AVENGERS: ENDGAME.

AuthorSuderman, Peter
PositionFILM - Movie review

As the culmination to more than a decade of innovative franchise filmmaking, Avengers: Endgame serves not only as a capstone to the story that began with 2008's Iron Man--the first film in what became known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)--but as a testament to the power, and profitability, of big-screen serialization.

In the years before Marvel started making feature films in-house, blockbusters, including superhero movies, might have sequels, but each one was expected to stand on its own as a complete, independent cinematic experience. Plotlines were wrapped up at the end of every movie, and characters rarely crossed over from one franchise to another.

The MCU, in contrast, was built on the same storytelling principles that ruled in Marvel's four-color comic books: serialization, crossovers, and reasonably consistent universe-wide continuity, all of which created incentives for fans to branch out from one hero to another, following not just a single character and story but an entire universe of them.

This strategy was initially viewed as risky, since an interlinked story might be confusing, or widely disliked, and...

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