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Last week, after a wait that seemed interminable, Thor: Love and Thunder arrived in cinemas. Meanwhile, fans of the Marvel cinematic universe (MCU) they were able to enjoy the latest episode of Ms. Marvelwhich concluded its six-episode season on Disney +. It is not the first time that Marvel has offered its audience more content at the same time. Last year, Spider-Man: No Way Home was released in the middle of Hawkeyewhile B.lack Widow opened its doors just as Loki he was finishing his first season. If until a few years ago, fans had to wait months between one episode and another of the MCU, now it often happens to have more things to watch at the same time; And the situation is bound to get worse.
Or, rather, to improve. To be clear, this is not a tirade against content saturation (you can read that one here). Instead, it is a reflection on need to find a balance in Marvel’s media diet. No matter how hard it is to say that the superhero market is a bubble on the verge of bursting, the public continues to clamor for this content. Three big-screen films and between four and five Disney + series per year do not currently seem able to meet the demand for Marvel-branded content. Within a decade, the company succeeded in recreating the experience of comics in traditional media.
That’s not to say that Marvel was the first to make some good comic-book movies, which have been around for as long Superman was released in theaters in the seventies and Tim Burton grappled with Batman in 1989. The production company didn’t even invent serial storytelling on multiple platforms. Already in the early nineties Star Trek had two series that were added to the films coming out in theaters. The point is, instead, Marvel distributes one amount of content that pushes fans to choose a character, or a faction, or a plot, and follow only those.
The example of comics
To understand what could become the trend in the near future, it is necessary to go back to the memory situation in which Marvel found itself in the eighties and nineties. As the company’s popularity soared thanks to the work of authors such as Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, Walt Simonson, the ranks of Marvel were constantly swelled by new series and new heroes. In some cases these were spin-offs focusing on existing characters – the Punisher, for example, had been an antagonist in Spider-Man comics for over a decade before achieving editorial success as a stand-alone character – while in others they were created from scratch new superheroes in the hope of finding an unexpected winning horse, only to quickly relegate the same characters to a creative limbo.
It was around this time, however, that Marvel’s production began to exceed a person’s sustainable reading limits. When the company’s content began to grow beyond 30, 40, 50 numbers per month, only the most avid fans – self-proclaimed “Marvel Zombies” – managed to keep up. The average reader, on the other hand, began to choose what to follow; “Marvel fans” turned into “X-Men fans” or “Spider-Man fans”.
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