Video Essay Explores How Long Marvel Films Will Continue to Go On
Marvel Studios has started quite a powerful trend in the entertainment industry and all the other studios with comic book properties are trying to emulate what Marvel has created. How long will Marvel be able to keep this up, though? There’s going to come a point where actors won’t renew their contracts and something is going to have to happen to those characters if those actors aren’t replaced.
Marvel Comics has been telling the stories of these characters since the 1940s. They’ve also rebooted their comic properties as well. The fact of the matter is Marvel has a ton of stories that they can tell and you never know, there could come a point where the studio reboots the MCU. Regardless of how things turn out, I personally don’t think Marvel will ever stop making movies.
Screen Rant has released a video essay called “Will The Marvel Universe Go On Forever?” and it explores what the future of Marvel might hold. The video comes with the following note:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last eight years, you’ve probably noticed a certain trend in superhero movies: the shared universe. While superhero films used to be treated as independent series that would reset after two or three movies, they now build on top of each other to create an almost overwhelming amount of shared continuity. Case in point: the upcoming Captain America: Civil War, which functions as a follow up to Captain America: Winter Soldier, an action-packed reunion of the Avengers: Age of Ultron cast and an introduction to both Black Panther as well as a new iteration of Spider Man!
But how long can this go on? Hollywood’s obsession with fan approval shows that one day a series that seems to be riding strong (Amazing Spider Man, for instance), can bottom out within 9 months of the latest films release. Steven Spielberg has even gone on record saying the superhero film will soon go “the way of the western” and fall out of popularity in mainstream Hollywood.
Is the father of American Blockbuster Cinema on to something? Around 30 characters have already enjoyed multiple appearances across the Marvel films so far, and a library of characters in Marvel Comics continuity that number in the thousands, most of whom can appear and cross over between a number of films and TV series. With a potentially infinite number of combinations, will this cinematic universe collapse under its own weight? Or will the Marvel Cinematic Universe go on FOREVER?