It’s hard to think of a series of films that went more than three films without a major overhaul or a significant decrease in quality; even the stalwart James Bond franchise, which Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige alluded to in a recent interview, hasn’t been without its misfires over the years. The Superman and Batman franchises of the ’70s/’80s/’90s suffered greatly after two films, as did the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises. And yet, as filming gets underway for Iron Man 3, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is really just getting started.The creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, seems to demand that the movies Marvel produces act a little bit more like comic books. If they’re all interconnected, after all, a clean slate for one would almost certainly require a clean slate for all. What makes the way they’ve been doing things so appealing to fans and exciting for the comic book reader, is exactly what will make the ship so large that it’s hard to turn if it’s on course to hit an iceberg.The question isn’t about recasting a character, which Feige dealt with and which can be perceived by the fans as basically the same as an artist change–you can like one “look” better but it doesn’t invalidate the other. It’s more a question of the complete approach to a character. The clean slate offered by a new #1 and a new creative team in comics is widely accepted by an audience who understands a little bit about the behind-the-scenes part of the industry. The same can’t really be said for the moviegoing audience, who will only see a fifth straight Captain America movie, for example, with the third different Cap in ten years. And without the option of hitting the “reset” button, how will Marvel cope?These are all questions, the answers to which are likely years away–but they’re questions worth answering, since so much of the appeal of the Marvel cinematic universe for fans of the comics has been tied up in the ways they can make the two resemble one another. Comics, though, are insular and complex and all kinds of things that movies can’t be–all this without the liability of being made using tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money. With that kind of power has to come some responsibility to consider whether you can really make some of these franchises work indefinitely without a reboot–and if you can’t, what do you do?
