10 Most Important Comic Book Movies Ever Made
8. The Avengers
Rival studios had been watching Marvel's four-year expansion of their (at the time) unique 'shared cinematic universe' concept with a keen eye to see how it would play out, and the unprecedented success of The Avengers must have caused more than a few executives to spit out their coffee and see dollar signs in their eyes when the box office numbers came in.
Nobody had ever attempted to create a series of interconnected franchises that told one overarching narrative on such a scale before, with five movies' worth of character-building and audience goodwill making Joss Whedon's Phase One payoff one of the most anticipated blockbusters in history by the time it theaters in May 2012.
After shattering box office records across the globe and earning a staggering $1.519bn worldwide to cement its status as the highest-grossing comic book movie of all time, it seemed in an instant as though every other studio in Hollywood was fast-tracking a 'cinematic universe' into development in an attempt to mimic the success of the MCU.