The Marvel Decade: How Superheroes Ruled the Cinema in the 2010s

Between the first Avengers and the final Endgame, everything changed.

At this time 10 years ago, the state of the superhero universe was in flux. Familiar franchises like X-Men and Spider-Man saw their first cinematic sagas end in a whimper, while Superman’s second saga never quite got off the ground. Batman was still a big deal on the heels of The Dark Knight—a record-breaker and Oscar-winner in 2008—but we were still several years away from that trilogy’s conclusion.

The one outlier on the calendar was a 2010 sequel to Iron Man, the unexpected 2008 smash hit that launched what would eventually be known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After that film’s credits—Who knew you could do such a thing?!?—Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury asked Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark if he’d like to participate in the “Avengers Initiative.” Some audience members gasped, while others walked out non-plussed.

None probably realized they witnessed arguably the most influential movie scene of the century.

Phase 1: Establish a Formula

The basic outline of this formula is simple: Heroes do heroic things. They suffer setbacks due to character flaws. They become better, and they dedicate themselves to good.

That’s not all so different from the formulas for all Hollywood action movies, but a few unique elements of Marvel’s now 22-times-repeated formula were established from film one.

The aforementioned post-credits sequence with Nick Fury promised us that these films would continue to get bigger. At the time The Avengers came out, it seemed like the most massive film imaginable, bursting at the seams with characters and unique relationships and promises for the future.

NONE PROBABLY REALIZED THEY WITNESSED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MOVIE SCENES THIS CENTURY.

Now, seven years later, it’s wild how quaint the film seems. Six superheroes? Please. Avengers: Endgame featured nearly 30 named heroes facing down Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his minions, and that’s not counting the named characters who previously died, or our heroes’ respective armies.

And this “bigness” is replicated in the various plot machinations of the greater series. The Avengers hinged on a glowing blue cube that could unleash hell on Earth, but we find out not long after it that the cube is just one of six similar objects that could, if combined, wipe out life in the entire known universe. That’s what they call escalation.

Besides always getting bigger, the Marvel films also constantly delivered when it came to its irreverent tone—something many franchise films have tried to replicate over the past few years, but none have done so with the effectiveness of the MCU.

A lot of that comes back to Robert Downey Jr., who set the gold standard for quick-wittedness in Iron Man, but it really exploded as the franchise shifted into what it called Phase 2.

Phase 2: Get a Little Weird

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy characters are all household names (and in several cases, popular memes) in 2019, but up until the summer of 2014, they were relative unknowns outside of comic book-reading circles, and unquestionably represented Marvel’s biggest gamble to date.

The Universe was starting to shift following the events of The Avengers. Captain America: Winter Soldier, for instance, proved that the series could play with elements from other film genres (in this case, the paranoid spy thrillers of the 1970s).

But Guardians was different. It was an Avengers-like movie in the sense that a half dozen heroes were teaming up to fight evil, but we didn’t know who any of these people were beforehand—and one of them was a tree. The marketing around the film heavily emphasized its jukebox-hits soundtrack, and it was packed with more weird space mumbo jumbo than every Star Wars film before it. All that combined to make this true oddity of a franchise film one of only two titles to cross the $300 million domestic box office mark that year. Marvel was exploding.

The weirdness that defined Guardians continued on, though not always in the same way. The tone was consistent, but as Phase 2 ended and Phase 3 began, new and more idiosyncratic filmmakers began signing up for Marvel superhero gigs. Ant-Man was originally intended to be an Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver) flick, but he stepped away and Peyton Reed (Bring It On) drove that one home. Jon Watts got the keys to Spider-Man: Homecoming after directing the little-seen dark comedy Cop Car. Taika Waititi made Thor: Ragnorok, the MCU’s most endearingly strange film. And Ryan Coogler—fresh off a hit with Creed—turned the somewhat unheralded Black Panther origin story into one of the biggest movies of all time, and a Best Picture nominee, to boot.

Phase 3: Snap Away the Competition

By the time we got to Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel was truly firing on all cylinders, and it helped that its competition in “cinematic universe building” was sputtering.

The most notable case here is the DC Extended Universe. Warner Bros. made the unfortunate choice to turn all of its creative over to director Zack Snyder. He made a surprise massive hit in the form of 300 back in 2007, but everything from then on was a creative disappointment. That included 2013’s Man of Steel—his first try at a DC film—and certainly extends to 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. He bottomed out with 2017’s Justice League, and while Wonder Woman and Aquaman were both enjoyable (in the hands of different, more interesting filmmakers), the franchise seems like it will never recover following a botched Avengers-like team-up.

Star Wars also found itself sputtering toward the end of this decade. At the start of it, there was little talk of more Skywalker adventures, but after George Lucas sold his baby to Disney, we got a new trilogy, as well as a pair of universe-expanding stories, and … well … none of it totally worked. There are fans of The Force Awakens and fans of The Last Jedi, who see eye-to-eye with each other about as well as Democrats and Republicans do in 2019.

But the side stories were half-baked at best. Directors were fired from all these films left and right, and for all that, The Rise of Skywalker seems to be hitting theaters with more of a sense of exhausted obligation than breathless anticipation.

And that brings us back to Marvel, which chose to truly stomp the living daylights out of its competition in the most insulting way imaginable—with a single snap of its fingers. It’s hard to adequately convey the impact of a single flick of one’s fingers, but Thanos’ snap was one of the most emotional moments of any major blockbuster movie this decade. It also left a record number of viewers breathless to find out what would happen in the film’s sequel, which was only a year away.

This year’s Endgame improbably one-upped its predecessor (at least at the box office), and the three-plus-hour extravaganza—with more characters and memorable moments than one could count—became the actual biggest movie of all time with $2.79 billion worldwide.

Disney executives, for all their success in 2019, are probably looking somewhat anxiously at their upcoming film schedule—Marvel and otherwise. While there are more stories to be told, the next few years are filled with new characters and uncertain futures for old friends. That said, they can pop some champagne as they head into 2020. They shepherded the most successful and one of the most universally beloved pop culture franchises that has ever existed.

They made the 2010s the Marvel decade, for better or for worse.

Source: The Marvel Decade: How Superheroes Ruled the Cinema in the 2010s