Introduction
On 6th October 2023, Marvel Studios began airing their 10th (fully canon) series on Disney Plus, Loki season 02. In less than a month, on 5th November 2023, the studio will also be releasing the 10th movie instalment of the ‘Multiverse Saga’, The Marvels. So, with twenty individual instalments to this new saga in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), what is it about?
It’s becoming increasingly pervasive on the internet about the issues surrounding the MCU’s supposed decline in quality. Some put it down to the poor writing of female characters, while others say it’s down to there being simply too much being released, and some suggest it’s a lack of connectivity between core franchises.
All these reasons aren’t to be dismissed out of hand, nor heralded as ‘the answer’ to the question: What’s happening with the MCU? Marvel Studios have been suffering. Their visual effects artists have unionised, their ‘big bad’ has been making headlines for accusations made against him, and the cast and crew have become more-and-more vocal about ongoing production issues. But beneath all the studio-based issues, one problem is glaringly omitted.
Story.
The MCU isn’t a business. It’s a Transmedia story. The issue with the MCU is that, since Avengers: Endgame, there’s no narrative. For more information on what a Transmedia story is, I’ve written about it previously.
At the core of all stories is a ‘controlling idea’. Robert McKee, author of Story, says:
"The Controlling Idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices. It’s yet another Creative Discipline to guide your aesthetic choices toward what’s appropriate or inappropriate in your story, toward what is expressive of your Controlling Idea and may be kept versus what is irrelevant toit and must be cut." - McKee
So, how did Marvel Studios once use this “Controlling Idea” to curate the Infinity Saga so effectively? And, more importantly, why have they begun losing at their own game?
How the MCU was Curated for Success
At its core, the ‘Infinity Saga’ was a tightly told story.
Robert McKee’s ‘Controlling Idea’ can “be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.” The graph above illustrates this. At its core, the Infinity Saga is the story that brings “together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to fight the battles that we never could.”
This story was broken down into 23 different instalments, making up three Phases.
Three Phases. Three acts.
“Act One: Thesis
Act Two: Antithesis
Act Three: Synthesis”
Phase 01 introduced “a group of remarkable people”.
Phase 02 tested “if they could work together”.
Phase 03 made them “fight the battles” that mortal men couldn’t possibly win.
Despite its numerous mini-franchises and team up movies, the Infinity Saga was deceptively simple. Every instalment progressed the story with only one real exception. Despite Captain Marvel including the Tesseract and showing audiences where the Avengers team got its name, it didn’t progress the story. By the time of its release, Thanos had already used the stones in Infinity War. In other words, it didn’t contribute to the ‘Controlling Idea’.
Otherwise, the mini-franchises were curated to near-perfection. Whether they knew it or not, Marvel Studios’ Infinity Saga exemplified the purity of a linear Transmedia experience. So, as they head into the new Multiverse Saga, repeating that success should be simple.
Shouldn’t it?
How the MCU is no Longer Curated
When the Multiverse Saga was announced, there was reason to be excited. The Saga would again be constructed of three individual Phases, culminating in an Avengers event that pits their new ‘big bad’, Kang the Conqueror, against the heroes of our story.
As we now enter the middle of Phase 05, we can concretely say that something has gone wrong. In the above graph, I have used a similar system to the Infinity Saga’s approach. There is a strand dedicated to the inclusion of the multiverse itself, and strand including the characters so-far confirmed to be appearing in Thunderbolts, the only team-up story confirmed as commissioned. I’ve also included the Young Avengers, something that Marvel Studios haven’t announced, to highlight further how they have lost their focus.
The once prolific cornerstones of storytelling don’t seem to be there anymore. Where each phase of the Infinity Saga culminated in a team-up movie that refocused the storytelling, the apparent ‘inciting incident’ of the Multiverse Saga was, according to their own recipe, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
“An inciting incident occurs towards, or at, the end of the first act, and the protagonist ‘falls down a rabbit hole’.” – John Yorke
Shuri, the new Black Panther, wasn’t seen or heard of in the entirety of Phase 04 and hasn’t yet appeared in Phase 05. So, she’s likely not the protagonist. Instead, an argument could be made that this inciting incident came in Phase 05’s opener, Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It did focus on the Multiverse, and the protagonists did fall quite literally ‘down a rabbit hole’ into the quantum realm. So, are Scott Lang and his family the Multiverse Saga’s protagonists? Again, there has been no mention of their return, so this is also unlikely.
The fact is, the MCU no longer has a protagonist.
There are multiple potential factors to this. For one, it’s recently become more and more clear that production issues are causing key talent to reconsider their place in the story. Elisabeth Olsen has been particularly vocal regarding how a lot of the careful work laid out in WandaVision was undone or repeated in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness.
Even with issues like these, there’s something else going on. The Multiverse Saga is going to supposedly culminate in two Avengers events, but there are no Avengers.
Except there are.
Every single Young Avenger, except Iron Lad, has now been introduced to the MCU, but the studio seems to be resisting its commission. Without this kind of team up to refocus the narrative and give audiences something, anything to root for, every new release becomes increasingly redundant. And, as the godfather of Transmedia Storytelling Henry Jenkins says, “redundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail.”
So, is it all over for Marvel?
How the MCU is the Answer to the MCU’s Problems
No, of course not.
First off, it’s easy to think that more oversight is needed to keep the franchise in check. That’s wrong. As evidence, let’s look back to Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume One. Writer-director James Gunn was given almost complete creative freedom when making his space-comedy. The only exceptions were to introduce the Infinity Stones and have a Thanos cameo. In all, it became roughly five minutes of screentime.
“Each installment is recognizably part of the whole and with enough flexibility that it can be rendered in all of these different styles of representation.” - Jenkins
By reducing the level of oversight to a few nudges to keep the stories ‘on brand’, the MCU can thrive again as seemingly disparate franchises that connect in real, meaningful ways.
Another issue facing the MCU is, yes, the sheer volume of material. The easiest way to refocus the storytelling is to slow down. There can be a panic in Hollywood at the moment that if they don’t have a blockbuster every year, audiences will forget about them and move on to the competition.
James Bond Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were separated by nearly half a decade. Audiences will wait for quality. There will be a time for She-Hulk, but if it’s being made just for the sake of it, of course audiences will (misguidedly) pick it apart.
Finally, and at this point most obviously, the way to save the MCU is to adhere to storytelling basics. Antagonists. Structure. Protagonists with desires.
“Without a desire to animate the protagonist, the writer has no hope of bringing the character alive, no hope of telling a story and the work will almost always be boring.” - Yorke
To save the MCU, all Marvel Studios needs to do is look at the MCU.
How Curation Can Help Your Writing
But what if you want to write a Transmedia experience? Do you need to copy Marvel Studios’ Infinity Saga? No.
The MCU is not a paragon of Transmedia storytelling. As a linear experience, it is the tidiest, but look to other franchises first before settling. Doctor Who had several sister-shows that ran alongside its core series, Star Wars operates in pockets of time to be explored through individual sagas, and The Matrix operated somewhere in the middle. Study your story, find its entry points, and exploit them in a way that only your story can be.
That said, be mindful of the Multiverse Saga.
Focus on the core principles of storytelling. “All stories have a premise – ‘What if…?’” Find your ‘what if’ and stick to it.
Curate your story and stick to the ‘controlling idea’.
“Could any film have matched the fan community’s escalating expectations and expanding interpretations and still have remained accessible to a mass audience? There has to be a breaking point beyond which franchises cannot be stretched, subplots can’t be added, secondary characters can’t be identified, and references can’t be fully realized. We just don’t know where it is yet.” – Jenkins
If they’re not careful, Marvel could be about to change that.
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