Smells Like ‘10s Spirit: How ‘The Avengers’ Assembled the First Successful Cinematic Universe

“Smells Like ’10s Spirit” takes a look at the decade in movies through the lens of success stories only made possible by unique trends that emerged. This series explores ten films – one from each year of the 2010s – and a single social, economic or cultural factor that can explain why it made an impact or lingers in the collective memory. Each piece examines a single film that tells the larger story of the tectonic forces reshaping the entertainment landscape as we know it. In this edition: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, a film that he wrote and directed.

“Studios aren’t looking for the next Avengers; they’re looking for the next Hunger Games.” I think back to this quote often, though I’ve long since forgotten who said it to me in May 2012. As a college student, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend the Cannes Film Festival and interface with industry leaders for the first time. With nothing really tearing up the Croisette this particular year, I posed a question to a panel of experts what they thought the effect would be of John Carter‘s colossal bomb and The Avengers‘ historic opening weekend.

I go back and forth on the validity and wisdom of the response I received. On the one hand, the executive’s prediction that high concept YA novels were the next big boom of the 2010s did not quite pan out. The Hunger Games franchise, while immensely successful, proved less the start of a new trend and more the dying embers of the ‘00s bonfire started by Harry Potter and Twilight. By 2016, the third installment in the Divergent series tanked so badly that the final chapter was quickly scuttled off to television – and then unceremoniously shelved for the indefinite future. Meanwhile, many theaters chose to operate 24/7 to accommodate opening weekend demand for the final Avengers film in May 2019.

Yet the extent to which Marvel dominates in the space of the “cinematic universe,” a franchise strategy breaking down silos between characters licensed by the same company by combining their stories into shared narratives and films, suggests that maybe more studios should have heeded the executive’s suggestion. While the story of 2012, and the decade at large, may well be the strategic brilliance of Marvel’s Avengers gambit, an equally significant development is just how many of their competitors tried – and failed spectacularly – to emulate their business model and creative synergy. Studios invested precious time and energy to merge various intellectual property holdings, and what do they have to show for it but a string of financially and artistically disappointing films (provided they even got off the ground at all) while Avengers: Endgame amassed a previously unthinkable gross of $357 million during its opening weekend? Marvel understood where their industry was headed long before their competition did. This racket is no longer just about movies anymore – it’s a game of branding and content.

As tempting as it is to imagine Marvel hatching their plan for domination like a secret cabal in a dark room, the real story behind their path to box office domination began from economic imperatives. After filing for bankruptcy in 1996, the company’s executives were angling for ways to emerge from their financial hole. Marvel outsourced big screen productions using its famous characters to major film studios who took care of the dirty work of filmmaking that the house Stan Lee built was unequipped to take care of themselves. As a result, though, they missed out on the profits when the movies hit big. When Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films minted the dominance of comic book adaptations, Marvel only saw $62 million of the $3 billion haul.

In a twist that some might find a little too on-the-nose, the seeds for the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe were laid at none other than … Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. Per the reporting in Ben Fritz’s book The Big Picture, it was here in 2003 where future Marvel Studios COO David Maisel pitched the company’s future to CEO Ike Perlmutter, who was loath to believe that moviemaking operations could ever make a meaningful contribution to his bottom line. His winning argument? Maisel pointed out that if Marvel took a more vertically integrated approach to their film division, the company was not at the mercy of studios choosing when their movies got released. (In yet another instance of being one step ahead of the market, a recent Trump DOJ decision reversed decades-old precedent that prevented full vertical integration in the film industry, a move that predicted scholar Peter Labuza to predict that Disney might alter the landscape once more by fully entering the film exhibition business.) Marvel would be the sole decision maker when it came to distribution, and they could pick dates that were most optimal for the real money maker: toy sales.

Marvel benefitted enormously, as many films featured in this column have, from the glorious accident of fortuitous timing. As Maisel and the team at Marvel Studios looked to capitalize on the revenue potential of the company’s extensive library of characters, they benefitted from a generous pre-Great Recession economic bubble that teetered on the edge of bursting. Their lenders were looking for new investment vehicles and cared little about the risk it carried. By the time Marvel’s long game played out in the early ’10s, the austerity measures of the recovery led most studios to lean on reliable, familiar formulas while The Avengers felt like a rare streak of boldness and bravado. (DC might have beaten them to market with a Justice League made by George Miller in the late ’00s had they not caught an economic headwind – the 2007-2008 writers’ strike.)

Under the tutelage of Kevin Feige, Marvel began working to combine the characters into a single, overarching narrative framework. From the start of his tenure as president, he brought together a “brain trust” of leading figures in the company’s publishing and animation divisions and integrated their expertise in what made the characters successful. While confident the master plan would work, their head honcho had quite a generous safety net thanks to the terms that the company negotiated in their financing. According to Marvel historian Sean Howe, the company used character rights, including the Avengers, as collateral – but did not specify who the Avengers were. “If you know comic book history,” said Howe, “you know that The Avengers can be any of 50 different characters.” If Iron Man flopped, Marvel could recover by replacing him with a new figure and cause minimal disruption.

Given the way Marvel made the decisions on structuring the lead-up to The Avengers, it’s obvious why Iron Man made big money despite not being considered a top-tier hero. The company recruited focus groups, but the discussions they stimulated had nothing to do with the actual mechanics of storytelling or narrative. Instead, according to Fritz in The Big Picture, these groups asked kids which heroes they would want to play with as a toy. Iron Man won in a landslide. From the beginning of the series, commercial imperatives outweighed creative considerations. This is not to say that Joss Whedon and the other directors who worked for Marvel did not manage to achieve significant visions of their own. But it does mean that the box in which they operated was circumscribed by the need for their films to serve as a key touchpoint in a larger, multi-pronged marketing campaign.

This process took place before Disney acquired Marvel, so ascribing the company’s maneuvering to the Mouse House’s modus operandi is inaccurate. But it’s clear that Disney recognized the strategic genius when the purchase took place; in 2009, CEO Bob Iger commented, “The acquisition of Marvel offers us […] opportunity to advance our strategy, to build a business that is stronger than the sum of its parts, and to drive substantial long-term value to our shareholders.” (By 2011, Disney’s consumer products division raked in nearly $200 million more in revenue than their film studio.)

The Avengers is the blockbuster that best encapsulates the 2010s Hollywood corporate id. As Zach Baron, then of Grantland, described in 2012, “The film is less a tentpole than an entire lean-to built of other, lesser tentpoles.” Not merely a singular big-ticket event but a culmination that finalizes Marvel’s first constellation, the film’s existence embodies both the time value of money principle and how movies are now just another touchpoint in a cross-channel customer acquisition funnel.

Did Marvel execute this strategy best, though, or merely get there first? We may never know. As Feige climbed his way up to his ultimate goal of comic book hero convergence, he might as well have burned the ladder behind him with how little the company’s competitors used it. They were all so focused on getting their own bright, shiny object that the studios ignored the years-long path it took to get there. In the four years prior to the release of The Avengers, Feige built up brand equity for each figure in the film. Stealthy as it might have seemed in 2012, the plan was out there in the open all along. But no one was paying attention. In an interview with Mashable in 2017, Feige described the indifference of his rivals in the ramp-up to The Avengers:

In May 2008, just days after the release of Iron Man, Marvel Studios announced four more films to be released over the next few years: Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, all leading up to The Avengers.

It was an insanely ambitious plan at the time. Marvel didn’t invent sequels or spinoffs, but an interconnected franchise, at that scale, on that schedule – that was new. Feige expected a big response … and, as he recalls it, got crickets in return.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is ambitious, this is great,’ and nobody talking about it,” said Feige.

Following 2012, studios scrambled to find ways in which they could cross-pollinate their IP. Some made sense, like DC eventually teaming Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and more in a Justice League film. Others, like Universal’s Dark Universe, populated with villains like Dracula and Frankenstein who arguably formed the first “extended universe” in cinematic history, might have worked if executed properly. But most were like Sony’s ill-fated attempt to create a Ghostbusters universe with series creator Ivan Reitman: attempts to skip straight to an end product without evaluating the viability of the underlying material to sustain a multiplicity of stories.

The success of The Avengers has ushered in a new era of moviegoing, one where audiences expected their action films to go wider, not deeper. They did not crave Sony drilling down in the mythology of just Spider-Man alone enough for a “Sinister Six” universe. The backlash against the very concept when revealed in the studio’s leaked emails from 2014 proved a key factor in chairwoman Amy Pascal licensing Spidey back to Marvel, per Fritz’s The Big Picture. Moviegoers are now conditioned to value sustained, continued engagement with a franchise that continues to expand its bounds, both onscreen and off.

As 2019’s spate of disappointing sequels and would-be franchises from Godzilla: King of the Monsters to Doctor Sleep show, re-emerging after several years away with nary a peep to be heard may no longer be a viable business strategy. Be it through lucrative licensing and sponsorship deals, ancillary products, standalone films, television transmedia, Marvel has maintained consistent ties with its fans. Starting in 2008, Paul Glitter, Marvel’s president of consumer products, transitioned the company from thinking about four week “grab-n-go” plans for their merchandise with retailers towards more ambitious three- to five-year plans. Avengers: Endgame was essentially the beneficiary of an 11-year marketing campaign spanning the breadth of the company’s promotional efforts.

In one sense, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was the 2010s answer to the 2000s’ “hyperlink cinema,” a prevailing trend in prestige cinema that granted meaning and purpose (however illusory) to the miracle of connection in a confusing, overwhelming world. Others might cite the influence of the golden age of television and shifting consumer preferences for serialized yet cumulative narratives as an explanation for how the MCU produced the highest-grossing film of all-time. It feels more accurate, however, to define them as something else entirely. As much as this column has separated the art of The Avengers from the commerce of the endeavor, compartmentalizing the two is rarely so clean-cut. The business of film exerts a gravitational pull on the aesthetics themselves.

2012’s The Avengers was the canary in the coal mine for what was to come in the ongoing battle to stand out in the crowded field of “content.” In order to compete with television and streaming – Netflix saw sixfold subscriber growth between the first and last Avengers installments – film began to take its shape and tenor. Post-Endgame, too, Iger recently admitted that fans of the MCU will have to tune into the recently launched Disney Plus to fill in pieces of the storyline that plays out in theatrical releases. After decades of an inferiority complex to the silver screen, TV scored a victory in the 2010s by forcing cinema to compete on its turf. Paradoxically, streaming is both our closest approximation to monoculture and the force ringing its death knell by necessitating a fractured storytelling.

Endgame co-director Joe Russo described his film’s triumph as a “testament to serialized storytelling, [and] something that can only be made possible through social media and the collective global conversation about content.” In that same panel discussion, Russo also declared the end of what he called “two-hour, closed-end” films because “this generation is craving a different kind of storytelling.” Perhaps the genesis of The Avengers came from what Feige described to Collider in 2012 as “looking to replicate that experience that a comic reader had, who […] always had their favorites and would argue about who’s better and who would win in a fight and occasionally they would get together for an uber-event and then after that uber-event would go back into their own comic stories.” But the film and franchise’s domination owes more to how well it meets the demands most audiences have for content at large: omnipresent, intensifying, bold in scope but familiar in form.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Where to stream The Avengers