Marvel has often been criticized for a lack of diversity in its characters and stories, but this has not stopped audiences from showing up at the box office. People eat what they like, and film studios know it.
Add the Marvel One-Shots, the digital series WHIH Newsfront and the Team Thor sketches, and you begin to see the vastness of the Marvel Marketing Machine. to this years Cloak & Dagger, each series co-promotes the MCU brand.
Whether the success of Wonder Woman – and the future success of Captain Marvel – will actually lead to the production of a Black Widow movie remains to be seen, but if it does, expect her to be the headliner in a movie shared with at least one other character, much like Thor’s team-up with the Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok.Ī second form of Marvel’s spin-off strategy is the creation of Marvel’s television department, and their output: from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. By familiarizing audiences with these characters before giving them their own films, the financial stakes became more secured. Civil War just took care over the introduction part, warming audiences for yet another Spider-Man reboot.Īs I discussed back in 2015’s Sexism and Racism in Hollywood: The Black Force Awakens, the early introduction of these characters was intended to carefully lower the risks of the new heroes’ solo outings. In the film, Peter tests his powers, struggles with them, learns, fails, but then becomes the hero he is meant to be after all.
Though presented as “not another origin story”, Spider-Man: Homecoming was an origin story in absolutely every single way, except the fact that the first fifteen minutes where Peter Parker is introduced and he gets bitten by a spider are missing.
Of course, Marvel Studios soon followed with Captain America: Civil War, which laid the groundwork for Spider-Man: Homecoming and Black Panther. It wasn’t until 2016, eight years after the start of the MCU, that a new character was introduced in an ensemble film, with fixed plans for a spin-off films: Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman. Though Kevin Feige discussed the spin-off possibilities of Black Panther this week, mentioning the potential of an Okoye spin-off series, these kind of remarks – whether scripts are actually ordered or not – are often no more than promotional speeches for the movies the “spin-off characters” appear in. After The Avengers, it was obvious that making spin-offs based on all those formerly mentioned characters was unrealistic at best, even when producing three films a year. In the years since Phase One, however, spin-off announcements have been kept mostly under wraps. We all know what happened to the former characters Bucky Barnes reincarnation was obviously better suited to present himself in a Captain America movie and Hawkeye might just wind up sharing a movie with Black Widow. Though hardly memorable, both The Warrior’s Three, The Winter Soldier and Hawkeye spin-off movies were considered. Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers led to similar announcements. The first still hasn’t found its footing yet, despite writers having handed in their first drafts even before The Avengers hit the big screen the second is now being rebranded into a Captain Marvel movie the third went on to become a television series and the fourth never got passed the initial writing stage. After Iron Man 2 rolled out, no less than four new spin-off movies were put in production: B lack Widow, Nick Fury, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.