or the JLofA appears to be "more is more" and admittedly, I would say that anyone who wants to conduct a focus group with the specific consumer demographic of nerds are wasting their time. We know what nerds want: nerds want more. Nerds are in the full grip of addiction. It's the idea that it is mathematically more interesting for a busload of passengers to be in danger, than for a character known and cared about to be in danger.

A great example of this principle in practice is an event in the fantasy series "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan, even though it is not a crossover event. At some point the major protagonist Rand Al'Thor teams up with another character Nynaeve to use two giant magic statues to cleanse the evil out of magic that makes male magic users go insane in the story. It's a real game changer. One of the gigantic statues is mostly buried on an island and it holds an orb that starts glowing when the two protagonists cast their mega spell. The inhabitants of the island misinterpret the orb glowing as a sign of the end times and commit mass suicide. 

The author Robert Jordan, was allegedly shocked that his readership, did not give a shit about the mass suicide. I found a reddit thread that can substantiate it here, and it helpfully links to the author's blog post where he expressed his disappointment that people were so blasé about unnamed unnumbered characters of quite literally no consequence to the story dying for no reason.

Are you familiar with the dirty joke "a boy fell in the mud." Crossover events and their necessity to create a premise large enough to have a blind acrobat in New York and space travelling intergalactic band of misfits team up with someone who can shrink down and communicate with ant queens, work off the idea that "two boys fell in the mud" is twice as funny as one boy falling in the mud. 

Crossover events suck in terms of writing because they are first and foremost sales promotions, an attempt to get marginal revenue to equal marginal cost. The story is fitted to spec, if it is ambitious at all it is to offer a narrative excuse to retcon up a bunch of garbage that has accumulated over a number of years as a result of having numerous creative teams working across numerous titles.

Marvel's "Civil War" crossover event could be regarded as interesting. Interesting things happened to interesting characters. Like Peter Parker revealing his identity, meant there was a slew of comics in the Spider-Man Titles where we could read the repercussions.

The trouble is, many interesting changes are not sustainable in comics. Eventually, Spiderman needs to go see a wizard to cast a spell that makes everyone forget his identity. Barry Allen dies in one crossover event, only to be brought back to life in another crossover event. 

And worse, if you write a good interesting crossover event, it will likely sell well. Sales are most addictive of all, and that gives us bad crossover events like "Civil War II"  

The famous Mr. Show sketch "The Story of Everest" is a form of rake joke, and in the creators' commentary track its revealed that the knocking over of the thimble collection was done more times than shown in the sketch, because the audience stopped laughing. They had to calibrate how much escalation worked. 

The Permanent Sale

In my marketing degree, I was taught about a trap. You are a retailer, and before your annual stock take, you decide to run a sales promotion to try and reduce inventory and make the stock taking exercise easier. You paint on your windows "Buy 2 get 1 free!" and it's a huge success. People take the opportunity to stock up on widgets.

However, you notice a few things. The first is that the month after the sale, sales drop off. The second is that the next year you notice sales drop off in the months leading up to stock-take. It appears your customers are anticipating another sale.

Anyway, skip a few years and you find yourself more or less holding permanent sales. There's still the end-of-financial-year big sale right before stock take. There's the post-christmas sale, the back-to-school sale, and a complex schedule of sales promotions on certain items that run year round. 

Permanent sales are the end result of becoming addicted to sales promotions. Both businesses and customers build up a tolerance to sales promotions. I do this with Steam games, there's no video game on my Wishlist I can't wait for to be 50~75% off. Online retailers Drjays and Yesstyle I've never known not to advertise a discount coupon code on the landing page.

Now, there's a stark difference between DC and Marvel, and that difference is Batman. Batman has his own sub-universe with at least 8 titles. Marvel's closest equivalents would be the X-men and Spiderman properties that generally only have 1 or 2 spin off titles at any time. However if you take a fucking gander at the list of Marvel's line-wide crossover events you can see there's two events in the 1980s, three in the 90's, four in the 00's, TEN in the 10's, and in the less than 3 years of the 2020's we are up to four line-wide events. 

DC's addiction can be perhaps best apprehended in the title's of it's crossover events "Crisis on Earth Prime""Crisis on infinite Earths" "Zero Hour: Crisis in Time" "The Final Night" "Day of Judgement" "Joker: Last Laugh" "Identity Crisis" "Infinite Crisis" "FINAL Crisis" "Blackest Night" "Forever Evil" "Batman: Endgame" "Superman Doomed" "The New 52: Futures End" ... "Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths"

I saw many a culture-critic youtuber point out the bloat of the MCU in Phase 4, where between the Disney+ TV shows and movies the claim I heard was that they put out more content than the previous three phases put together. By my count phases 1-3 put out 23 movies, and maybe the TV show Agents of SHEILD counts too. Phase 4 has 15, 7 movies and 8 TV shows. This is unremarkable, given that the parallel source material of comic book publication universes tell us exactly what was going to happen. 

These are after all, adaptations.

Virgin, Ryan, Saw

The 20th century saw air travel invented. It began as a luxury with attractive stewardesses serving cocktails while you stretched your legs out to smoke, to something worse than bus-travel in every way but the distance covered over time.

For me, it was somewhere between Saw III and Saw IV, that a movie became a TV show. Saw the original is indubitably a movie, Saw V and VI are episodes in a TV series that was released at the cinemas. 

Saw is a fairly famous franchise, the initial movie involves two men trapped in a dilemma, with a satisfying twist. After the first movie, the franchise becomes increasingly formulaic, there is a cold open like many TV series of someone in a survival game where they have to chop something off or die, or chop something off and die. The bulk of the movie will be a series of these survival games, while someone tries to figure out what goes on, and the last act will be the final survivor living through or dying as it is revealed to them the minutes dedicated to unresolved plot developments.

It's this format of watch a story that is essentially prelude of getting a piece of a story. I assume, with no real knowledge of TV production, that it is just standard practice that you get people to watch individual episodes in order to tease a season finale. Be it House M.D., The Mentalist, Dr Who or Seinfeld. 

The payoff for a TV channel is that you tune in to the finale and watch the sponsors adds, also you watch an entire episode during the regular season including the ad breaks in order to get hints as to the content of the season finale.

I put it to you, that "Phase" is just a euphemism for "Series" and an important aspect of this business model, is that the finale doesn't have to pay off the hype. The Saw series, literally goes fucking nowhere, in the back of my head is a distorted mess of innumerate Jigsaw-apprentices. Does Hoffman die at the end of Saw 3D or not? Why do I care? I don't.

The Unique Problems of the Film Medium

The first is that actors get old and die. Comics do not face this problem, and both DC and Marvel have a Simpson's style continuity, Bart has been 12 years old my entire life. The South Park gang are still in primary school as they've lived through Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, the Obama Presidency, the Garrison Presidency, Nintendo Wiis and iPads and World of Warcraft. 

Batman's parents were murdered shortly after attending a screening of a Zorro film, which places their deaths anywhere between 1920 and 2005. Judge Dredd ages in real time but you know he has a bunch of robot parts and lives in a future where his life and quality of life can be extended. He is currently 73 years old, which gives hope for a future instalment with Karl Urban.

However much anyone liked Michael Keaton or Christian Bale or R-Patz, it's an athletically demanding role, and these are big corporate owned IPs. This isn't like Rocky Balboa a creation of the lead actor who can reprise the role pretty much whenever he likes. 

What this sets up, is when the DCCU flops hard and essentially disintegrates, you can have Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton and R-Patz all playing Batman concurrently. Meanwhile over at the MCU, the main Avengers roster is all retired, at the least the two most charismatic leads - Evans, Downey and Johansen. Spiderman, owned by Sony, is being played competently as a naïve young man.

Which obliges the MCU concept to either conclude, in order to reboot Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, Black Widow, The Hulk after some interval. (Consult Batman at this point) Or bring on the second and third stringers - Shang Chi, Moon Knight because we all remember Shang Chi and Moon Knight when we were growing up, Marvel and DC have a whole bunchola of characters in their stable, but popularity breaks down in line with Pareto distributions - we would predict 1% of the characters to account for 50% of the sales, 20% accounts for 80%, 80% of the characters only 20% of the sales and 50% of characters accounting for 1% of the sales. The 2000s where the time of Marvel's 1% shining - Tobey McGuire as Spiderman.

Having sold off both X-Men and Spiderman rights as Marvel's two most popular properties, the MCU had no choice but to turn to the avengers. Phases 1-3 mark the 20% bracket selling 80%, and phase 4 brings the stable into 80% that sell 20% bracket. We can see it in the proliferation of titles and the diminished revenues and interest. 

The brilliance of the MCU concept, is behind us. The first piece of brilliance was figuring out a way to put Robert Downey Jr into 9 films instead of 3 like Christian Bale in Batman. It is an achievement of mileage. The second brilliant payoff is getting $1bn+ at the box office for an unpopular second or third tier character like Captain Marvel. That's turning movies into TV.

Why Would Anyone Want A Nintendo Universe?

I mean I can see why a studio would want to emulate the MCU while the MCU was working, before the fever broke. But a consumer should want a series of good films, and that is more likely to occur when you can exclude misses and only count hits.

Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers.

Pretty good right? Well, the Hulk movie arguably has been forgotten, Iron Man 2 wasn't as good as Iron Man, Thor? 

Here's another list: Kramer vs Kramer, The Amityville Horror, Rocky II, Apocalypse Now, Alien and 10. 

Malcolm Gladwell would say I'm nostalgic for when films only featured white people... even though phase 1 was extremely white. But in 1979 moviegoers got a bunch of good films, even some all-time classics with them being largely independent of other movies.

I feel I'm in a minority, that feels that books and comics and video games are legitimate mediums in which to tell a story, and do not need those stories to be legitimized by "the Movie" suffix being a box office success. 

However, I can conceive that someone could make a great Zelda movie, you know what wouldn't make a great Zelda movie better? A post credits cut scene where Mario and Luigi tumble out of a pipe into Hyrule and ask "where are we?" 

You know what isn't exciting at all? If in a mid-credits cut scene of the Donkey Kong movie Diddy Kong peels a banana to discover a golden ticket with a Bowser insignia inviting him to compete in a Super Smash Bros. tournament.

You know what would be fucking shit? If Starfox and friends are attempting to travel through warp space when an anomaly sends them crashing into Bowser's Arena.

It's probably no surprise that I never got Super Smash Bros. games either. My experience of them was that they are a messy conceptual nightmare. I got no thrills from seeing Princess Peach and Kirby finally square off in combat.

A Nintendo cinematic universe doesn't have the problems the MCU has, namely, Seth Rogan and Chris Pratt can phone in their performances for 20 or 30 years as voice actors. Voices age slower than bodies. You don't have to pay someone to train for 6 months intensively to get in shape for a role. Furthermore, if you do have to replace voice talent, it's a lot easier to stick another voice up a 3d puppet. (Patton Oswald replacing Louis CK in "The Secret Life of Pets" due to the masturbating in front of women).

But just make Mario movies, I haven't seen the current one and probably won't, I'm not hungering for a sequel. Make a Zelda movie, maybe I'd check it out if the trailers promised something. Don't make a Kirby movie, because there's not a story there. Make a Donkey Kong Country movie, because there probably is. 

And sure, if in 5 years the dollars just makes too much sense, do a crossover movie of all the Nintendo properties having to fight in a tournament to stop video game land from being destroyed. You know, like Wreck-It-Ralph. But there's no need to tease a Nintendo Cinematic Universe. It can easily be of no consequence just like in Nintendo games, Zelda Tears of A Kingdom is unaffected by who canonically wins Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Nor does it effect Super Mario Galaxy or anything there.

What makes me want to cry, is the idea that there's an MCU shaped hole in the world, that needs filling.

There isn't. Try to remember life before the MCU. You know, when people other than Koreans and Tarentino made good movies.