7 Reasons Marvel's Movies And TV Shows Will NEVER Connect More

In the United States, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. averages 3 million viewers each week. Let's assume that these are the true MCU diehards who watch everything Marvel puts out. As such, let's generously assume that on average, they all see each MCU film twice in theatres and try to gauge just how much of an impact they have on the box office.

(That's not to mention the Netflix series since they don't post viewership numbers.)

Last summer, the average movie ticket price in the U.S. was $8.61. Based on the assumptions above, this means our Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. audience accounted for $51.66 million at the box office for each Marvel film in 2015. Using only the domestic box office since I can only work with U.S. television viewership, AOS fans accounted for 11.3% of receipts for Avengers: Age of Ultron and 28.7% of receipts for Ant-Man.

We can inflate those percentages even more generously, but the television audience is still a small fraction of the film audience. The disparity gets even greater when factoring in the worldwide audience that these movies are expected to attract.

It's very hard to justify working in important references that the vast majority of the audience will simply not get because they have not seen the material to which you are referring. That is why the flow of influence moves downward from the content with the biggest audience to the content with the smallest, not the reverse.

You would not expect an issue of Poe Dameron or an episode of Star Wars Rebels, both of which are canon, to play a critical role in a Star Wars film because of the massive gap in audience size. The same principle applies for Marvel TV shows and movies.

The television shows live off the people who want everything. The movies try to serve everyone.