TO INFINITY WAR & BEYOND
Avengers: Age of Ultron is the latest cog in Marvel's anticipation machine, which trains audiences to care about what's coming next, rather than what's playing now
What are you doing May 3, 2019? I know where a few million will be. The calendars have already been cleared. It’s been pencilled in: that’s the day Avengers: Infinity War Part II is set to première. Of course by that time you’ll have long since enjoyed Avengers: Infinity War Part I, poised to appear May 4, 2018. Guardians of the Galaxy 2, due May 5, 2017, will be a distant memory. Captain America: Civil War will have come and gone way back in 2016. And this weekend’s Avengers: Age of Ultron? It might as well have been the stone age.
Last October, Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, afforded the movie-going world a glimpse of its next five years. It was the future of the multiplex in PowerPoint: nine Marvel blockbusters to be doled out like a drip feed at a rate of two or three every year. The news was received enthusiastically by an easily galvanized nerd corps. Elsewhere, it was greeted by the usual state-of-the-industry hand-wringing: alarmists winced to think of the comic-book adaptation tightening its grip on the cinema. What else are we going to watch, with all these mega-hits looming?
But that Marvel plans to make more Marvel movies should hardly seem surprising. Indeed, Marvel movies aren’t the problem. What ought to alarm us about the studio’s five-year plan isn’t that in 2018 we’ll have to endure another Avengers film. What’s alarming is the climate of which the plan is symptomatic. We’ve come to prefer anticipation to reflection — to thinking idly about a film that’s coming soon than to thinking seriously about one that’s already out. Publications tease and rumourmonger rather than digest and analyze; release dates and casting decisions are more widely shared and read than actual criticism. If Chris Evans is interviewed tomorrow, he isn’t going to be asked much about the movie that’s in theatres today. What we crave, insatiably, are intimations of the next thing.
Marvel is aware of this tendency. They’ve designed the product to accommodate our fascination with the product still to come: cameos and injokes allude to future story developments, Easter eggs hidden in the background reward the scrupulous with hints about what’s to come. The impulse isn’t relegated to the micro level, either. Whenever a Marvel screenplay seems ungainly, you can be sure that a concession to the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe is to blame. And then there are the much-discussed “stingers”: those brief epilogues that pop up after the credits role. Since Samuel L. Jackson appeared, with a tantalizing remark about “the Avengers initiative,” at the end of the first Iron Man, this thinly veiled promotional vignette has come to be expected of every Marvel feature — quite often with more excitement than the movie that precedes it. You get the sense that stingers are half the reason many people buy tickets. Forget the film. People want the preview.
Feige is a shrewd businessman and a perspicacious producer. Much has been made, since his rise to prominence, of the rigour with which he’s streamlined Marvel’s development process, and many credit his scrupulousness with the consistency of the studio’s almost universally acclaimed superhero fare. (That’s the most irritating thing about the Marvel Universe for blockbuster alarmists: they aren’t just enormously lucrative, they’re usually pretty good, too.)
Yet Feige’s most enduring contribution to the industry likely won’t be his approach to film production. It will be his vision of the future: the way nine new films may be planned for the next five years, titled and attractively logo’d, ready to be unveiled and teased until they’re out. He’s built an anticipation machine. The movies are just cogs in it.