Marvel’s Cinematic Universe not just a Franchise but a Meta-Franchise

Recently, Marvel’s Infinity Wars achieved a monster box office global opening of $640.9MM breaking records and breaking writing conventions at the same time. It’s Rotten Tomatoes score was equally impressive with a fan rating of 91% and a critics rating of 83%.

Achieving a rare “first” in the world of entertainment:

Aside from the fact that clearly a whole lot of people of all ages, across the world, really liked this movie, it has also achieved another kind of first. It is the world’s first, blockbuster, global, Meta-Franchise. The Logic issues, a story that’s not a complete story, an insanely huge cast of character that make it impossible to service real emotional arcs in 2hrs & 40 min, and many more rules of good storytelling broken, didn’t stop this Meta-Franchise movie from landing in gargantuan success. (We’ll unbox why this movie got permission to break these very good rules in a moment).

So what is a Meta-Franchise? 

It’s a distinct commercial story/premise whose narrative is fed by other distinct and standalone franchises. In short, Thor, Spiderman, Black Panther, The Avengers, Guardians Of The Galaxy, and many other unique Marvel franchises, all bring characters, Plot elements, meaning and backstory to the larger moves of the Cinematic Universe Franchise. Infinity Wars is the first, bonafide, Meta-Franchise output of the Cinematic Universe.

I think it’s very important to recognize the difference between a Meta-Franchise and the large Global Franchises. Star Wars is a large global franchise but not a Meta-Franchise. All the movies and content done to date in the Star Wars Universe are contributors to a single, vast, story arc. Solo is a prequel, not a separate franchise.

Vision and Courage builds a Meta-Franchise:

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, (and a few other golden age comic creators) consistency of universe has been the gift that keeps on giving. Marvel/Disney deserve their own heaping of kudos for recognizing and grooming that creative vision into a universe that they have invested in, tested and boldly built into this breakthrough success. This kind of growth takes a long view for investment and commitment (something rare indeed in the world of entertainment where none of the other big companies have yet shown the will to build and execute on and even within Disney itself, the same strategic vision hasn’t been applied to Star Wars. (More on the opportunities for the Star Wars Franchise in a coming blog post).

Prior to Infinity Wars, Marvel’s Cinematic Universe had given us some very interesting crossover stories exploring and demonstrating that the universe could be made seamless.  Well thought through risks were taken and even though not all worked well, the connections got built and we, the audience, watched and connected to these distinct characters and their unique stories and arcs. In essence, Marvel/Disney taught us the rich mythology of the Cinematic Universe not by making us drink from a firehose in a single movie (something that never works) but by building that bigger understanding across many movies, many characters, many different reasons to find the sub-franchises relevant, each in their own right!  It is likely that most people who went to the movie had seen at least some of the many Marvel movies that revealed the characters, their struggles and their personal and world backstories. It was certainly clear that the writers assumed this and made little effort to explain much about the pantheons of heroes in the movie. I have certainly heard a fair amount of criticisms from audience members who didn’t understand some aspect of the movie because they hadn’t seen that particular franchise’s movies. It makes me wonder just how sustainable this new model of motion picture storytelling is when it requires pre-consumption of so many other franchises.

Permission to break the rules:

In the world of motion picture writing, there’s a number of well known creative choices that one wants to avoid simply because many movies and many decades have shown they don’t work. Below are three such choices that generally don’t work (and I know that I’ll get comments about some example where it did but it doesn’t change the word “generally”) yet Marvel’s Cinematic Universe/Meta-Franchise was able to break.

Avoid too much backstory or mythology. 

Generally, this tends to make stories too “thick” and impenetrable to all but the most avid fans (Warcraft) and can even displace critical character development with plot points in service of explaining something that doesn’t move the story forward.

Infinity wars left the job of backstory and mythology mostly to the sub-franchises/previous movies and did little more than a bit of expository reference to those previous stories.

Avoid having too many character stories to service.

Too many characters means not enough time to tell sufficient set up or arc for each character and tends to put the character in service of plot points versus plot in service of character moves that help us to relate to them and inhabit the changes they are going through. 

Oh boy did Infinity Wars squeeze in an unprecedented number of characters. Though they were able to get some story told around a few more central characters (the deepest being Thanos our bad guy) it was very thready and relied heavily on the audience knowing these characters. Clearly, the many previous movies were sufficiently attended that this gamble worked and we now have a new success condition for a specific kind of story structuring. Can they manage a sequel that is equally jammed or is this unique? I don’t know the answers but it sure will be interesting to watch. I hope that other single franchise stories, that aren’t drawing off the Meta-Franchise base Marvel has, don’t try this (though I’m certain some will). 

An interesting note: Game of Thrones has been able to service this many significant characters by doing it over a much, much larger multi-episodic arc. Let’s raise a glass for yet another new story format proven but that’s for another post.

Avoid indeterminate endings or cliffhangers

Aaaaargh! (comic book expression of painful discomfort). This not only runs counter to the definition of a complete story, it’s one of my personal bugaboos. It’s done all the time and yet audiences generally don’t like this at all.

It’s not even a debate whether or not Infinity Wars brazenly stopped the story at a place engineered for maximum shock. It wasn’t story closure, since the audience knows with complete certainty that there’s much more to this story. With such high marks from fans and critics alike I have to wonder if the sub-franchises and depth of understanding of the characters and how the universe works built over two decades meant that a profoundly truncated and incomplete story was experienced as far less incomplete. We’re into undiscovered country here.

Who else could be doing this?

In order to build and activate on a true Meta-Franchise you need 3 things. 

1.) A deep world/universe that is alive and expanding at the edges full of many, many, places and ideas to explore but stitched together with logic and rules that work. This happens intentionally not accidentally and takes people who know how to do quality world building guided by narrative. 

2.) Distinct characters who each represent a distinct idea and useful meaning, each in their own right, capable of becoming their own sustainable and relevant franchise.

3.) A central creative vision supported by a company/management group willing to take the long view.

The roster is small but every day could be the beginning of someone developing the ideas that can make a Meta-Franchise. This list includes: 

1. DC/Warner and (some) their comic book hero franchises. Lots of very big work needed to make it align, as these were acquisitions versus conceived from a more aligned vision. It’s possible but lots of tough decisions and disruptive creative work needed.
2. Star Wars – Yes, right now this is a single Mega-Franchise but other IP creations could be developed to play in the vast universe without being part of the existing story. (See my previous post on dubious handling of Canon and lack of real newness)
3. Harry Potter – A rapidly expanding world/universe with so much yet to be revealed. Development of distinct stories that are separate franchises will be needed and Fantastic Beasts is a good start.

Commercial implications?

It’s very likely that as the Meta-Franchise establishes itself that it will, on some level, stitch together audience affinity across the feeder franchises and broaden play, social expression and lifestyle commitment on an individual audience/fan level. Whether that equals higher consumer lifetime value or more fans I can’t say at this point but cross collateralizing fandom would most certainly have an effect on retention. 

What’s next?

Hard to say…but guaranteed, we’re going to see lots more playing across the franchises in the marvel universe and lots of attempts to reproduce this kind of success from other big players (a small wince at Universal’s attempt at a dark universe). 

Marvel will clearly learn as they continue inventing how to do this and so will the industry. My advice for anyone considering making a Meta-franchise is to understand why this worked and take the time to build out the feeder franchises, carefully aligned in a well built universe, before jumping into these biggest of big stories.  What is guaranteed is that this sure is fun seeing new forms and structures emerge in this time of hyper-mythologizing!

Cheers, Kevin

Meta-story review of The Last Jedi

Today, on the evening news, there was a report that some of Hasbro’s sales were down and that analysts are blaming it on “tie-in fatigue.” The story went on to unbox a convoluted explanation about fans being fatigued over too many tie ins.

I thought this was an attempt at adaptive justification for something that has a much simpler explanation. I will explain using the The Last Jedi.

Well, there are more than enough fan reviews, chat boards and professional movie critiques presenting endless opinions about what worked and what didn’t in the movie, so I thought that I would do something different. I would review the movie from a Meta-story point of view.

In other words, how did the movie and narrative work from a franchise-driving stand point.

I’m not going to spend time praising the things that we love about Star Wars (and there’s a lot of those in this movie). Instead this critique will unbox those elements that are causing the franchise to stumble from a broader commercial standpoint.

Warning!! Spoiler Alert!! Read no further if you haven’t seen the movie and plan to.

Disaster on Rotten Tomatoes: When it first aired, the fan ratings on Rotten Tomatoes were in the mid to low 60’s. Not great but not rotten…yet. Over the following weeks, the more the audience showed up or thought more about what they’d seen, the more the fan rating dropped. Big trouble! It should go up… As of writing this, the number has hit 49%. Officially rotten!! What happened?!!

Meta-story analysis:  From a Meta-story standpoint, this latest installment is declining at nourishing and expanding itself as a franchise. It’s not some strange idea like “tie-in fatigue.” It’s a problem with what’s happening with the narrative and the world development. Here’s why:

A responsibility to deliver enough newness: With big world properties that live across multiple media and multiple sequels, prequels and timelines, it’s important to give your existing fans and your new audience real surprises and continual expansion of story, character and world.

Continual new human ideas need to flow through the story. Ideas that are useful for the new changes your audience wants in their lives now and tomorrow. Those ideas are hard to craft well but when done right, the audience wants to use them and the new visual elements are one of the most profound ways the audiences owns those ideas and takes them home to explore and expand on them. Rich new visuals also signal that the franchise is moving forward. 

Scant newness: For a while now, the Star Wars saga has significantly under-delivered on newness of world and elements within it. We travel to new places but those places are often full of vehicles and things that feel very tired, very “been there done that.” 

Example: The newer, larger, walkers. Just putting gorilla-style knuckles on what is largely the same design and same gestalt We’ve seen in quite a few of the movies now, just feels old. Was this done to employ much of the existing molds for the toy company? Where was the visual imagination that could have delivered an exciting new take on these dreadnaughts, a new visual idea that would use surprise to re-awaken that sense of institutional and relentless power at our doorstep? We are 10 movies into the franchise after all...

Surprise opens the mind to faster and deeper adoption of the ideas in the moment. Lack of surprise deadens that adoption and then the audience invests less in the franchise.

Use the permission Luke!: In a universe as vast as the Star Wars universe, with multitudes of alien races and the vast timeframe to stretch across, this franchise should have full permission to visually experiment and yet it seems bolted into its visual canon.  Where does this come from? There are more than enough images, toys, collectibles, published stories, games and beyond to enjoy the past visual work for generations yet to come. There’s no need to treat this franchise’s past like it should define its future. Re-invention and risk are critical to continual franchise health.  Visually, this movie doesn’t rise to that challenge.

Respecting some Canon is very, very, important for your fans but too much can be handcuffs for evolution or expansion. In big world properties, mythology bloat is inevitable. Over time, the canon becomes so thick it stifles evolution and it needs to be trimmed back from time to time. The devil is truly in the details here. If you’re going to change canon through narrative repositioning, or do a full on ret-con, how well you do it and what you replace it with had better be truly excellent.

Off-hand discarding of Canon, or worse still, badly conceived redefining of key elements to make them less important, can backfire as it did in this movie. Change but change well.

Overly heavy canon is more like a long time valued employee whose time it is to retire. The elements need to be moved from the story respectfully and with affection versus rudely and uncharacteristically. Again, this movie did the latter (I’ll explain where) and its just one of the ways it popped the audience right out of the story.

Every time you disrupt or weaken the story, you weaken the connection of the meaning and usefulness to the audience and this is what drives usage and franchise success!! 

Character consistency: In Star Wars, we have literally grown up with the characters as they’ve gone from young world hoppers to aged sages and galactic institutions. That means we KNOW who they are as if they were family members. The Last Jedi wrote behaviors for some of the most foundational characters of the franchise that just don’t play as true and even betray some of the key reasons we love them. Yes, there’s a Hollywood adage that goes something like “kill the baby.” What is meant is that crafting great story often means giving up something you hold precious in order to achieve the unexpected. What it doesn’t mean is that long standing characters can be thrown away unceremoniously.

Luke: Here is the character who started it all. A flawed and naïve boy who grew to take on the greatest evil in the galaxy and prevail because of goodness, heart and tenacity. Yes, there is human truth in disillusionment that can come with age but, the motivation that would have been needed for Luke to decide to kill a sleeping student was way outside of his character truth.

Additionally, the life we found him living was absurd and full of very strange narrative choices that left the audience feeling creepy. Whose idea was the unsettlingly cheesy sequence of milking a giant rubber lactating alien walrus during one of his rants?

We invest in fictional heroes the same way we do in real heroes. We don’t want to feel creepy or upset at behaviors that just don’t make sense for someone we invest our beliefs in. You can’t unsee or unhear those things so you can do real damage to your franchise. That doesn’t mean your characters and heroes can’t go through gigantic ups and downs and swings from dark to light. Doing it in ways that run counter to that character’s truth are the problem.  

Yoda: His appearance in this movie seemed only to be a device to burn the reliquary of the Jedi books. His laughing and bizarrely joking demeanor at doing so with little setup or reason for being in the story trivialized this beloved character who is the living and breathing metaphor for the balance of the force.  It was strange for a quirky character whom, in the past, we’d come to deeply trust.

Chewie – why was he even in the movie? He had no significant role as in past movies. He was little more than a chauffeur. Utterly removable. This character has been the franchise’s powerful metaphor for unquestioning loyalty and friendship, Battlefield brotherhood and egoless strength. None of those beats were serviced. What a terrible demotion. Like Luke, he was given a cringy sequence when he was about to eat that cooked Porg. It smells of ewoks but with an attempt at creating a meme-worthy moment that didn't work. 

Plot efficiency - When in doubt, leave it out: Characters or elements put into a story as a device to make certain plot points happen are often the weakest characters and elements in the movie. Broadly, the rule is to subtract these elements from the story and continually tighten the narrative and the logic of how it all moves forward. This is because characters with no depth or lacking any motivation that has been credibly built, are characters we can’t connect to, we aren’t scared of, who simply don’t move us. The more you have in a story, the flatter your story gets and eventually, your audience leaves not knowing why they really didn’t care, or worse still, didn’t like it.

Unfortunately, The Last Jedi was absolutely bursting with unneeded or under-motivated character appearances. Additionally, so many of these characters had bits and chads of set-up stories from previous movies that were either ignored in this movie or when the payoff arrived, it was lightweight or trivial.

Supreme Leader Snoke:  Here is a character that the story didn’t invest in letting us get to know and therefore fear. He had virtually no background, died in a surprisingly incompetent moment, but more importantly, he was not a dangerous idea. Being just a Megalomaniac makes THE most boring bad guys. Great bad guys actually have a viable and dangerous idea they represent. This idea is usually of greatest threat to our central hero. In this movie, that idea was Ben/Kylo Ren’s. That worked very well but then Snoke needed a deeper reason to exist.

Maz Kanata: An interesting character lightly set up in The Force Awakens as being somehow involved in Luke Skywalkers journey through the underground. What an interesting set up! We had no payoff of that set up in this movie and only saw her in a desperate broadcast that was clearly just to give us a push in the direction of a specific code breaker. Really unnecessary and not terribly respectful of the setup previously given the audience. Set ups are an immediate question that comes rushing back into the audience’s head as soon as they see the character again. Instead all that interest was spent on being merely expository…a plot device.

DJ (Benicio Del Toro): This codebreaker was a character that I’ve heard a lot about since the movie aired. Folks I’ve spoken to usually quirk an eyebrown and say something like “whats with that guy?” In essence, another plot device to play a reversal/betrayal to magnify the stakes during the battle with the last of the resistance.  Because of the weight of that betrayal, the character should have been built much deeper to carry it. As an example, how much better would it have been if it were one of Rey’s parents whom had abandoned her? (something that was yet another anti-climactic throw away moment when revealed). Add to the weight on her shoulders and give her a real reason for her crisis of belief rather than just some words from an evil guy.

Captain Phasma: Cool silver suit. Always walking on during ominous music in these movies. No real back-story. No real meaning or ideas…and then she’s dead by a miraculous come back from Finn and we don’t even get to see the great actress we know is under the suit? A real miss on all cylinders. You won’t sell more silver storm troopers unless there’s a character reason that moves us to want them. As I write this I worry that the next movie will see her not really dead but now hideously scarred…and mad…and still no reason to exist in the story.

Rey in the pit beneath the island: Nothing happened! Luke gave us a quick set up that the pit was strong with the dark side and when she goes down into it against Luke’s warnings, nothing understandable happens. No great metaphors, no foreshadowing that makes powerful sense, nothing of consequence that has any real impact on the story. Without this sequence the movie would not have changed one bit.

Looking for the codebreaker on the gambling planet: this entire sequence seemed gratuitous and unnecessary when crafting a character for profound betrayal could have, and should have, come from within the closer circle of characters in the story. We had to endure a seemingly impossible jaunt to an almost comically conceived of vegas-on-redbull planet when it all could have been done tighter and with far more painful and personal results. This one seemed a combination of plot convenience and unmotivated world building. Great world building always means each location is more than a host for the action. It is a new part of the meaning of the story. Dagoba is where Luke finds the strength to commit to the training…

Rules of Magic: Magic always has to have rules and limitations. Harry Potter does it so well and as a result, we feel the characters struggle to learn it, use it, master it and ultimately succeed even in spite of it. The force is a form of magic.

The Last Jedi just throws all of that out the window in exchange for the concept of finding “extraordinariness” within yourself just when you need it most. For me, this is perhaps one of the most disappointing takes of the more recent Star Wars films. Luke, Darth, anyone and everyone who can use the force in any capacity, have a long and profound journey to find it within themselves, train in its use and control, and even learn how to use a light saber. This takes a lifetime for most but at least several intensive years (and movies) for the deeply gifted.

Rey: So now we have a hero who never has to train and learn, who simply has the force grow and respond to her exactly when she needs it. Lightsabers leap into her hand on command, amazing skill in wielding it is automatic and even making enormously heavy rocks float are all possible without significant training. What this does is undercut our belief that she has achieved “worthiness.” We all know that exceptional is something that takes a lot of very, very, hard work so including that truth is critical to stories with any sort of magic or the magic becomes a form of deus-ex-machina (a god that descends from heaven to fix whatever is wrong). In essence, we are delivered a hero that is not useful to us as proof of an idea. This makes all the business that flows from her and her experience far less successful.

Leia and sudden manifestation of the force: You can’t have the first and only time a character uses magic be a moment the story turns on without some form of setup or foreshadowing. By having Leia pull herself from the vacuum of space, back into an airlock, using the force, when we have never seen her do so before is just that kind of moment. Yes, she’s Luke’s sister. Yes, the rest of the writing for her was good in this movie, but there was no cost or effort in the magic’s use and no real meaning either. Consistent with this movie’s reoccurring mistake of not putting narrative weight behind many of their choices. Again, doing a great job of telling a story with inspiring, believable, human struggle, triumph and truth is the foundation of sustaining a great heroic franchise.

Sacrificing good sustainable logic for great moments:  Weaponizing light speed changes the entire struggle.  I was blown away at how cool the moment was when Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) turned her ship around and went suicide-lightspeed right into the First Order causing unimaginable damage!

Then I began to think about what this does to the entire series. It changes everything. Once you weaponized something of that much power, everyone would use it…a lot! Get as many ships as you can and robot-light speed them into the First Order strongholds and vice versa. No ground war, just super powerful space missiles. I could almost guarantee that the next movies won’t even address this but there it is.

Also feeding the boys business: In the past, the Star Wars franchise has been a very broad-based, multi-generational and dual gender phenomenon. I applaud leaning into equalized roles for male and female actors in the new movies. About time!

That being said, The Last Jedi has somewhat taken its eye off the ball when it comes to keeping the boys business fed with heroic characters they want to inhabit as well.

This is important because there’s a very big difference between what audience shows up for a movie and who buys into all the play, game and lifestyle goods afterwards.

Male heroic model? So what male characters in the movie can I really aspire to be in a major heroic way? Yet again, Finn seems to only be in the story to be saved. Poe has potential but ultimately, he’s used primarily for scaling the stakes of the movie through his frustration. Luke…well we’ve talked about him. Net/net, there’s a very important discussion for the next movies about finding and representing important, new, male-heroic mythology that is thrilling and competitively aspirational.

There’s lots more to talk about but this blog post is already the longest one I’ve ever posted. 

In closing:

It’s hard to hurt big, multi-generational franchises: There is a great deal of evidence across other franchises that big, multi-generational franchises can grow dramatically, reinvent the visual, and even get it wrong and then get it right. This is important, because when a franchise delivers gigantic sums of profit to it’s parent company and all the companies who pay a lot to license that franchise, it can become too precious and second-guessing can cause all kinds of decision-making that is unhealthy to the creative process of shaping the next chapter in the story for an audience that is continually changing. There are ways to cope with these pressures and I'll save that for another blog post.

The Star Wars franchise has reached the point where I believe it needs to be carefully (and a little dangerously) evolved for relevance and world-newness as well as tighter and better structured character storytelling. I believe it’s all do-able and if it’s done right, we can all forgive a stumble or two on our favorite epic mythology. The upside for the franchise is still there but it’s not to be mined…it’s to be reshaped.