5 Mistakes That Will Burst Marvel Cinematic Properties' Bubble

3. High-Risk Business Means Low-Risk Filmmaking

Movie-making is complicated. Seeing any credit scroll, particularly credits for a big-budget, include a wide array of trained professionals working together to make a movie. When Marvel connected their respective franchises together, they took a complicated process of producing a movie/product and made it significantly more complicated. And in Phase One, as it is called now, this complication added to the fun of actually watching the movies. When you saw The Avengers, you had probably seen at least a couple of Marvel's previous efforts, and watching them team up was exciting in and of itself. But now we know that this crazy idea can work. So what is going to keep the idea of rallying superheroes together fun and new? The rest of this section includes SPOILERS for both Thor: The Dark World (which you probably should have seen by now) and The Avengers (which you definitely should have seen by now) so if you haven't gotten that far yet just skip to the next section. When Tony Stark crosses back through the wormhole in The Avengers, he is supposed to be dead. We get the scene where the rest of the team rallies around their leader and briefly mourns his death, but the audience knows better. Robert Downey Jr. and Iron Man were going to be back for Iron Man 3 the following year. What is supposed to be a dramatic (and theoretically surprising) scene is ultimately made absurd by the predictability of the moment: Tony Stark is going to come back to life. That being said, the movie handles the situation humorously, with the Hulk literally scaring Iron Man back to life, but it hints at the central problem Marvel faces from a narrative standpoint: how can you keep the stakes high if you know every central character has multi-picture deals? Thor 2 skirts around this issue on multiple occasions. When I watched Thor get his hand taken off by Loki I initially thought, "Wow, they're going full Empire Strikes Back here. This is interesting, I wonder what's going to happen to Thor from here on out." But that feeling of actual surprise was shot almost immediately when it was revealed that it was all a hologram, or something like it. When Loki appears to die shortly thereafter, it was plain to see that the audience was being tricked yet again. Of course they're not going to get rid of their most appealing villain, why would they? But repeatedly putting characters in danger without any real chance of peril has diminishing returns. Say what you will about The Dark Knight Rises, but fans could be legitimately concerned about the Caped Crusader's fate in that film. But Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston are going to be around in Marvel movies for a long time, they are proven to be bankable. So the question becomes: How can characters progress if they are contractually obligated to stay the same to appeal to audiences?