“MCU movies have long mastered the concept of continuity and connectivity when their writers have understood that it worked wonders for their universe in the comics. Therefore, readers and spectators would pay close attention to details in every scene to make sure they haven’t missed anything important in the plot. Continuity in a storyline is extremely important, has to be in order for connectivity to be able to link everything.”
~ “The Artifice” online publication
While it has some of the better-known (Batman, Superman, etc.) comic book characters, the DC universe of superhero movies has dramatically underperformed the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The thirty-one films of the MCU have grossed $31B while the eleven films of the DC universe grossed only $6B.
That is almost $1 billion per film for the MCU!
I have read multiple articles about the “secret sauce” that has allowed them to differentiate and be so much more successful, but the most consistent reason seems to be the incredibly cohesive nature of all the films. A group of 30 writers regularly gather to script the franchise well into the future. A subset of those writers work on any given film and they always have overlap between each subsequent offering.
The precision of all that cohesion and cross-referencing makes the entire narrative feel more familiar and true. It is almost magical how it is all so perfectly connected. That is how they have created the most successful movie franchise of all time. And that story arc and process of creation already has eleven other stories ready to be told.
That method of writing allows them to create cohesion across dozens of films where the DC universe hasn’t been able to create that sort of integrated narrative across their eleven. And despite the fantastic track record, it continues to take a consistent group of writers spending weeks and years writing together. And it takes millions of dollars to make it all conveniently fit and feel like one overarching story instead of a series of films loosely tied together.
What if you were trying to write a cohesive narrative with 40 different authors on three continents over a span of 1500 years? Is there any way you could possibly make that sound like one story, much less a cohesive narrative where every cross reference perfectly fits with the others? What if you had to connect 63,779 cross-references?
It would be nothing short of a miracle to make that happen. The image in this post represents the sixty-four thousand different cross-references from the Bible. The horizontal continuum across the bottom represents the entire written span from Genesis to Revelation. The colored lines contain all of those thousands of references.
What the best writers in the world have worked tirelessly to do in the fantastic narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe completely pales in comparison. An increasing portion of the population questions the validity of the bible or the claims of divinity by the story’s singular superhero, Jesus. But it is pretty difficult not to step back and marvel (no pun intended) at the staggering achievement of this cohesive story.
Consider
We all live within a story, a narrative, or a worldview we’ve chosen, consciously or unconsciously. Which one are you living in?
Is it a current philosophy, ideology, or trend?
Have you aligned your life with a story that cohesively connects you across millennia and into eternity?